The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins by Lesley M. M. Blume
“You simply have to see it to believe it.”
As we know by now, flora and fauna not only survive but often thrive in unthinkable conditions. And we also know that the deserts of today were once the oceans of yesteryear, and vice versa and so on. Antarctica enjoys this sort of peculiar history: it may be hard to believe now, but once this continent was part of a bigger landmass, and in its fields, ferns and flowering trees grew amidst warm, gentle breezes. But then the continent broke off from the mass and drifted south to the bottommost part of the globe; it soon froze over and its tropical past was forgotten.
Now, one would think that it would be rather difficult to find fossils of its early inhabitants underneath all of this snow and ice.
Yet when I reached the top of the cliff, I saw that Gibear had tethered the rope to a tall, solemn tree standing alone on that vast, windswept plateau. So much ice had wrapped around the trunk that it resembled thick, ropy crystal; its leaves gleamed like diamonds in the sun. Then I looked up and noticed something quite startling. From the gnarled, icy branches dangled very large frozen apples the size of melons. What’s more, each one bore a human face.
Gibear busily dug a hole nearby as I stood there rather shocked. Suddenly he gave a series of short barks, and, still dazed, I stumbled over to see what he had found.
A peculiar headless body, encased in ice.
At first glance, it resembled a human being, but tree-like bark covered its arms and legs; sticks served as fingers. Between this body and the face-tree, a fascinating tale begged to be discovered and told here on this iceberg.
After much investigation of the terrain and these strange frozen creatures, I have drawn the following conclusion:
Around a hundred million years ago, when Antarctica became determined to break away and seek its fortune alone at the South Pole, the decision must have created an understandable amount of havoc among the land’s inhabitants. Each one would have had to make up his own mind about whether he would stay on Antarctica and roll the dice as the land drifted to an uncertain future—or move over to the mainland, which appeared to be staying put.100
Among this area’s residents: an eccentric, headless, bark-covered “tree-woman,” who lived alone and cultivated a very unusual tree that grew a fine variety of heads—each one very different from the others. Some had two human eyes, a nose, and a mouth, like today’s people, but others were far more creative. For example, one branch of the tree grew heads in which all of the eyes belonged to other species: cat eyes, fish eyes, horse eyes, and so on. Another branch offered heads with an array of different noses: a parrot’s beak, an elephant’s trunk, a pig’s snout, and the like. (All of these flabbergasting examples remain on the frozen branches now, like a ghastly set of charms dangling from a bracelet!)
Each morning, the headless tree-woman would wake up and stand under these fruit heads, until one pleased her and she plucked it off the branch. And then, with a grotesque little squish, she would mash it down on her neck stub.
The tree kept coming up with new ideas and designs to replace the harvested heads. (My instincts tell me that the tree-woman never wore the same head twice. Why, the very idea! If she were anything like today’s ladies of fashion, she would not have been caught dead.)
Things appear to have been just dandy for the tree-lady, who got to be a different creature every day—until a fateful crack began to spread across the land. To her chagrin, the lady saw that her precious tree lived resolutely on the side that would drift away and become Antarctica. Soon her neighbors packed up all of their possessions and leaped over the crack to the mainland. This is how I visualize the ensuing scene:
“Come with us,” the neighbors called to the lady. “You do not have much time; the crack is getting wider by the moment.”
The tree-lady fretted and wrung her hands. (I imagine her to be wearing a fetching head that day, with big orange tiger eyes and luscious red human lips.)
“But what about my tree?” she cried. “I cannot live without it.”
“Leave the tree behind,” her neighbors told her. “We hear that your land is drifting south to the cold bottom of the world; surely it will freeze, and you along with it.”
“Ohhhh,” she wailed. “I shall come with you. Wait for me as I pack my possessions.”
So the headless tree-lady ran over to the tree, plucked off ten of her favorite heads, and threw them into a burlap sack. But then, just as she reached the crack in the earth, she turned around and galloped back to the tree.
“Just a few more,” she called, shoveling ten more heads into the sack.
“Hurry!” shouted her neighbors. “Soon it will be too late.”
The tree-lady lugged her sack to the widening crevice and stopped.
“I still do not have enough,” she cried, peering inside the sack—and once again, she ran back to the tree. “Each head is so different—I simply cannot pick just one.”
(“Ha—I know what ailed that lady!” exclaimed a voice in my head. It was Mother Wiggins, of course. “I see it all the time, here in our little Shropshire village, which you have seen fit to neglect all these years.”
“And what problem is that, Mother?” I sighed.
“It is plain as the nose on your face,” said Mother Wiggins. “She was trying to be too many things at once. No one gets to be everything under the sun: you have to choose. At the end of the day, having too many choices is as bad as having none.”)
Once again, the old woman was right.
For the headless tree-lady, this proved a very costly mistake, for suddenly a terrible thundering sound came from the earth: Antarctica split away from the mainland and drifted away to its fate—carrying the tree-lady and her precious tree along to theirs.
