by Stef Penney
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Jakob looks round at the valley as they leave it. Fog obliterates the horizon. The new land he may have seen from the hilltop has vanished into the whiteness of the sea.
Chapter 14
Return from Cape Dupree, 82˚34’N, 46˚12’W (disputed)
June 1892
‘Right! Right! God damn you!’
Armitage is cursing the sled, Frank is almost sure. He throws his weight to the right, the drag of the sled causing the rope to bite into his shoulder and squeeze him cruelly round the waist. Armitage hangs on the other rope. Metek, the hunter, holds the sled itself, guiding it as they lower it down the slope of wind-scoured ice. The gradient is so steep, the dogs have had to be uncoupled, and the sharp frenzy of their barking comes and goes under the shriek of the wind.
Metek holds up his hand – stop! He points below – a dark line in the snow across their path: a crevasse. At the same moment, Armitage loses his footing and slides for a heart-stopping number of seconds towards the blue crack. Frank drops to the ground, his heels dug in against a block of ice. Cautiously, he lifts his head: Lester is spreadeagled, face down, a dozen feet from the crevasse; Metek has tipped the sled on its side, turning it into an anchor and saving Armitage a nasty fall. Their leader pulls himself back up the slope, eyes hidden by his ice-clotted hood, his mouth a black hole. Words are coming out, but Frank can’t make out what they are. Perhaps he is angry with Metek about the sled, again: most of the gear has fallen off; the lashing on one of the runners has come loose . . .
Frank drags himself to a sitting position, and the wind slams on to his back like a falling wardrobe. It is unbearable, but apparently necessary, that he must once again get up and repack the sled. Necessary, but surely impossible, that Metek can once again mend the crumbling sled runner. Unbearable but true that their stove leaks, that fuel is so low they can barely heat what food they have and that their clothes are frozen hard on the outside and wet on the inside. Completely unbearable that they are still several days from their base on the coast, and that he is clinging on to a glassy, treacherous slope of ice in a torrent of wind and snow. He despairs of ever seeing home, family, fiancée again. Not for the first time on this trip, Frank wants to cry. Luckily, it is too cold for tears.
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Lester Armitage, Metek and Frank have been on the ice cap for ninety days. The younger hunter, Tateraq, turned back after thirty miles, leaving them one sled and twenty dogs. The others went on.
They have been to the north coast of Greenland and back, 870 miles, walking every step. Every mile was painfully won. Sometimes the snow was so flour-soft they floundered, thigh deep; sometimes it was like coarse sand and the runners could hardly slide through; sometimes there was a glassy crust that sliced the dogs’ paws and the soles of the men’s boots. Wind-carved ice ridges lay across their path: huge, concrete-hard barriers they could not chop through, but had to haul the sled over – and if they couldn’t, they had to unpack, pull the sled over, climb back, drag the gear over, repack, untangle the dogs’ traces, go on to the next ridge a few yards further, to be repeated, over and over . . .
Sometimes Frank wondered if Armitage was losing his mind. Sometimes he wondered if he was losing his: when visibility was poor, which was often, it was easy to succumb to the illusion that they were walking and walking, but never advancing through the featureless greyness. Such times, on top of the weariness, uncertainty and discomfort, were soul-destroying. But there were, it was true, other times – moments – when the sun burnt off the fog, and they struggled out of their snow illu in the morning to find themselves under an aching blue sky, to see never-before-seen mountains glittering in the distance, and Frank would, at least briefly, be heart-glad he is here.
