'Are you ready, Jeffson?'
'Aye, Wilson!' cried I.
'_Then here goes!_' cries he.
Even as he spoke, he fired. Surely, the man was in deadly earnest to
kill me.
But his shot passed harmlessly by me: as indeed was only likely: we
were mere shadows one to the other.
I fired perhaps ten seconds later than he: but in those ten seconds he
stood perfectly revealed to me in clear, lavender light.
An Arctic fire-ball had traversed the sky, showering abroad, a
sulphurous glamour over the snow-landscape. Before the intenser blue of
its momentary shine had passed away, I saw Wilson stagger forward, and
drop. And him and his lantern I buried deep there under the rubble ice.
* * * * *
On the 13th March, nearly three months later, Clark, Mew and I left the
Boreal in latitude 85° 15'.
We had with us thirty-two dogs, three sledges, three kayaks, human
provisions for 112 days, and dog provisions for 40. Being now about 340
miles from the Pole, we hoped to reach it in 43 days, then, turning
south, and feeding living dogs with dead, make either Franz Josef Land
or Spitzbergen, at which latter place we should very likely come up with
a whaler.
Well, during the first days, progress was very slow, the ice being rough
and laney, and the dogs behaving most badly, stopping dead at every
difficulty, and leaping over the traces. Clark had had the excellent
idea of attaching a gold-beater's-skin balloon, with a lifting power of
35 pounds, to each sledge, and we had with us a supply of zinc and
sulphuric-acid to repair the hydrogen-waste from the bags; but on the
third day Mew over-filled and burst his balloon, and I and Clark had to
cut ours loose in order to equalise weights, for we could neither leave
him behind, turn back to the ship, nor mend the bag. So it happened that
at the end of the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, and
could still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the old
Boreal. Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with 400 lbs. of
instruments, ammunition, pemmican, aleuronate bread; Mew followed, his
sledge containing provisions only; and last came I, with a mixed
freight. But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, and
Mew took his place.
Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough. The
sun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat. Our
sleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were
soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers,
under wrappings of senne-grass and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.
Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would
crash perilously against an ice-ridge--and they were our one hope of
reaching land. But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost six
mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them. On the twelfth day
Clark took a single-altitude observation, and found that we were only in
latitude 86° 45'; but the next day we passed beyond the furthest point
yet reached by man, viz. 86° 53', attained by the _Nix_ explorers four
years previously.
* * * * *
Our one secret thought now was food, food--our day-long lust for the
eating-time. Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.
* * * * *
Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only,
but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus. Ah, the ice!
A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.
On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar
silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had
watched.
* * * * *
After the eleventh day our rate of march improved: all lanes
disappeared, and ridges became much less frequent. By the fifteenth day
I was leaving behind the ice-grave of David Wilson at the rate of ten to
thirteen miles a day.
Yet, as it were, his arm reached out and touched me, even there.
His disappearance had been explained by a hundred different guesses on
the ship--all plausible enough. I had no idea that anyone connected me
in any way with his death.
But on our twenty-second day of march, 140 miles from our goal, he
caused a conflagration of rage and hate to break out among us three.
It was at the end of a march, when our stomachs were hollow, our frames
ready to drop, and our mood ravenous and inflamed. One of Mew's dogs was
sick: it was necessary to kill it: he asked me to do it.
'Oh,' said I, 'you kill your own dog, of course.'
'Well, I don't know,' he replied, catching fire at once, 'you ought to
be used to killing, Jeffson.'
'How do you mean, Mew?' said I with a mad start, for madness and the
flames of Hell were instant and uppermost in us all: 'you mean because
my profession----'
'Profession! damn it, no,' he snarled like a dog: 'go and dig up David
Wilson--I dare say you know where to find him--and he will tell you my
meaning, right enough.'
I rushed at once to Clark, who was stooping among the dogs,
unharnessing: and savagely pushing his shoulder, I exclaimed:
'That beast accuses me of murdering David Wilson!'
'Well?' said Clark.
'I'd split his skull as clean----!'
'Go away, Adam Jeffson, and let me be!' snarled Clark.
'Is that all you've got to say about it, then--you?'
'To the devil with you, man, say I, and let me be!' cried he: 'you know
your own conscience best, I suppose.'
Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent. However,
from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit.
Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous,
fierceness. In that pursuit of riches into that region of cold, we had
become almost like the beasts that perish.
* * * * *
On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though
sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the lower
animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week
spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a
real hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region--beyond doubt
cursed--not meant to be penetrated by man: and rapid and awful was the
degeneration of our souls. As for me, never could I have conceived that
savagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it brood
in mine. If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the
habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so
would they be.