96. Antarctica boasts some extremely unforgiving temperatures: in the winters, visitors can expect a range from –40 to –90 degrees Fahrenheit; in the summer, thermometers rise to a balmy –5 to –31 degrees Fahrenheit.
97. This development further demonstrates Gibear’s scientific intelligence: copper conducts and retains heat very well.
98. At the time of Dr. Wiggins’s visit, much of Antarctica remained unexplored. The first landing likely took place in the 1820s, when an American seal hunter named Captain John Davis set foot on the icy continent. Then, in 1892, a Norwegian explorer named Captain Anton Larsen landed on Antarctica; he was credited with finding the first fossils there—although we know now that Dr. Wiggins’s discoveries predated Captain Larsen’s by nearly a decade.
99. This is roughly the height of a ten-story building.
100. Incidentally, this landmass, known today as Gondwanaland—a supercontinent—would eventually break up into many different masses and continents, including Africa, Antarctica, Australia, India, and New Zealand.
July 1884
“Wiggins Berg,” Antarctica
In Which I Discover … Quarrelsome Iceberg Insects
(Seditiosus Glacies Mons Montis Insectare)
One morning, over breakfast, I finally got up the courage to ask Captain Blotski why he chooses to dine on matches instead of on more appetizing fare.
“Many years ago, I taught myself to eat matches and be happy,” said the captain, gnashing on an especially splintery batch. “When you go on a long voyage, sometimes there is no food in the sea to eat. Like here in the middle of this ice-filled ocean. There is nothing to catch down there.”
“Nonsense!” I said. “Plenty of delicious fish swim below the prow of your fine ship—even next to this enormous iceberg. Nature gives them all sorts of ingenious ways to survive.101 Hand me a fishing rod and I will show you.”
The whole crew gathered to watch as I dangled the fishing line over the side of Buyan. Not five minutes later, I felt a tug, and triumphantly reeled in a large gray cod. Everyone clapped.
“Let’s try again, shall we?” I said, with a great deal of lofty authority. A mere few minutes later came the happy tug on the line: this time, a glistening squid had made my hook’s
“Pozdravlyayu, Dr. Wiggins,” said Captain Blotski, which means “congratulations” in Russian.
“Let’s see what we pull up this time,” I said. “After all, third time’s the charm.” I threw my hook over the side again. Five minutes passed, and nothing-happened. Soon ten minutes had ticked by, and then a quarter of an hour.
“Hmmm, I cannot imagine what the delay is,” I said, peering with embarrassment over the ledge at the water—and suddenly there came such an enormous tug that I would have flipped over the side of the boat had two sailors not caught my legs. We seized the rod and pulled all together.
“I think it is stuck on something big down there,” gasped one of them.
“It is coming up,” I bellowed. “Pull as hard as you can.”
“It is very ugly,” another sailor informed us as he looked over the side. “Here it comes!”
Suddenly a huge, barnacle-covered object burst out of the water, shot up into the air, and fell in a lump onto the deck.
“That disgusts me,” said Captain Blotski. “I would rather eat a hundred dry matchsticks than put a bite of that in my mouth.”
I examined the object excitedly, my heart pounding. “No one shall be eating this,” I shouted. “For I believe we have found a most valuable paleozoological artifact.”
“What is it?” asked the captain.
“This, my friends, is an ancient, fossilized leg,” I announced, pointing out the position of the joints, “of a gigantic underwater Antarctic insect. And we shall remain quite anchored here until I learn more about it.”
We dredged the entire area around the iceberg—which, incidentally, the crew renamed Wiggins Berg!—and pulled up five more legs, making a complete set of six: fairly standard for an insect of some variety.
“But why have we not found any other body parts?” I wondered. “Perhaps the creature’s body has been crushed underneath the iceberg.” It seemed highly unlikely that the body had disintegrated and the legs had been left intact.
Then something suddenly occurred to me. I scrambled down to my quarters and retrieved this very journal, and flipped to my most recent entry. The passage of interest:
When I reemerged, Captain Blotski had anchored Buyan, but by then the iceberg had managed to drift away. We pulled up the anchor and headed toward the berg—but once again, the mountain of ice scuttled away, as though on legs beneath the surface.
“Follow me, lads,” I shouted, rushing to the side of the boat. “We are going back up on top of Wiggins Berg. And bring your shovels and picks.”
One cold excavation dig later and thirty feet deeper, my hunch was confirmed: my pick unearthed a gigantic frozen heart.
Wiggins Berg was not an iceberg at all: rather, it was an enormous insect body, layered and swaddled in yards of ice and snow. The story told by the remains: approximately one hundred million years ago, a small family of huge sea-dwelling insects clustered together in the southern Pacific Ocean, generally keeping to themselves and surviving on mollusks and other saltwater fare.
Then, one day, they happened to look up and see a huge landmass floating by overhead: Antarctica, on its way to the South Pole.102 They decided to follow it and eventually found themselves in terribly icy water. They huddled together to stay warm, and suddenly a huge hunk of ice formed around them, clumping their bodies into one odd mass. This mass stuck up above the surface of the water, in the style of an iceberg, and the creatures’ heads and legs jutted out beneath. Just imagine the chat they would have had among themselves at that point:
“This was an unfortunate idea,” they all would have agreed—but then came the business of deciding the next step.