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After forty-four days’ outward march, they reached the top of a wind-scoured cliff. From its foot, a plain of ice stretched northwards, as far as they could see, through drifting fog. The frozen sea looked an awful place – tortured into a chaos of ridges and hollows, even worse than those they had encountered on land. The prospect of setting out across that unstable wilderness was appalling, and they were still, by Lester’s most optimistic calculation, more than 400 miles from the Pole. They celebrated their arrival at the north coast with an argument about the cliff’s height – necessary to calculate the distance to the horizon. For lack of stones (even, ironically, snow) to drop over the edge, they sacrificed an empty tin, weighted with dog shit, but it bounced off the uneven rock face and vanished without sound (Frank profoundly glad he hadn’t been the one to throw it). Lester thought the cliff was 700 feet high. Frank thought it more like 500 – which made the horizon either thirty-five miles away, or less than thirty. The disagreement was moot: with the dense, shifting fog, they could see only a mile across the ice. Lester wanted to wait for the weather to clear, but food was short, and fuel shorter. After a miserable twelve-hour wait, in which no one was allowed to sleep, he gave the order to return. Otherwise, Frank believed, he or Metek might have pushed him over the edge.
On their return, the dogs began to die, their bodies fed to the survivors. The men could not eat the meat, not knowing what they had died of. Nor could they find the caches of food they had made on the outward journey, so had to go on short rations.
Now, at last, they have reached the glacier that will lead them down off the ice cap and back to their base. Still over fifty miles to go. They have hardly any fuel – enough, perhaps, for two nights of melting snow to drink. They are cold and starving, and desperately thirsty. Only six dogs are left alive. Frank has frostbite on his cheeks and hands. Metek is suffering from diarrhoea. Lester has frostbitten feet. Frank, who took an oath to alleviate suffering, can do nothing about any of this.
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Lester is shouting again. Frank sways to his feet and clambers, crabwise, down the slope to the grounded sled. Metek points to the runner – not only is the lashing loose, but the runner itself has split. Frank looks at Lester. For a moment, he thinks his leader is crying; his face is a mask of wounded disbelief – the face of a man whose world has, for a long time, been conspiring against him.
He turns to Metek and screams at the top of his voice, ‘Can you mend it?’
If Metek is at the end of his tether, he does not show it. He nods, ieh; he is a wizard with such things, has saved their lives on a daily basis, but he needs more leather thong, perhaps a tin, if they can spare it . . . Understanding at last, Frank squats down and starts to search – with the numb, slow movements that have become habitual to them – through their meagre belongings for something that will get them home.
Chapter 15
Neqi, 77˚52’N, 71˚37’W
July 1892
Jakob’s party reaches the Greenland coast on 30th June, as instructed. When they are still a mile from the ice foot, they see a sled come galloping out to meet them. They wonder, for a few excited minutes, if the welcoming party is Armitage and Frank. Then they see that the sled is driven by two hunters: Omowyak and his son Sorqaq. The Eskimos hail the Americans and tell Johannes, cheerfully, that they thought they were dead.
‘We have been gone for twelve weeks,’ Erdinger says, puzzled, ‘which is what we planned.’
‘Such terrible weather!’ Johannes translates. The others look at each other with the first stirrings of alarm.
‘Armitage and Urbino – are they back yet?’
‘No. Not here. Still up there.’ Omowyak and Johannes point towards the ice cap. Jakob can understand most of what Omowyak says, but it is as well that Johannes translates to be sure what he says next.
‘There have been bad storms. On the inland ice – no game. Tateraq came back because there was nothing to eat. They are probably dead.’
‘They could just be late coming back.’
Johannes and Omowyak confer. Omowyak is emphatic.
‘Dead. Yes,’ repeats Johannes.
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On their first day back, they light the stove and burn some precious coal for hot baths – an intense, almost erotic pleasure after months of cold water. Jakob shaves off his beard, which makes him laugh, as beneath it the skin is pasty, while the rest of his face, like his body, is deeply tanned. Erdinger goes in search of Mikissoq, his paramour of the previous winter, and returns in a sulk, having been supplanted by another. Adding injury to insult, he is bitten by a dog, and his hand swells up with an infection. They obsessively watch the shoreline of the fjord for any movement that could be their returning colleagues.
After four days, Jakob and Shull, with two local men, Omowyak and Ayakou, who is Metek’s cousin, set off in search of the northern party. Armitage’s route was to take them up the glacier on to the ice cap, then strike across the interior until they reached Sherard Osborn Fjord, far to the north, and beyond.
