by John Buchan
“Nothing very clear.” Adam had acquired a trick of speaking very slowly and softly, as if words were precious and had to be respectfully treated — a common thing with men who for a long season have had to forgo their own language. “There must be a time of confusion — another year at least, I should say. Everybody is self-conscious and egotistical. Creevey to-night was not trying to solve an economic problem, but to show how clever he was. The lads at the Pegasus have had too much in the way of duty and want to make pets of themselves. The dancing people were not natural — they were all trying to make-believe and play a part. That is going on for a little while till the ground begins to quake under them. I’m not wanted yet, I think.
“And I’m not ready myself,” he went on. “I’ve been coming to realise that for some time, and now I’m sure. First of all, I’m not fit enough. . . . Oh yes, I’m fitter than you, far fitter than most people, but I’m not in the hard training I should be in. Today I couldn’t make my body do what it ought to do. I want some good, tough, physical toil.”
“Anything else?” Stannix asked. He smiled as he looked at Adam’s lean face, his frame without an ounce of needless flesh, and the alert poise of his head.
“Yes, I want a spell of quiet. You see, I have been living for four years in a circus. It hasn’t damaged my nerves in the ordinary sense — they’re under pretty good control — but it has made my mind airless and stuffy. I want to get some sort of poise again, and that means being alone. What I need is space and silence — frozen silence.”
“How are you going to find it?”
“I’m on the road to it. I’ve been busy for weeks making arrangements with the Danish Government and with his American relatives. The day after tomorrow I sail for Iceland. I’m going to find Falconet.”
II
On the last day of September Adam sat on a hummock of snow looking east to where, far below Danmarks Fjord, lay a blue gash in the white ice-cap. The cirrhus clouds of the afternoon before had been a true augury, and all night a gale had howled round the little tent. But the wind had blown itself out before morning, and now the air was clear and quiet. It was the first peaceful hour he had had for days when he could review his position.
At Shannon Island he had found the schooner which Falconet had instructed to meet him in June. A base had been erected there like a lumber-camp, huts and store-rooms and dog-houses, for money had not been spared, but there was no sign of its master. Falconet had made elaborate plans. A sealing sloop had crawled up the coast as soon as spring opened the shore waters, and its crew had pushed on when navigation became impossible, and had laid down depots and caches of food at points up the coast as far north as Independence Fjord. Such spots had been carefully marked on the latest map, which was Rasmussen’s. Falconet himself had set off with two sledges and dog teams in March to cross the inland ice. His objective was a bay on the extreme north shore of Greenland, of which Rasmussen had heard rumours through the Arctic Highlanders of Thule. They called it Gundbjorns Fjord — a curious name, thought Adam, who remembered that to the old Norsemen Gundbjorns Reef had been the legendary edge of the world. Falconet had his own theories about Greenland travel. He had taken but the one companion, his stores were of a scientific compactness, his dogs were the best that money could buy, and he held that by travelling light he could reach his goal in early summer, replenish his supplies from bear and musk-ox (he was a famous shot), and return by the coast depots in time to rejoin his ship at the end of July.
But something had miscarried. Ship’s parties had gone up the coast almost as far as Kronprinz Christians Land, and had found no sign of him. He could not be returning by the inland ice, for his food supplies would not permit of that. His American friends had been anxious, and Washington and Copenhagen had laid their heads together, so Adam had found his proposal welcomed. Falconet might be ill, or he might have had an accident; if he did not come south before the winter he would perish; clearly someone must go and look for him. Time was of the essence of the business, so the route must be the inland ice, the road Falconet had himself travelled, for the coast road would mean a detour round two sides of a triangle.
So Adam started from Shannon Island with three sledges and two companions — one a Danish naval officer called Nelles who had been with Koch, and the other a young American, Myburg, who had explored the Beaufort Sea before the war. Their plan was to find Falconet somewhere in the north of Peary Land and bring him down the coast by the chain of depots, before the sun disappeared. If they were delayed they would winter on Shannon Island and go home in the spring. Nine years before Ejnar Mikkelsen had covered most of the ground in a couple of months, and Nelles, who was the local expert, believed that, if Falconet was alive, he could be found and brought back before the close of September. It was arranged that in that month relays of dog-teams should be waiting at points on the coast as far north as Danmarks Fjord.
