As the wooden manhole cover slides into place inches above my head, cutting out the bright blue skies and 2 AM daylight, there is a momentary feeling of nothingness, and a sinister nagging that it will not end. I imagine that it’s this sensation running rampant in one’s imagination that induces claustrophobia in people. This is certainly not the place for people who have qualms with tight, dark places. I am standing on bars of uneven heights, blind, with my back braced against and my shoulders curving along the cylindrical wall. The tube might be two feet in diameter, though I wouldn’t put money on it being any larger.

A moment passes and my pupils dilate to reveal a sliver of light streaming through the boundary between the tube and the cover. But it’s down I’m going, and contorting to see past myself, there is an aquatic blue glow coming from below. Descending, my body shifts rhythmically clockwise and the counter-clockwise, as each sway provides the room I need for my foot to take the next rung. Twenty feet down, and the hard, uneven footholds end abruptly, replaced by a rope ladder and open space. While the blue glow has brightened into a gloomy sort of mood lighting, I can’t simultaneously look down and move my feet, so I struggle to transition from the stability of the rungs to the flimsy ladder, which flails in the extra room at the end of the tube. There is an uneasy feeling that if I slip in these close quarters, my face is going to go straight into the metal rungs.

Easing my way down the ladder, I touch something solid. As I lower myself out of the tube and into a small pod, I see it’s a wooden crate to sit on. I promptly do. The space I find myself is roomy compared to the tube, perhaps three feet across with enough clearance to turn and look around me. Each wall is nothing more than a window.  The view is spectacular. I find myself about 15 feet below the sheet of ice I had just a few moments before been standing on, floating in the middle of an icy ocean.  Above, the ice glows blue, the only source of illumination here, and spikes of it grow downward from the frozen ceiling. Below in the murky depths I can make out the sea floor to one side, but it slides away into darkness below me. And all around the ocean is an empty sort of blueness, but it’s dotted by sparkling stars that the ice-light shines on: small creatures of the Ross Sea, drifting serenely by. Many are like tiny shrimp with wings, and once in awhile a spherical blob passes, its flagella whirring frantically.

It’s strangely warm in here, shielded from the wind. The tightness keeps my body heat close. I sit silently, and suddenly become aware that there’s more in these waters than just insects. It comes to me as a whistle first. From which direction, I can’t tell: the sound echoes and reverberates and makes it seem like it’s everywhere. And close. I twist and turn, looking for motion, but the visibility down here extends only 50 feet or so. I listen. There’s a wheeeeerp, the pitch starting normal and sweeping impossibly high. It’s not quiet either, but clear and crisp and right there. It feels like the maker sits just at the edge of my world, prowling the edges of my vision.

I whistle back, as high pitch as I can hit, and pause. A whistle comes back to me. I whistle again. The response puts mine to shame. Seals: they’re out there hunting, playing, perhaps even talking to me. It’s simultaneously fascinating and intimidating, for though I know they are no threat, the fact that I can’t see them – or anything past my little universe – makes the imagination see something larger and darker out there making these noises. They know where I am, but I don’t know where they are. A series of pings come to me, the pitch starting high and going low, lower, lower, each one a short zap, like an futuristic ray gun from the techno 80’s. Animals do not make noises such as these, do they?

It is an experience both eerie and awe-inspiring.