Their map shows a white blank covering most of Greenland. The only words on it read, The Interior is entirely covered with Ice. Ice with a capital I. To the north and east, the land shades into a blur: Armitage, Metek and Frank have walked off the edge of the known world.
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The two sleds struggle on to the broad foot of the glacier, which forms a highway, of sorts, on to the ice cap. From a distance, it looks smooth and flat, its gradient gentle, but close to, it is a wilderness of towering blocks and hard, scoured ice, criss-crossed with open and hidden crevasses. They know how to avoid some of the worst areas, where the glacier bends around a sandstone bluff, but cannot avoid the rugged chaos at its higher reaches, where it spills off the ice cap itself, and starts to fall, with infinite slowness, infinite patience, towards the sea.
The glacier on which Jakob broke his ankle was a sylph compared to this behemoth. It is in every way different: the scale, the latitude, the surrounding mountains. He finds himself wishing for the time to draw and measure, to live with the creaks and booms that ring out so suddenly below them – to understand its secrets. When they have to bridge a particularly deep crevasse with one of the sleds, Jakob stops halfway across, and stares into its blue depths.
‘A moment. It’s fine,’ he calls. He lies across the sled so that his head hangs down into the crevasse itself, feeling its chill exhalation; within inches of the surface, the warmth of the sun is gone. The sides glisten. The colour of the ice shades from silver and palest blue to mint and cobalt, before vanishing into a throat of blackness: the home of cold. A dozen feet below, there is a turquoise gleam in the darkness. A hidden chimney? A patch of particularly clear ice? Meltwater, perhaps, forming on the surface, finds a weakness, freezes again . . . Questions run through his head, theories . . . He leans further, stretches downward and, in the few moments’ windless silence, he hears whispering. He holds his breath, straining – and recognises the faintest of rustlings as ice crystals sublimate – something once thought impossible – and transform directly from their solid state into vapour. It sounds like language, the ice making him a whispered invitation he can’t quite catch. He has to resist the urge to step off the sled and clamber down.
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On the fourth day, before they reach the top of the glacier, Ayakou, who is leading, shouts and points up ahead.
‘Qamiut! Sleds! Sleds!’ he shouts, giving a whoop of joy. Neither Jakob nor Shull can see anything through their eyeshades, but hope and relief surge through them, the backwash of their former fear suddenly overwhelming. It is fifteen minutes before Jakob can make out black dots on the rough surface up ahead. Longer still before one of the dots yells and waves. Then, somehow, they are upon them, and three wind- and frost-blackened faces, bearded and clotted with balls of ice, crack into grins of welcome and relief. Jakob throws his arms around Frank in his joy at seeing him again. He even hugs Armitage. They laugh and talk in parched, rasping voices. Frank’s shrivelled lip splits, and a bead of blood runs slowly, gruesomely into his beard.
In Neqi, when the men remove their clothes for the first time in months, Jakob is shocked again at Frank’s appearance. His friend, who has always seemed indestructibly massive and strong, looks ghostly, gaunt and shrunken. His face is a terrible sight: the skin blackened, raw, peeling; his eyes red and weeping. His left hand is unusable. They weigh themselves: Frank has lost thirty-seven pounds; Lester twenty, but he was lean and stringy to start with. Metek refuses to be weighed, melting quietly away as soon as they have unpacked, anxious, perhaps, to inform his wife that she is not a widow.
Amid the general high spirits, Armitage is in a strange mood. He is adamant that they did not need rescuing, so Erdinger and Jakob and Shull agree: of course they only came to meet them; their own journey had been easy; couldn’t believe how different conditions were on the ice cap; astonishing feat . . . Lester’s eyes, always disconcerting, now seem incapable of focusing on their faces; instead, his gaze roams the air above their heads, distracted.
‘Tateraq should be horsewhipped. I paid for those dogs. We had an agreement.’
‘Perhaps he thought you hired them. He lost several of his own dogs first. In any case, we won’t need dogs again, before the ship comes . . .’
