Rhys Hughes
Ordinary geographers believe that our planet has only two poles, the North and South, and they prefer to ignore the East, West, Front and Back poles. But Anton Arctic went to the other extreme and maintained the existence of a seventh pole, namely the Scottish.
This is Anton's story or should be, but in truth there isn't much to tell. He had wanted to be an explorer since he fell asleep in a laundry basket and awoke hanging from a washing line. The huge white sheets drying next to him looked like icebergs and after he detached himself from the pegs holding him up he wandered among them in wonder. He was only thirty eight years old and was astonished to discover that icebergs are not cold. In fact he used them to wrap up warm when night fell.
The Scottish pole was located somewhere in Scotland. That is all he knew. His careful and prolonged researches into history, cartography, mythology and natural science led him to conclude that Scotland could be reached by boarding the 06:15 train from London.
Accordingly he bought a ticket at King's Cross station and waited patiently on the platform. When his train was ready he settled into his seat and opened his rucksack to check the condition of his survival equipment. Fortunately his sandwiches, flask of hot tea and good book were all in perfect working order.
The journey north was uneventful. After he crossed the border, he kept his face close to the window in case he spied the Scottish pole standing in a field. How would he recognise it? He imagined it was long and cylindrical with a tartan pattern. However, his estimates of its height remained vague.
When he arrived in Edinburgh he walked unknown streets with a measured step. Not even the greatest detective in Scotland Yard, an organisation that specialises in Scottish measurements, hence its name, has been able to determine where exactly his measured step took him.
His movements may be obscure but not his motives. Obviously he searched for the Scottish pole in Edinburgh without success. A few days later he appeared in a small town much further north called Invergarry. How he got there is open to conjecture. He might have fallen asleep in another laundry basket, or whatever passes for laundry baskets in Scotland, huge porridge pots stuffed with kilts perhaps, but why such an occurrence would take him to Invergarry is unclear. A witness who claims to have seen him riding north in a chariot pulled by a haggis has been dismissed as an unreliable character from a different story that has not even been written yet.
It was raining heavily when he arrived in Invergarry and in a muddy field near that town he exhibited rather odd behaviour. At least it was odd to outsiders. In Anton's opinion his actions were rational and even heroic. So let us recount what happened from his perspective.
Plodding along with a heavy sense of failure in his soul, he abruptly noticed something marvellous on the horizon. He ran forward and his joy increased to an almost unbearable intensity as he realised his quest was over. He had found the Scottish pole! Now all he had to do was conquer it to guarantee his future reputation as a noteworthy explorer.
He didn't know what 'conquering' a pole entailed, but he was aware that an army conquers a country by marching over it and so he concluded that it was probably a good idea if he positioned himself over the pole. This meant he had to climb it.
Haste was important for he saw that a rival explorer had already reached the base of the pole and was clutching it with both hands. Fortunately for Anton this other explorer did not have the physique of a climber. He was large and far too heavy to haul himself easily up any pole and he grunted and grimaced as if preparing for a great effort while people standing in the field urged him on. Anton wanted to shout at these people, to redirect their attention, but he decided to save his breath for running.
Splashing through puddles, he reached the pole and flung himself on it, climbing rapidly with his legs and arms wrapped around the rough wood. The pole was shorter than he had anticipated and he was overjoyed to have found such an unobtrusive landmark in so large an area as Scotland. At no point did he doubt this really was the Scottish pole. He was too busy trying to climb beyond the reach of his rival.
When he was halfway up he suddenly felt very dizzy and almost lost his grip. He paused for a few moments and then resumed his task. This rest must have been beneficial, for the second half of the climb was much easier, as if the top of the pole was pulling him by the force of magnetic attraction, an impossible explanation due to the fact he was not made of iron, but welcome all the same.
He arrived at the top and was astonished to strike his head on a ceiling! He had not noticed a ceiling above the pole at any stage during his climb or before. This was indeed a mystery. The top end of the pole was fixed firmly into this ceiling and there was no way of mounting it. How could he conquer the pole now? It was necessary to get above the ceiling and stand on the other side.
This problem was lessened by the fact that the ceiling was covered with tufts of fibre that hung down from its surface. He could cling to these and work his way along until he reached the edge. The barrier had to come to an end somewhere.
This was a hazardous operation but he found it unnaturally easy to disengage from the pole and attach himself to the ceiling. He clung to the slippery tufts with all his might and dug the toes of his shoes into the pliable surface and in this manner he crawled his way across. He had no particular direction in which to go but he kept crawling anyway.
The underside of the ceiling was very dirty. It had clearly not been cleaned for many years, if ever. Anton became dismayed with the filth that gathered on his clothes and he started to regret the entire adventure. Even more irritating was the fact that the ceiling seemed to have no edge after all. He paused for a much needed rest.