* * * * *
As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from four
miles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledges
lightened) to twenty.
It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange-looking
objects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continually
increased as we proceeded. They had the appearance of rocks, or pieces
of iron, incrusted with glass-fragments of various colours, and they
were of every size. Their incrustations we soon determined to be
diamonds, and other precious stones. On our first twenty-mile day Mew
picked up a diamond-crystal as large as a child's foot, and such objects
soon became common. We thus found the riches which we sought, beyond all
dream; but as the bear and the walrus find them: for ourselves we had
lost; and it was a loss of riches barren as ashes, for all those
millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled
something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance
had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in
their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to
interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed our
way.
* * * * *
We had all along had good weather: till, suddenly, on the morning of the
13th April, we were overtaken by a tempest from the S.W., of such mighty
and solemn volume that the heart quailed beneath it. It lasted in its
full power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of our
sledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face-downward. We had
travelled all the sun-lit night, and were gasping with fatigue; so as
soon as the wind allowed us to huddle together our scattered things, we
crawled into the sleeping-bags, and instantly slept.
We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our
eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle
cracklings of artillery. This may have been a result of the tempest
stirring up the ocean beneath the ice. Whatever it was, we did not care:
we slept deep.
We were within ten miles of the Pole.
* * * * *
In my sleep it was as though someone suddenly shook my shoulder with
urgent '_Up! up_!' It was neither Clark nor Mew, but a dream merely: for
Clark and Mew, when I started up, I saw lying still in their
sleeping-bag.
I suppose it must have been about noon. I sat staring a minute, and my
first numb thought was somehow this: that the Countess Clodagh had
prayed me 'Be first'--for her. Wondrous little now cared I for the
Countess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth--precious little for
the fortune which she coveted: millions on millions of fortunes lay
unregarded around me. But that thought, _Be first!_ was deeply suggested
in my brain, as if whispered there. Instinctively, brutishly, as the
Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes,
arose.
The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while the
tempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation. I
looked abroad upon a vast plain, stretched out to a circular, but waving
horizon, and varied by many hillocks, boulders, and sparkling
meteor-stones that everywhere tinselled the blinding white, some big as
houses, most small as limbs. And this great plain was now rearranging
itself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines like
mutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionate
mountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent and
inconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself,
pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, while here and there I saw
the meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysers
or spurting froths in a steamer's wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime,
filling all the air. As I stood, I plunged and staggered, and I found
the dogs sprawling, with whimperings, on the heaving floor.
I did not care. Instinctively, daftly, brutishly, I harnessed ten of
them to my sledge; put on Canadian snow-shoes: and was away
northward--alone.
The sun shone with a clear, benign, but heatless shining: a ghostly,
remote, yet quite limpid light, which seemed designed for the lighting
of other planets and systems, and to strike here by happy chance. A
great wind from the S.W., meantime, sent thin snow-sweepings flying
northward past me.
The odometer which I had with me had not yet measured four miles, when I
began to notice two things: first that the jewelled meteor-stones were
now accumulating beyond all limit, filling my range of vision to the
northern horizon with a dazzling glister: in mounds, and parterres, and
scattered disconnection they lay, like largesse of autumn leaves, spread
out over those Elysian fields and fairy uplands of wealth, trillions of
billions, so that I had need to steer my twining way among them. Now,
too, I noticed that, but for these stones, all roughness had
disappeared, not a trace of the upheaval going on a little further south
being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me.
It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt
one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom of
the deep.
* * * * *
And now with a wild hilarity I flew. Gradually, a dizziness, a lunacy,
had seized upon me, till finally, up-buoyed on air, and dancing mad, I
sped, I spun, with grinning teeth that chattered and gibbered, and
eyeballs of distraction: for a Fear, too--most cold and dreadful--had
its hand of ice upon my heart, I being so alone in that place, face to
face with the Ineffable: but still with a giddy levity, and a fatal joy,
and a blind hilarity, on I sped, I spun.
* * * * *
The odometer measured nine miles from my start. I was in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Pole.
I cannot say when it began, but now I was conscious of a sound in my
ears, distinct and near, a steady sound of splashing, or fluttering,
resembling the noising of a cascade or brook: and it grew. Forty more
steps I took (slide I could not now for the meteorites)--perhaps
sixty--perhaps eighty: and now, to my sudden horror, I stood by a
circular clean-cut lake.
One minute only, swaying and nodding there, I stood: and then I dropped
down flat in swoon.