It doesn’t matter what anyone says, Armitage seems to take no pleasure in what they have accomplished. Despite the success of his journey – of both journeys – he is morose. He spends the following days sitting in his private alcove – a corner of the cabin enclosed by boxes – staring at the picture of his wife, writing in his diary. Then he rouses himself, and takes Johannes and Shull to visit a village down the coast. He intends – with bribes and promises and, if necessary, threats – to secure many more dogs, for next time.
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In his absence, a certain rhythm re-establishes itself. It is too late in the season for sled journeys – the sea is liquid, the remaining ice thin and dangerous. The men wait for their ship, the Sachem. Jakob sorts through his rock samples, checks his field notes and makes fair copies. He has always found such work soothing.
Luxuriant grass now covers the ground between the shore and the cliffs, tempting the men to stretch out on it whenever the sun shines. They go fishing, and scoop up samples of seawater; they spy on the busy, invisible world under the microscope. They watch seals mating on the beach. They accompany the young boys when they scramble up the cliffs to look for auk’s eggs, and catch the birds in their homemade nets.
A small, eroded iceberg grounds itself opposite the hut. It is tall and thin and reminds them of a shy, hopeful panhandler. Every day, when the tide goes out, the base is a little more undermined. Erdinger names it Bert Bergman, and they place bets on when it will fall over.
‘I stopped writing anything in my diary. I mean anything . . . extra.’
Frank is stretched out on a patch of shingle by the water’s edge. He has been lethargic since his return, spending much of his time eating and sleeping. A weak sun warms his face, which sloughs blackened scabs where he was frostbitten. Jakob sits next to him, clumsily mending his fur boots. A few yards away, Bert is fretted and stooped, as though he has stomachache, but glimmers greenly like a friendly ghost. Jakob has grown attached to the presence; he will be saddened when it finally collapses. He finds what looks like a maggot egg nestled in the seam of his kamik and pokes at it with the needle.
‘What do you mean?’
They speak slowly and indolently. When the sun isn’t going to set, where is the hurry?
‘You know . . . I knew he was going to demand my diary at the end of it all, so I couldn’t say what I really thought, but sometimes, I sometimes thought he’d lost his mind. He would push on so hard, it was as though he didn’t care whether he made it back or not. I don’t care what a man chooses to do with his own skin, but if he is responsible for others, he can’t go on like that.’
Frank looks uneasy; he glances towards the hut; his voice is hardly more than a mumble.
‘Metek and I wanted to mark our food caches with cairns and a good spread of flags, in
case we missed our trail on the way back. He said that was a waste of time; we wouldn’t need them, and so forth. Implied we were fussing like old women. Of course, on the way back, there was so much snowdrift, we couldn’t see our trail at all. We couldn’t find the caches. Not one. We were out of food when you found us. We were damn lucky. He asked for my loyalty, my obedience. I gave him those. Certain risks you accept. But I didn’t come here to die of someone else’s . . . pig-headedness. Does that make me a coward?’
‘Of course not. Did he say that?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘What was the north coast like?’
Frank snorts. ‘The fog was so thick we couldn’t see much. The ground sloped down for a long time, and then fell away sheer to some sea-ice. Visibility was terrible. We stayed for twelve hours, waiting for the fog to lift, but it didn’t. It may have been the north coast, but we could only see a couple of miles. It could have been the shore of a fjord. There was no way of telling.’
‘You took photographs, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know how much you’ll see. They won’t prove anything.’
‘Lester said the coast was turning south-east there.’
‘As far as we could see.’
‘It was an extraordinary journey, Frank. You’ve gone somewhere no one has been before.’
Frank is silent for a long minute.
‘Don’t repeat this to anyone, Jake; promise?’
‘Of course.’
‘We didn’t know where we were. We never stopped long enough to take sights. I think he took two longitude sightings the whole trip.’
‘But . . . you took sightings at the coast?’
‘There was no sun. It was dead reckoning.’
Jakob tries to conceal his shock. Not knowing where you are – and not being able to prove it – is the explorer’s cardinal sin.
‘I think that’s why Lester’s been so’ – another swift glance around him – ‘strange. He knows that he . . . not failed, exactly, but he was negligent, and he knows it.’
