South, far south, of my wildest imagination, a volcano rises from the slate-gray ocean that surrounds Antarctica. This volcano bears a name worthy of a Victorian adventure novel -- Deception Island. Its collapsed caldera, open to the sea through a narrow slot, is a protected harbor that is a favorite anchorage for the expedition cruise ships that serve the Antarctic tourist trade. As a naturalist aboard Le Diamant, a French-owned vessel, I was one small cog in that trade, and as we approached Deception Island on a midsummer day this past January, I paced the deck with a mixture of dread and hopeful anticipation.

Flocks of graceful Cape Petrels wheeled around us, flashing their black-and-white checked wings, as Le Diamant gingerly nosed her way through Neptune’s Bellows, the passage into Deception Island. In just a couple of minutes, we left the birds, the persistent rolling swell, and the limitless, iceberg-studded expanse of the ocean behind, and sailed into the caldera. Calm as a farm pond, the Deception Island caldera is almost devoid of life because of the volcanic vents that make its waters too hot for krill and other Antarctic sea creatures. However, it offers one attraction that many ecotourists find irresistible: the opportunity to swim in Antarctica. This explained my dread, and the grim looks that I exchanged with my fellow naturalists. The Swim was our least favorite Antarctic excursion. You see, it involves digging trenches in the black volcanic ash beach to allow the “swimmers” to wallow in troughs of suitably lukewarm water – the water around the vents themselves being scaldingly hot.

Meanwhile, outside the caldera, where the outer slopes of the Deception Island volcano met the icy krill-filled sea at a cape called Bailey Head, waited one of the world’s great natural spectacles: a teeming colony of more than 300,000 Chinstrap Penguins. If we could get our passengers’ Antarctica-bathing finished in time, we just might have a chance to attempt the tricky landing required to visit this great city of penguins. And that explained my hopeful anticipation.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning. How had I come to be here, beyond the end of the world?