* * * * *
In a hundred years, I suppose, I should never succeed in analysing
_why_ I swooned: but my consciousness still retains the impression of
that horrid thrill. I saw nothing distinctly, for my whole being reeled
and toppled drunken, like a spinning-top in desperate death-struggle at
the moment when it flags, and wobbles dissolutely to fall; but the very
instant that my eyes met what was before me, I knew, I knew, that here
was the Sanctity of Sanctities, the old eternal inner secret of the Life
of this Earth, which it was a most burning shame for a man to see. The
lake, I fancy, must be a mile across, and in its middle is a pillar of
ice, very low and broad; and I had the clear impression, or dream, or
notion, that there was a name, or word, graven all round in the ice of
the pillar in characters which I could never read; and under the name a
long date; and the fluid of the lake seemed to me to be wheeling with a
shivering ecstasy, splashing and fluttering, round the pillar, always
from west to east, in the direction of the spinning of the earth; and it
was borne in upon me--I can't at all say how--that this fluid was the
substance of a living creature; and I had the distinct fancy, as my
senses failed, that it was a creature with many dull and anguished eyes,
and that, as it wheeled for ever round in fluttering lust, it kept its
eyes always turned upon the name and the date graven in the pillar. But
this must be my madness....
* * * * *
It must have been not less than an hour before a sense of life returned
to me; and when the thought stabbed my brain that a long, long time I
had lain there in the presence of those gloomy orbs, my spirit seemed to
groan and die within me.
In some minutes, however, I had scrambled to my feet, clutched at a
dog's harness, and without one backward glance, was flying from that
place.
Half-way to the halting-place, I waited Clark and Mew, being very sick
and doddering, and unable to advance. But they did not come.
Later on, when I gathered force to go further, I found that they had
perished in the upheaval of the ice. One only of the sledges, half
buried, I saw near the spot of our bivouac.
* * * * *
Alone that same day I began my way southward, and for five days made
good progress. On the eighth day I noticed, stretched right across the
south-eastern horizon, a region of purple vapour which luridly obscured
the face of the sun: and day after day I saw it steadily brooding
there. But what it could be I did not understand.
* * * * *
Well, onward through the desert ice I continued my lonely way, with a
baleful shrinking terror in my heart; for very stupendous, alas! is the
burden of that Arctic solitude upon one poor human soul.
Sometimes on a halt I have lain and listened long to the hollow silence,
recoiling, crushed by it, hoping that at least one of the dogs might
whine. I have even crept shivering from the thawed sleeping-bag to flog
a dog, so that I might hear a sound.
I had started from the Pole with a well-filled sledge, and the sixteen
dogs left alive from the ice-packing which buried my comrades. This was
on the evening of the 13th April. I had saved from the wreck of our
things most of the whey-powder, pemmican, &c., as well as the
theodolite, compass, chronometer, train-oil lamp for cooking, and other
implements: I was therefore in no doubt as to my course, and I had
provisions for ninety days. But ten days from the start my supply of
dog-food failed, and I had to begin to slaughter my only companions, one
by one.
Well, in the third week the ice became horribly rough, and with moil
and toil enough to wear a bear to death, I did only five miles a day.
After the day's work I would crawl with a dying sigh into the
sleeping-bag, clad still in the load of skins which stuck to me a mere
filth of grease, to sleep the sleep of a swine, indifferent if I never
woke.
Always--day after day--on the south-eastern horizon, brooded sullenly
that curious stretched-out region of purple vapour, like the smoke of
the conflagration of the world. And I noticed that its length constantly
reached out and out, and silently grew.
* * * * *
Once I had a very pleasant dream. I dreamed that I was in a garden--an
Arabian paradise--so sweet was the perfume. All the time, however, I had
a sub-consciousness of the gale which was actually blowing from the S.E.
over the ice, and, at the moment when I awoke, was half-wittedly droning
to myself; 'It is a Garden of Peaches; but I am not really in the
garden: I am really on the ice; only, the S.E. storm is wafting to me
the aroma of this Garden of Peaches.'
I opened my eyes--I started--I sprang to my feet! For, of all the
miracles!--I could not doubt--an actual aroma like peach-blossom was in
the algid air about me!
Before I could collect my astonished senses, I began to vomit pretty
violently, and at the same time saw some of the dogs, mere skeletons as
they were, vomiting, too. For a long time I lay very sick in a kind of
daze, and, on rising, found two of the dogs dead, and all very queer.
The wind had now changed to the north.
Well, on I staggered, fighting every inch of my deplorably weary way.
