Hugging one's Penguins

Gavin Francis spent a year working at a British research station on the Caird Coast of the Antarctic continent. He liked to spend his afternoons huddled with the penguins on their ice shelf; he thinks birds live more joyfully than human beings, existing "in a series of discontinuous eternities." But Mr. Hamblyn, a lecturer in the department of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, drily comments that Mr. Francis "has no way of knowing what emotions, if any, a wintering penguin might feel - indeed, the male emperors' annual feat of endurance - a winter-long fast, spent silently incubating an egg that must never touch the ice - is mysterious to us precisely because it is unfathomable."

Is unfathomability a possible precise cause of mystery? It seems to me that they are more or less the same thing, and do not stand in any kind of causal relationship.

Anyway, returning to the Antarctic, Mr. Hamblyn thinks we should know that on the Argentine base, at the tip of the Peninsula, a school has opened to educate some of the dozen or so children - "citizens of Antarctica" - who have been born on the continent since the nineteen-seventies, in defiance of the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, under which children and dogs are banned. Babies born defiant what!