To "visitors" from the Starkweather-Moore and Lexington camps, the Barmeister-Falken main camp seems as large as a small town, albeit a subterranean one. The first impression is of a dark, cavernous hangar made of thick walls of snow blocks, covered over by a immense canvas tarp. Large enough for four Junkers aircraft, the hangar could easily hold all the dwellings at the Lake camp, with room to spare. The Boeing and the _Belle_ sit in the inner corners of the hangar, overshadowed by their bigger brothers. For most of the time, the hangar contains only one Junker: one lies twisted and ruined at Lake's camp, while two accompany Falken at his excavation site.
Those with an eye for aircraft and their care are impressed by the well-equipped machine rooms just off the hangar. Laid out neatly above and on benches lining the room is a wide selection of tools, appropriate for all purposes. One gets an impression of orderly neatness, and of a level of planning and preparation well beyond that of your own expeditions.
Both of these impressions are reinforced the more you explore their camp. The scale of the place is impressive, and would be more so if you hadn't just come from the sprawling megapolis of the City. The main structure of the complex is a large rectangular tunnel connecting the various residences, workshops, laboratories, etc. The tunnel itself is made for the sole purpose of allowing people to get from one building to another, and is nothing more than a trench cut out of the snow---a couple of yards deep---and covered with canvas. It may have been comfortably wide at some point in time, but has become the favored storage area for empty boxes. By now, it is completely lined with them, leaving a passageway just wide enough for two men to slip by each other. What they lack in width, however, they make up for in length-- stretching roughly half the length of a football field from corner to corner. The tunnels are also quite dark, as the tarp and the snow keep out the constant sunlight and the illumination from the labs and living quarters never makes it very far. Lit kerosene lamps line the tunnels, just close enough together to allow one to creep along its length.
The living quarters and other inhabited areas are also dark, by and large. There is electric lighting in the living quarters and the mess, but other than that the only illumination is by kerosene lamp or candle. Also, the camp is still chilly almost throughout. The average temperature lingers just below the freezing point of water, which although much warmer than a tent, is still not quite shirtsleeve weather. The favored mode of dress seems to be the reindeer-skin pants and boots of the "outdoors" outfit, but sweaters and a wool cap rather than the parka. Off-duty, the men of the camp spend most of their time sitting at the tables near the stove in the mess, one of the two heated areas in the camp. (The other is the photographic shack, when it is in use.)
In addition to being simply large, the camp is almost ridiculously well-stocked. The organizers of the BFE seem to be well aware that a winter on the ice might become a necessity, and apparently took precautions to have enough supplies. The coal store contains several tones of coal, bagged in sacks--- more then enough to last a year. Their storerooms contain more than a dozen reindeer hides, and several thousand staples. The food stores are well-supplied, and continually supplemented by seals from the Weddell Sea. (Although the chopping and butchering room has the capacity to disquiet and frighten those who are either unprepared, or who saw the medical tent from Lake's camp. The room contains a large table and a variety of cutting and slicing instruments-- and every surface is covered with splattered, frozen, red blood.)
However, despite the plenty of its stores, the camp offers little in the way of comfort or privacy. That which is needed for the expedition's mission is to be had-- and the best of it, too, with spares-- but for that which is not needed there is a minimal supply. There are three sets of living quarters: a large barracks with bunkbeds for the workers, another ten bunks in the administrative offices for the radio operators and suchlike, and a small officer's quarters for the expedition's leaders. (Those of you with a military background instantly break these accommodations down into "enlisted men," "NCO's" and "commanders", and nothing you see over the next few days contradicts this.) There are no differences between the accommodations except in decoration: each man has a bunk, a cabinet, and a sea chest at the foot of the bed. Most of these chests are unlocked. Each room has a single coal stove that struggles valiantly against the chill, without much success. While the administrative quarters is decorated in a "bookkeeper" motif---with the walls covered in various charts, calculations, maps and so on---and the officers' quarters decorated in a tasteful "Camp of Rich Gentlemen", the workers' barrack's decor is a simple "naked girls" style, making liberal use of pornography of all styles.
Other than the, um, artwork, the only real luxury in the camp is the library in the administrative quarters. There are some thousand volumes covering a variety of subjects. There are several books on the relevant sciences (physics, chemistry, geology, etc), specific textbooks (such as the manuals for all the aircraft and machines), occult and mythological tomes, general references (such as an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a _Who's Who_, and so on), and an intelligent collection of poetry and literature. Unfortunately for many of you, it is entirely in German. (There are several other-language-to-German dictionaries, for the patient.)
Other notable sights around the camp:
-- Three meteorological stations towards the north, where the meteorologists can often be found muttering to themselves. In the Antarctic, predicting the weather is an important and tricky business.-- A physics room, which has no metal in its construction, where the physics staff can measure the ambient magnetic field.
-- A biology lab, which is more than adequately supplied for dissections, autopsies, and so forth. Interestingly, there also seems to be supplies for quarantines and epidemiological studies...
-- The medical facilities, which contain a locked desk (of medical files) and a locked cabinet (containing the expedition's supply of medicine and drugs). There is also an assortment of instruments and an autoclave.
-- The physics and geology labs are similarly well-equipped. The geology lab also has a high-pressure chamber, and a remote handling box (a box of thick glass with large rubber gloves built into the sides).
Other than the safe and the radio shack, there does not seem to be any area of the camp that is kept off-limits. Those of you who volunteered to cooperate are allowed to roam the complex on your own, while those of you who seemed... hostile are kept under the (friendly) eyes of Pavel, Peter, and Gregor (among others). The complex seems rather abandoned at the moment; designed for a much larger group than the skeleton crew manning it at the moment. This becomes less true when the Lake's Camp team returns, but the number of people there do not begin to explain the vast amounts of supplies and space. Those of you who ask learn that the majority of the expedition members are actually out, either surveying and mapping by dog, or at the Falken excavation site.