Veyra's Glass Shore: what the first visitors found

There were six of us and two guides, and for the first hour nobody said much beyond the checks: seals, air, radio, line. We were one of the first small groups allowed into the cavern on Veyra that people have started calling the Glass Shore, and none of us knew quite what to expect, except that it would be cold and that we would not be allowed to touch anything.

The descent

The cavern opens in a low ice cliff, its mouth turned towards Ilyr. From the landing pad it is a two-hour ride by crawler across a plain of frozen ridges, with the sun low on the horizon the whole way and the shadows of the ridges stretched out for hundreds of metres beside us.

Veyra's gravity is so slight that the way down is less a climb than a slow, guided fall. We clipped to a fixed line and let ourselves down a ramp of ice some eighty metres long, hand over hand, boots barely touching. Our lead guide, Petra Voss, had been down it more than forty times. She went first and talked the whole way, in the calm, unhurried voice of someone reading out the shipping forecast. At the bottom the ramp levels onto a broad shelf, and the cavern opens around you. That is the moment every account of the Glass Shore tries to describe, and I am about to fail in the same way.

The light

Ilyr was just above the horizon behind us, and its light came in through the cavern mouth almost level, along the floor and up into the walls. The walls are ice cliffs thirty or forty metres high, and they are clear. Not white, as ice is everywhere else on Veyra, but clear, so that light goes into them and comes back out somewhere else, bent and softened. Petra explained that this ice froze very slowly from meltwater, with no bubbles to scatter the light, and that this is why visitors say it looks like glass. Knowing why did not help in the slightest.

Where the light struck the cliffs head on they glowed pale gold. Further in, where it had passed through more ice, it turned blue, then a deep, inky blue-green, and at the back of the cavern it ran out altogether. Our lamps were set to their lowest. We were asked to keep them that way, and nobody argued.

The lake

The lake lies along the foot of the cliffs, black and perfectly still. It is liquid water, warmed from below by the same heat inside Veyra that drives the geysers at the south pole, and it is roofed by a skin of clear ice a few centimetres thick. From the shelf it looks like a hole in the floor. Petra knelt at the marked edge and angled her lamp down, and through the skin we could see the water moving: slow currents, a few pale specks of frost turning over in them.

Someone asked how deep it was. Nobody knows. The first survey team lowered a weighted line two hundred metres and found no bottom, and that line is still the only thing that has been in the water. The rules are written to keep it that way.

The silence

Sound does not travel through a vacuum, so in one sense a suit is always silent. In practice it is noisy: the fans, your own breathing, the click of the radio, six people saying "look at that" at once. At the shore Petra called a minute of radio quiet. One by one we switched off. For the first time since the shuttle, nobody said a word.

A minute became five. I listened to my breathing slow. Across the lake the cliffs went on glowing, gold at the front and blue at the back, and the light shifted on the walls as Ilyr crept along the horizon outside. When the radio came back on, the first thing anyone said, after a long pause, was a quiet "thank you", and it was not clear to whom.

For the first time since the shuttle, nobody said a word.

The rules that protect it

Visits to the Glass Shore are deliberately small and deliberately few, and the rules are read out at the landing pad and again on the shelf.

• Six visitors, two guides, never more.
• Stay on the line. A cord on the ice marks where you may walk; the lake's edge is a metre beyond it.
• Touch nothing. A suit glove is warmer than the ice and leaves a mark that lasts for years.
• Lamps on low, and no flash. The light is the point.
• Forty minutes at the shore, then back up the line.
• Nothing taken, nothing left.

It is a short list, and on the way back up the ramp it seemed a small price. The Glass Shore has been open to visitors for less than a season. If it is to look to the next groups the way it looked to us, the line on the ice will have to hold.