At the North Pole, frozen and happy

The quote in the exergue - 'it is through pain that man conquers the happiness of the future' (Fedor Dostoevsky) - sounds more than a promise but North Pole. Storia di un'ossessione, written by Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge, goes beyond emotional boundaries, flies higher than Umberto Nobile's airship, reaches, happy and violent, to the most algid heart. It is the epic ride - it would take Homer to sing it - of two men, Kagge and Børge Ousland, alone, courageous, hungry for food and life, who on 4 May 1990 reached the North Pole after 800 kilometres on skis, without the aid of dogs, base camps or motorised vehicles. They are the first to make it by human power alone.

Kagge's tale interweaves the 58 days of their going with the adventures that in previous centuries saw dozens of men attempt the conquest of the Pole. Why so much fascination for the navel of the world, which is one and multiple, geographical, celestial, magnetic and imaginary North Pole? Which gives the feeling of moving through space and time? "With just a few steps you can walk around the world crossing 24 time zones. If you walk clockwise, or westwards, travelling 360° around the Pole, you suddenly find yourself in the previous day. If you turn around and walk anti-clockwise, towards the east, after one lap you will be one day in the future'. For Kagge, it is an obsession born when he received his first world map as a gift at the age of 7: 'I was in love not so much with the idea of reaching the Pole as with the idea of being able to overcome hardship, frost, hunger and danger. Everything is planned millimetrically, any mistake can be fatal when dancing on the edge of life. Each sledge has 60 daily rations of dried meat, oatmeal, fat, chocolate, powdered milk formula, two decilitres of petrol for the camping stove, two revolvers in case of bear attack, with a total weight of 120 kilos, enough for 70 days. The maniacal nature is typical of all explorers (the few women mentioned are armchair travellers), as are the scientific preparation, the unexpected, the primitive spirit, the unyielding tenacity, the ability to wait and the relationship problems with their father. Kagge also sets out to seek the respect of the parent.

That point, which after all is not there because it is air, water and ice, was the land of the Hyperboreans, according to Herodotus; in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, interest in unknown regions grew. Then, the first expeditions arrive, in a chase of firsts, lies, abandonments, ice giants, but there remains "the reason why ice floats instead of ending up on the seabed: water has an unusual property, the weight, compared to the volume, decreases when the water solidifies. The ice mass therefore weighs less than the equivalent volume of water'. There is the idea of sailing to the Pole, as Robert Thorne did in 1527, and immediately the conquest also becomes a matter of pure political dominance. Arctic fever is fuelled by William Parry and John Franklin, Nansen and Hjalmar's march, Roald Amundsen's expedition or Noble's airship, with its patriotic flavour.

Every metre is a conquest: the ice is solid enough to walk on, but you only proceed after tapping it three times with a stick; the cold is so intense that only bacteria brought from home circulate and so there is no need to change your underwear; close encounters do exist and a bear has to be waited on very closely because the revolver, preferred to the rifle to carry less weight, only does its work a few metres away, 8 to be precise. Days pass, reserves dwindle and even a sultana dropped in the snow is precious: 'I wanted that sultana so much that I got down on all fours, bent my head, stuck out my tongue and managed to grab it. The moment the sultanas passed my lips and slowly slipped into my mouth I felt great happiness. As I chewed it slowly, savouring it, I was reminded of a truth I already knew: happiness is hidden in the simple things. The taste of a small portion of food is delicious, that of a crumb is heavenly'.

On 4 May the arrival: 'we were so tired that we did not realise we were travelling through time. The ice beneath us had probably already shifted a little from the geographic pole, so time travel was illusory'. Fascination, fatigue and "the joy you feel when physical pain still overwhelms you but you know it's coming to an end. You still feel numb, but slowly you feel the warmth. You feel the circulation picking up again. It is that experience and that thought that incessantly draws me back to nature. On which everyone bears a heavy responsibility: in the Arctic, the temperature is rising at twice the rate of global warming because the Barents Sea is now free of ice, and without the reflective effect of ice, its surface heats up and raises the temperature on land and sea. After 75,000 generations in which the Arctic Ocean has been covered by ice, we could become the first to experience a clear sea in summer. But 'we are the ones who need the ice, today more than ever'.