This odour of peach-blossom, my sickness, and the death of the two dogs,
remained a wonder to me.
Two days later, to my extreme mystification (and joy), I came across a
bear and its cub lying dead at the foot of a hummock. I could not
believe my eyes. There she lay on her right side, a spot of dirty-white
in a disordered patch of snow, with one little eye open, and her
fierce-looking mouth also; and the cub lay across her haunch, biting
into her rough fur. I set to work upon her, and allowed the dogs a
glorious feed on the blubber, while I myself had a great banquet on the
fresh meat. I had to leave the greater part of the two carcasses, and I
can feel again now the hankering reluctance--quite unnecessary, as it
turned out--with which I trudged onwards. Again and again I found
myself asking: 'Now, what could have killed those two bears?'
With brutish stolidness I plodded ever on, almost like a walking
machine, sometimes nodding in sleep while I helped the dogs, or
manouvred the sledge over an ice-ridge, pushing or pulling. On the 3rd
June, a month and a half from my start, I took an observation with the
theodolite, and found that I was not yet 400 miles from the Pole, in
latitude 84° 50'. It was just as though some Will, some Will, was
obstructing and retarding me.
However, the intolerable cold was over, and soon my clothes no longer
hung stark on me like armour. Pools began to appear in the ice, and
presently, what was worse, my God, long lanes, across which, somehow, I
had to get the sledge. But about the same time all fear of starvation
passed away: for on the 6th June I came across another dead bear, on the
7th three, and thenceforth, in rapidly growing numbers, I met not bears
only, but fulmars, guillemots, snipes, Ross's gulls, little awks--all,
all, lying dead on the ice. And never anywhere a living thing, save me,
and the two remaining dogs.
If ever a poor man stood shocked before a mystery, it was I now. I had a
big fear on my heart.
On the 2nd July the ice began packing dangerously, and soon another
storm broke loose upon me from the S.W. I left off my trek, and put up
the silk tent on a five-acre square of ice surrounded by lanes: and
_again_--for the second time--as I lay down, I smelled that delightful
strange odour of peach-blossom, a mere whiff of it, and presently
afterwards was taken sick. However, it passed off this time in a couple
of hours.
Now it was all lanes, lanes, alas! yet no open water, and such was the
difficulty and woe of my life, that sometimes I would drop flat on the
ice, and sob: 'Oh, no more, no more, my God: here let me die.' The
crossing of a lane might occupy ten or twelve entire hours, and then, on
the other side I might find another one opening right before me.
Moreover, on the 8th July, one of the dogs, after a feed on blubber,
suddenly died; and there was left me only 'Reinhardt,' a white-haired
Siberian dog, with little pert up-sticking ears, like a cat's. Him, too,
I had to kill on coming to open water.
This did not happen till the 3rd August, nearly four months from the
Pole.
I can't think, my God, that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling
nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four
long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a
man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed
and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others
yonder seemed to watch me still with their distraught and gloomy gaze,
and in my spinning dark dreams spun that eternal ecstasy of the lake.
However, by the 28th July I knew from the look of the sky, and the
absence of fresh-water ice, that the sea could not be far; so I set to
work, and spent two days in putting to rights the now battered kayak.
This done, I had no sooner resumed my way than I sighted far off a
streaky haze, which I knew to be the basalt cliffs of Franz Josef Land;
and in a craziness of joy I stood there, waving my ski-staff about my
head, with the senile cheers of a very old man.
In four days this land was visibly nearer, sheer basaltic cliffs mixed
with glacier, forming apparently a great bay, with two small islands in
the mid-distance; and at fore-day of the 3rd August I arrived at the
definite edge of the pack-ice in moderate weather at about the
freezing-point.
I at once, but with great reluctance, shot Reinhardt, and set to work to
get the last of the provisions, and the most necessary of the
implements, into the kayak, making haste to put out to the toilless
luxury of being borne on the water, after all the weary trudge. Within
fourteen hours I was coasting, with my little lug-sail spread, along the
shore-ice of that land. It was midnight of a calm Sabbath, and low on
the horizon smoked the drowsing red sun-ball, as my canvas skiff lightly
chopped her little way through this silent sea. Silent, silent: for
neither snort of walrus, nor yelp of fox, nor cry of startled kittiwake,
did I hear: but all was still as the jet-black shadow of the cliffs and
glacier on the tranquil sea: and many bodies of dead things strewed the
surface of the water.