“We are going back north and resuming our life as it was before,” proclaimed one insect.
“Who made you the king?” said another. “It is too far. Instead, let us make the best of a bad situation and stay right here. We shall likely get used to the cold.”
“Over my dead body,” said a third. “This is what we are going to do: tomorrow we will break free from this ice, climb up onto the continent, and live there. It will certainly be warmer with all of that sunshine.”
“We are aquatic creatures, you dimwit,” shouted the first one. “We would die up there. I command you to return back north.”
This argument might have gone on for many days, or even weeks. Apparently they could reach no solution, for they chiseled the iceberg apart and went their separate ways. Needless to say, each one soon froze to death without the warmth of the group.
If there is a lesson to be discerned from this story, I suppose it would be this: when everyone wants to be the decision-maker, then nothing will ever get done, to the detriment of all.
As old Mother Wiggins used to say, “Too many cooks always spoil the soup.”
101. Dr. Wiggins is quite right here: for example, Antarctic notothenioid fish living in close proximity to ice have evolved a glycoprotein antifreeze in their body fluids to prevent freezing.
102. See Dr. Wiggins’s previous journal entry, on this page, which explains the migration of Antarctica to the southernmost region of the planet.
September 1884
The South Pole
In Which I Discover … Ice-World Daredevils
(Glacies Terra Dementia Populus)
Since we happened to be in the vicinity, I thought that I would crown my list of explorations by visiting the most remote place on earth: the South Pole.103 Just imagine the undiscovered delights that lie nestled in the snow down there; I knew that it would be worth braving the treacherous elements to reach it.
My companions: Captain Blotski, half of the Buyan crew, and Gibear, of course. A note about the Russians: time and again I have congratulated myself on my foresight in commissioning them. After all, some of them grew up in Siberia,104 for heaven’s sake, and for them, this snowy world is like a casual visit to the seashore for us.
As we began our journey, Fortune smiled on us (or so it seemed): the weather grew unusually warm, even reaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit at high noon on some days. This delighted the sailors—except for Captain Blotski, who muttered: “Mother Nature is playing a trick on us. Don’t let her fool you: she is not a nice lady.”
Later that afternoon, our expedition climbed over a craggy mountain, and on the other side glistened a smooth plain; it looked like a vast, glassy lake on a windless day. When we arrived at the plain’s edge, I brushed aside the melting snow: underneath shone a sheet of ice. We apparently were standing at the edge of a great frozen lake. With the unseasonably warm weather, I warned everyone that we must be on guard against thinning ice. Just as we made plans to hike around the lake, Gibear scampered out onto the ice! I demanded that he come off the lake immediately, but the animal responded by trotting out even further, sitting down, and giving me a most defiant stare. No amount of shouting or cajoling would tempt him back to the shore.
So, out onto the lake I went—not standing up, but rather wiggling along on my stomach (which still manages to be insultingly plump, even out here!). This approach, of course, better distributes the weight of one’s body and kept me from plunging straight through the weakened ice into the waters below.
“Come here, you varmint,” I growled, reaching out for Gibear, making a swiping motion across the surface. My sleeve brushed aside the snow. I looked down, and there beneath the ice, a frozen face made entirely of bone stared up at me! After I got over my shock, I wiggled along a bit further and swiped the ice in another patch of the lake, and uncovered another face. After snaking along the surface of that ice for another half hour, I located over two dozen frozen bone-faces.
The Wiggins Antarctic Expedition (courtesy of its scout, Admiral Gibear) had discovered the final resting place of yet another eerie prehistoric humanoid tribe, and now (thanks to the Expedition’s leader, Dr. Wiggins the Bold) the story of that species as well as its cemetery will be preserved for posterity.
We carefully chiseled one of the frozen bodies out of t
I believe that they must have grown rather bored down here in the Antarctic, for their remains tell me that they engaged in some rather astonishing daredevilry to entertain themselves. For example: at one point, they had created skis for themselves out of ice, and took to shooting down the mountains at outrageous speeds. (We found one buried in a nearby drift with the skis still attached to his feet; he likely landed there as a result of an accident.)
At another point, flying had been all the rage: the Ice-World Daredevils built magnificent ice gliders, which they strapped to their backs before leaping off the cliffs into the air, soaring above the land (and, I suspect, sometimes straight out into the sea, to be lost forever). In a snow-covered valley, we found a body still affixed to one such glider—a masterful piece of work!
It also appears that, around this time, some balmy weather decided to sweep in and caress the continent, rather like the warmth that the Wiggins Antarctic Expedition itself has encountered. Weeks of unseasonably warm temperatures melted down snow and weakened ice across the land. For some reason, the Ice-World Daredevils chose this moment to take up ice-skating.
Now, this was clearly an intelligent species—why on earth would they choose to skate on thinning ice? I can conclude only that they saw a thrill in the danger of doing so. I imagine that they made a great show of skating along and sported special ice outfits carved for the occasion. What a fantastical sight it must have been!