Then he made the mistake of turning his head to look down. The ceiling must have been designed as a slope for he was much higher now than the actual height of the pole. He had crawled his way to an immense altitude and the land beneath him was so distant it appeared a grey blur without any distinguishing features.
Anton was terrified. He no longer desired fame as an explorer but cared only for a return to solid ground. He looked around in vain for the Scottish pole. Having lost all sense of direction, he clung to the tufts more tightly as he fought the urge to scream. This was the worst moment of his life.
Then he controlled his fear and decided that before falling to his death he ought to make an effort to save himself. He closed his eyes and crawled off as fast as possible, his hands slipping on the damp tufts, his boots digging slimy footholds in the ceiling. He didn't expect to survive and yet he had the curious feeling that gravity was starting to lose interest in him.
A man filled with hydrogen or helium like an old fashioned airship might bounce along a ceiling with no greater ease than Anton now proceeded. And yet he knew this defiance of the laws of nature was an illusion, that soon he would lose his grip and plummet to the grey land below. Tiredness would overcome him or the tufts break off and his doom would rush at him impatiently.
While he was imagining this doom and feeling sorry for himself because he had so few friends to remember him, none in fact, which maybe isn't so bad if being remembered as unsuccessful is worse than never being noticed, he suddenly struck his head on an obstacle. He snapped open his eyes. He had crawled straight into a solid pole.
It wasn't the Scottish pole, for it was made of a substance harder than wood, possibly concrete, but he didn't care what name it had. It might be the French or Turkish pole, carried from its native land and planted here by invaders. What did it matter provided he could climb down it? That was the important point.
Not wanting to descend to the ground upside down, he turned in a careful circle and embraced the pole with his legs. Then he eased his body onto its length, but his hopes of sliding smoothly groundwards came to nothing. Either there was too much friction between the substance of the pole and his limbs or else he was still connected to the ceiling by a weird magnetism, for it took considerable effort for him to inch his way down.
After ten minutes or so of exhausting work he was mortified to discover that the pole came to an end. It was not connected to the ground but merely stuck into the ceiling like a fake stalactite. Worse than this, the end was glowing hot and shone brightly. It was the simplest kind of light fitting. Anton grumbled to himself. If he was going to be forced to dangle from ceiling illumination, the least his luck might do was to provide a chandelier.
A tide of resignation rose inside him, flooding the chambers of his heart and the spaces between his bones. He simply lacked the stamina to hold on. He was exhausted and the glowing tip of the pole was radiating an uncomfortable amount of heat. To avoid blisters he let go of the pole and embraced extinction instead. He allowed himself to plunge freely.
At this point it might be appropriate to describe Anton's activities from the viewpoint of the people standing in the field when he first arrived. Every year Invergarry has the honour of hosting the Highland Games. This traditional competition features only essentially Scottish feats of strength and endurance, the most famous of which is Tossing the Caber. The caber is a lopped tree trunk and it takes formidable muscle power to toss it.
The caber is not really tossed for distance but for style. The athlete holds the caber in his hands, keeping it balanced perfectly erect. He is required to imagine a clock face spread on the ground before him. He stands at the 6 o'clock position and tosses the caber so that it turns in the air and lands upside down in the middle of the clock. Then it is supposed to topple over and end up pointing exactly towards the 12 o'clock position.
The caber was in the very act of being tossed when Anton Arctic rushed across the field, jumped onto it and began climbing. By the time he was halfway up it had somersaulted in mid flight and thus he felt dizzy. Then it landed in the middle of the clock face, but because the torrential rain had softened the ground it stuck fast without toppling. Anton noticed none of this and kept climbing.
When he reached the end of the pole he assumed that the ground was a ceiling. He never suspected he was upside down. He let go of the pole and inched across the field, holding tightly to clumps of grass. Eventually he looked up at the cloudy sky and was overwhelmed with vertigo. He thought the sky was the land.
He resumed crawling and the pole he struck his head against was a lamppost at the edge of the field, an Ivergarry street light. The spectators watched in disbelief as he climbed feet first up this lamppost, did a handstand at the top and then let go with a peculiar sort of laugh.
What happened next has become a source of mild controversy. The spectators at the Highland Games swear that he plummeted head first into the mud of the field and was buried as far as his waist, so that only his feebly kicking legs were visible until he was hauled out with ropes by several of the strongest athletes and sent packing back to London, never to be heard of again. And there should be no reason to doubt them.
But the pilot of a passing airliner crossing Scotland at the time reported seeing a man rising into the sky and waving cheerfully as he went past, a man with bushy white eyebrows and whiskers as frosty and desolate as bedsheets on a washing line.