* * * * *
When I found a little fjord, I went up it to the end where stood a
stretch of basalt columns, looking like a shattered temple of
Antediluvians; and when my foot at last touched land, I sat down there a
long, long time in the rubbly snow, and silently wept. My eyes that
night were like a fountain of tears. For the firm land is health and
sanity, and dear to the life of man; but I say that the great ungenial
ice is a nightmare, and a blasphemy, and a madness, and the realm of the
Power of Darkness.
* * * * *
I knew that I was at Franz Josef Land, somewhere or other in the
neighbourhood of C. Fligely (about 82° N.), and though it was so late,
and getting cold, I still had the hope of reaching Spitzbergen that
year, by alternately sailing all open water, and dragging the kayak over
the slack drift-ice. All the ice which I saw was good flat fjord-ice,
and the plan seemed feasible enough; so after coasting about a little,
and then three days' good rest in the tent at the bottom of a ravine of
columnar basalt opening upon the shore, I packed some bear and walrus
flesh, with what artificial food was left, into the kayak, and I set out
early in the morning, coasting the shore-ice with sail and paddle. In
the afternoon I managed to climb a little way up an iceberg, and made
out that I was in a bay whose terminating headlands were invisible. I
accordingly decided to make S.W. by W. to cross it, but, in doing so, I
was hardly out of sight of land, when a northern storm overtook me
toward midnight; before I could think, the little sail was all but
whiffed away, and the kayak upset. I only saved it by the happy chance
of being near a floe with an ice-foot, which, projecting under the
water, gave me foot-hold; and I lay on the floe in a mooning state the
whole night under the storm, for I was half drowned.
And at once, on recovering myself, I abandoned all thought of whalers
and of Europe for that year. Happily, my instruments, &c., had been
saved by the kayak-deck when she capsized.
* * * * *
A hundred yards inland from the shore-rim, in a circular place where
there was some moss and soil, I built myself a semi-subterranean Eskimo
den for the long Polar night. The spot was quite surrounded by high
sloping walls of basalt, except to the west, where they opened in a
three-foot cleft to the shore, and the ground was strewn with slabs and
boulders of granite and basalt. I found there a dead she-bear, two
well-grown cubs, and a fox, the latter having evidently fallen from the
cliffs; in three places the snow was quite red, overgrown with a red
lichen, which at first I took for blood. I did not even yet feel secure
from possible bears, and took care to make my den fairly tight, a work
which occupied me nearly four weeks, for I had no tools, save a hatchet,
knife, and metal-shod ski-staff. I dug a passage in the ground two feet
wide, two deep, and ten long, with perpendicular sides, and at its north
end a circular space, twelve feet across, also with perpendicular sides,
which I lined with stones; the whole excavation I covered with
inch-thick walrus-hide, skinned during a whole bitter week from four of
a number that lay about the shore-ice; for ridge-pole I used a thin
pointed rock which I found near, though, even so, the roof remained
nearly flat. This, when it was finished, I stocked well, putting in
everything, except the kayak, blubber to serve both for fuel and
occasional light, and foods of several sorts, which I procured by merely
stretching out the hand. The roof of both circular part and passage was
soon buried under snow and ice, and hardly distinguishable from the
general level of the white-clad ground. Through the passage, if I passed
in or out, I crawled flat, on hands and knees: but that was rare: and in
the little round interior, mostly sitting in a cowering attitude, I
wintered, harkening to the large and windy ravings of darkling December
storms above me.
* * * * *
All those months the burden of a thought bowed me; and an unanswered
question, like the slow turning of a mechanism, revolved in my gloomy
spirit: for everywhere around me lay bears, walruses, foxes, thousands
upon thousands of little awks, kittiwakes, snow-owls, eider-ducks,
gulls-dead, dead. Almost the only living things which I saw were some
walruses on the drift-floes: but very few compared with the number
which I expected. It was clear to me that some inconceivable catastrophe
had overtaken the island during the summer, destroying all life about
it, except some few of the amphibia, cetacea, and crustacea.
On the 5th December, having crept out from the den during a southern
storm, I had, for the third time, a distant whiff of that self-same
odour of peach-blossom: but now without any after-effects.
* * * * *
Well, again came Christmas, the New Year--Spring: and on the 22nd May I
set out with a well-stocked kayak. The water was fairly open, and the
ice so good, that at one place I could sail the kayak over it, the wind
sending me sliding at a fine pace. Being on the west coast of Franz
Josef Land, I was in as favourable a situation as possible, and I turned
my bow southward with much hope, keeping a good many days just in sight
of land. Toward the evening of my third day out I noticed a large flat
floe, presenting far-off a singular and lovely sight, for it seemed
freighted thick with a profusion of pink and white roses, showing in its
clear crystal the empurpled reflection. On getting near I saw that it
was covered with millions of Ross's gulls, all dead, whose pretty rosy
bosoms had given it that appearance.
Up to the 29th June I made good progress southward and westward (the
weather being mostly excellent), sometimes meeting dead bears, floating
away on floes, sometimes dead or living walrus-herds, with troop after
troop of dead kittiwakes, glaucus and ivory gulls, skuas, and every kind
of Arctic fowl. On that last day--the 29th June--I was about to encamp
on a floe soon after midnight, when, happening to look toward the sun,
my eye fell, far away south across the ocean of floes, upon
something--_the masts of a ship_.
A phantom ship, or a real ship: it was all one; real, I must have
instantly felt, it could not be: but at a sight so incredible my heart
set to beating in my bosom as though I must surely die, and feebly
waving the cane oar about my head, I staggered to my knees, and thence
with wry mouth toppled flat.
So overpoweringly sweet was the thought of springing once more, like the
beasts of Circe, from a walrus into a man. At this time I was tearing my
bear's-meat just like a bear; I was washing my hands in walrus-blood to
produce a glairy sort of pink cleanliness, in place of the black grease
which chronically coated them.
Worn as I was, I made little delay to set out for that ship; and I had
not travelled over water and ice four hours when, to my in-describable
joy, I made out from the top of a steep floe that she was the _Boreal_.
It seemed most strange that she should be anywhere hereabouts: I could
only conclude that she must have forced and drifted her way thus far
westward out of the ice-block in which our party had left her, and
perhaps now was loitering here in the hope of picking us up on our way
to Spitzbergen.
In any case, wild was the haste with which I fought my way to be at her,
my gasping mouth all the time drawn back in a _rictus_ of laughter at
the anticipation of their gladness to see me, their excitement to hear
the grand tidings of the Pole attained. Anon I waved the paddle, though
I knew that they could not yet see me, and then I dug deep at the
whitish water. What astonished me was her main-sail and fore-mast
square-sail--set that calm morning; and her screws were still, for she
moved not at all. The sun was abroad like a cold spirit of light,
touching the great ocean-room of floes with dazzling spots, and a tint
almost of rose was on the world, as it were of a just-dead bride in her
spangles and white array. The _Boreal_ was the one little distant
jet-black spot in all this purity: and upon her, as though she were
Heaven, I paddled, I panted. But she was in a queerish state: by 9 A.M.
I could see that. Two of the windmill arms were not there, and half
lowered down her starboard beam a boat hung askew; moreover, soon after
10 I could clearly see that her main-sail had a long rent down the
middle.
I could not at all make her out. She was not anchored, though a
sheet-anchor hung over at the starboard cathead; she was not moored; and
two small ice-floes, one on each side, were sluggishly bombarding her
bows.
I began now to wave the paddle, battling for my breath, ecstatic, crazy
with excitement, each second like a year to me. Very soon I could make
out someone at the bows, leaning well over, looking my way. Something
put it into my head that it was Sallitt, and I began an impassioned
shouting. 'Hi! Sallitt! Hallo! Hi!' I called.
I did not see him move: I was still a good way off: but there he stood,
leaning steadily over, looking my way. Between me and the ship now was
all navigable water among the floes, and the sight of him so visibly
near put into me such a shivering eagerness, that I was nothing else but
a madman for the time, sending the kayak flying with venomous digs in
quick-repeated spurts, and mixing with the diggings my crazy wavings,
and with both the daft shoutings of 'Hallo! Hi! Bravo! I have _been to
the Pole!_'
Well, vanity, vanity. Nearer still I drew: it was broad morning, going
on toward noon: I was half a mile away, I was fifty yards. But on board
the _Boreal_, though now they _must_ have heard me, seen me, I observed
no movement of welcome, but all, all was still as death that still
Arctic morning, my God. Only, the ragged sail flapped a little, and--one
on each side--two ice-floes sluggishly bombarded the bows, with hollow
sounds.
I was certain now that Sallitt it was who looked across the ice: but
when the ship swung a little round, I noticed that the direction of his
gaze was carried with her movement, he no longer looking my way.
'Why, Sallitt!' I shouted reproachfully: 'why, Sallitt, man...!' I
whined.
But even as I shouted and whined, a perfect wild certainty was in my
heart: for an aroma like peach, my God, had been suddenly wafted from
the ship upon me, and I must have very well known then that that
watchful outlook of Sallitt saw nothing, and on the _Boreal_ were dead
men all; indeed, very soon I saw one of his eyes looking like a glass
eye which has slid askew, and glares distraught. And now again my
wretched body failed, and my head dropped forward, where I sat, upon
the kayak-deck.
* * * * *
Well, after a long time, I lifted myself to look again at that forlorn
and wandering craft. There she lay, quiet, tragic, as it were culpable
of the dark secret she bore; and Sallitt, who had been such good friends
with me, would not cease his stare. I knew quite well why he was there:
he had leant over to vomit, and had leant ever since, his forearms
pressed on the bulwark-beam, his left knee against the boards, and his
left shoulder propped on the cathead. When I came quite near, I saw that
with every bump of the two floes against the bows, his face shook in
response, and nodded a little; strange to say, he had no covering on his
head, and I noted the play of the faint breezes in his uncut hair. After
a time I would approach no more, for I was afraid; I did not dare, the
silence of the ship seemed so sacred and awful; and till late afternoon
I sat there, watching the black and massive hull. Above her water-line
emerged all round a half-floating fringe of fresh-green sea-weed,
proving old neglect; an abortive attempt had apparently been made to
lower, or take in, the larch-wood pram, for there she hung by a jammed
davit-rope, stern up, bow in the water; the only two arms of the
windmill moved this way and that, through some three degrees, with an
_andante_ creaking sing-song; some washed clothes, tied on the bow-sprit
rigging to dry, were still there; the iron casing all round the bluff
bows was red and rough with rust; at several points the rigging was in
considerable tangle; occasionally the boom moved a little with a
tortured skirling cadence; and the sail, rotten, I presume, from
exposure--for she had certainly encountered no bad weather--gave out
anon a heavy languid flap at a rent down the middle. Besides Sallitt,
looking out there where he had jammed himself, I saw no one.
By a paddle-stroke now, and another presently, I had closely approached
her about four in the afternoon, though my awe of the ship was
complicated by that perfume of hers, whose fearful effects I knew. My
tentative approach, however, proved to me, when I remained unaffected,
that, here and now, whatever danger there had been was past; and
finally, by a hanging rope, with a thumping desperation of heart, I
clambered up her beam.
* * * * *
They had died, it seemed, very suddenly, for nearly all the twelve were
in poses of activity. Egan was in the very act of ascending the
companion-way; Lamburn was sitting against the chart-room door,
apparently cleaning two carbines; Odling at the bottom of the
engine-room stair seemed to be drawing on a pair of reindeer komagar;
and Cartwright, who was often in liquor, had his arms frozen tight round
the neck of Martin, whom he seemed to be kissing, they two lying stark
at the foot of the mizzen-mast.
Over all--over men, decks, rope-coils--in the cabin, in the
engine-room--between skylight leaves--on every shelf, in every
cranny--lay a purplish ash or dust, very impalpably fine. And steadily
reigning throughout the ship, like the very spirit of death, was that
aroma of peach-blossom.
* * * * *
Here it had reigned, as I could see from the log-dates, from the rust on
the machinery, from the look of the bodies, from a hundred indications,
during something over a year. It was, therefore, mainly by the random
workings of winds and currents that this fragrant ship of death had been
brought hither to me.
And this was the first direct intimation which I had that the Unseen
Powers (whoever and whatever they may be), who through the history of
the world had been so very, very careful to conceal their Hand from the
eyes of men, hardly any longer intended to be at the pains to conceal
their Hand from me. It was just as though the Boreal had been openly
presented to me by a spiritual agency, which, though I could not see it,
I could readily apprehend.
* * * * *
The dust, though very thin and flighty above-decks, lay thickly
deposited below, and after having made a tour of investigation
throughout the ship, the first thing which I did was to examine
that--though I had tasted nothing all day, and was exhausted to death. I
found my own microscope where I had left it in the box in my berth to
starboard, though I had to lift up Egan to get at it, and to step over
Lamburn to enter the chart-room; but there, toward evening, I sat at the
table and bent to see if I could make anything of the dust, while it
seemed to me as if all the myriad spirits of men that have sojourned on
the earth, and angel and devil, and all Time and all Eternity, hung
silent round for my decision; and such an ague had me, that for a long
time my wandering finger-tips, all ataxic with agitation, eluded every
delicate effort which I made, and I could nothing do. Of course, I know
that an odour of peach-blossom in the air, resulting in death, could
only be associated with some vaporous effluvium of cyanogen, or of
hydrocyanic ('prussic') acid, or of both; and when I at last managed to
examine some of the dust under the microscope, I was not therefore
surprised to find, among the general mass of purplish ash, a number of
bright-yellow particles, which could only be minute crystals of potassic
ferrocyanide. What potassic ferrocyanide was doing on board the _Boreal_
I did not know, and I had neither the means, nor the force of mind,
alas! to dive then further into the mystery; I understood only that by
some extraordinary means the air of the region just south of the Polar
environ had been impregnated with a vapour which was either cyanogen, or
some product of cyanogen; also, that this deadly vapour, which is very
soluble, had by now either been dissolved by the sea, or else dispersed
into space (probably the latter), leaving only its faint after-perfume;
and seeing this, I let my poor abandoned head drop again on the table,
and long hours I sat there staring mad, for I had a suspicion, my God,
and a fear, in my breast.
* * * * *
The _Boreal,_ I found, contained sufficient provisions, untouched by
the dust, in cases, casks, &c., to last me, probably, fifty years. After
two days, when I had partially scrubbed and boiled the filth of fifteen
months from my skin, and solaced myself with better food, I overhauled
her thoroughly, and spent three more days in oiling and cleaning the
engine. Then, all being ready, I dragged my twelve dead and laid them
together in two rows on the chart-room floor; and I hoisted for love the
poor little kayak which had served me through so many tribulations. At
nine in the morning of the 6th July, a week from my first sighting of
the _Boreal_, I descended to the engine-room to set out.
The screws, like those of most quite modern ships, were driven by the
simple contrivance of a constant stream of liquid air, contained in very
powerful tanks, exploding through capillary tubes into non-expansion
slide-valve chests, much as in the ordinary way with steam: a motor
which gave her, in spite of her bluff hulk, a speed of sixteen knots. It
is, therefore, the simplest thing for one man to take these ships round
the world, since their movement, or stopping, depend upon nothing but
the depressing or raising of a steel handle, provided that one does not
get blown to the sky meantime, as liquid air, in spite of its thousand
advantages, occasionally blows people. At any rate, I had tanks of air
sufficient to last me through twelve years' voyaging; and there was the
ordinary machine on board for making it, with forty tons of coal, in
case of need, in the bunkers, and two excellent Belleville boilers: so I
was well supplied with motors at least.
The ice here was quite slack, and I do not think I ever saw Arctic
weather so bright and gay, the temperature at 41°. I found that I was
midway between Franz Josef and Spitzbergen, in latitude 79° 23' N. and
longitude 39° E.; my way was perfectly clear; and something almost like
a mournful hopefulness was in me as the engines slid into their clanking
turmoil, and those long-silent screws began to churn the Arctic sea. I
ran up with alacrity and took my stand at the wheel; and the bows of my
eventful Argo turned southward and westward.
* * * * *
When I needed food or sleep, the ship slept, too: when I awoke, she
continued her way.
Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel,
overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea, till my knees would
give, and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was not
contrived, rather delicate steering being often required among the floes
and bergs. By now, however, I was less weighted with my ball of Polar
clothes, and stood almost slim in a Lap great-coat, a round Siberian fur
cap on my head.
At midnight when I threw myself into my old berth, it was just as though
the engines, subsided now into silence, were a dead thing, and had a
ghost which haunted me; for I heard them still, and yet not them, but
the silence of their ghost.
Sometimes I would startle from sleep, horrified to the heart at some
sound of exploding iceberg, or bumping floe, noising far through that
white mystery of quietude, where the floes and bergs were as floating
tombs, and the world a liquid cemetery. Never could I describe the
strange Doom's-day shock with which such a sound would recall me from
far depths of chaos to recollection of myself: for often-times, both
waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which planet I was, nor in
which Age, but felt myself adrift in the great gulf of time and space
and circumstance, without bottom for my consciousness to stand upon; and
the world was all mirage and a new show to me; and the boundaries of
dream and waking lost.
Well, the weather was most fair all the time, and the sea like a pond.
During the morning of the fifth day, the 11th July, I entered, and went
moving down, an extraordinary long avenue of snow-bergs and floes, most
regularly placed, half a mile across and miles long, like a Titanic
double-procession of statues, or the Ming Tombs, but rising and sinking
on the cadenced swell; many towering high, throwing placid shadows on
the aisle between; some being of a lucid emerald tint; and three or four
pouring down cascades that gave a far and chaunting sound. The sea
between was of a strange thick bluishness, almost like raw egg-white;
while, as always here, some snow-clouds, white and woolly, floated in
the pale sky. Down this avenue, which produced a mysterious impression
of Cyclopean cathedrals and odd sequesteredness, I had not passed a
mile, when I sighted a black object at the end.