At first fortune had been with Adam and his party. They climbed on to the ice-cap a little south of Cape Bismarck, and, keeping the nunataks of Dronning Louises Land on their left, travelled for five days on tolerable ice in good weather, with few bergs to surmount and no crevasses to delay them. Then suddenly their luck turned. A wind of 120 miles an hour blew from the east, and the plateau became the playground of gales. They came on ice-fields like mammoth ploughlands, where they scarcely made three miles in the day, and mountainous seracs which would have puzzled an Alpine climber. They found valleys with lakes and rivers of blue ice out of which they had to climb painfully. There was trouble, too, with the dogs. Five of them one night broke into the stores and ate one-half of the total dog-feed. Several died of gashes from the sharp ice, and two more from eating the livers of their dead companions. For nearly a week the party was storm-bound, lying in their tents in the lee of an ice-scarp, while blizzard after blizzard threatened to blow the whole outfit to Baffin’s Bay.
The culminating disaster came in the fourth week out, when one of the sledges, driven by the young American Myburg, broke through the crust and disappeared in a bottomless abyss. Adam and Nelles made vain efforts at rescue, and Adam had himself lowered on a cable made up of haul-ropes into the cruel blue depths. There was no sign of life; hundreds of feet down in the bowels of the ice-cap, man and dogs had met their death. The tragedy was followed by a storm which delayed the survivors for three days, and gave Nelles too good a chance to brood. He was a dreamy morose man, and an indifferent companion, and from that day onward Adam found his moods hard to deal with. Death and the madness which is worse than death had cast their shadow over him.
Adam himself had found the weeks pass quickly. He had a straightforward task — to shape a course which he more or less understood, and to complete that course in the shortest possible time. It was only a question of common sense, resolution and physical fitness; the difficulties were known, and had been surmounted by many others since the days of Henry Hudson; if each of them put out his powers to the fullest stretch they would reach Gundbjorns Fjord, barring accidents, and whether or not they found Falconet was in the lap of the gods. Such was his mood at the start, and even the tragic fate of Myburg did not greatly change it. Death was an irrelevant factor in any enterprise, and since one could not ensure against it one must leave it out of reckoning. His fatalism was more than a creed now, and had become an instinct of which he was conscious in every waking hour. Always, above and around him, was this sense of guidance.
He had got the solitude he desired, and the long white distances streaked with blue shadows, the unfeatured universe in which nothing moved but winds and clouds, soothed and comforted him. . . . But it was a kind of comfort which he had not expected. He had wanted to get away from men and their littleness, but he found that the littleness was in nature. All his life he had dreamed of exploring the last undiscovered geographical secrets, and had thought of the world as a field of mystery of which only the edge had been lit up. Now he realised that the globe had suddenly gone small, and that man had put his impress u
pon the extremest wilds. The forgotten khanates of central Asia were full of communist squabbles. The holy cities of Arabia had been bases and objectives in the war. Epidemics, germinated in the squalor of Europe, had destroyed whole tribes of savages in Africa. He remembered conversations he had heard that summer in England, when untrodden equatorial forests had been thought of only as reservoirs of wood alcohol, and plans were preparing for making a road by air to every corner of the inaccessible. The world had shrunk, but humanity was extended — that was the moral that he drew from his reflections. Many things had gone, but the spirit of man had enlarged its borders. The problem of the future was the proper ordering of that spirit.
As they moved north from the head of Danmarks Fjord over the snow-cap of Erichsens Land, there was one human spirit that troubled him. Every day Nelles became more difficult. He was a big fellow, and with his heavy clothes and matted hair and beard and red-rimmed eyes he looked like a bear wakened out of its winter sleep. He had always been silent and uncompanionable, though a magnificent worker, but since Myburg’s death he had taken to talking — wild incoherent talk in a voice that rose often into a scream.
He wanted to turn back. They had lost time and would for certain be caught by winter. Falconet was dead — must be dead long ago — and what advantage was there in finding a corpse? His passion made him eloquent, and he would draw terrible pictures of an ice-cave at Gundbjorns Fjord, and two dead men with staring eyes awaiting them. “I will not go!” he cried. “I will not meet the dead. For the love of God let us turn now, or we shall be wrapped in the same winding-sheet.”
Adam reasoned with him patiently, but the madness grew with every hour. He became slovenly, and one night left the dogs unfed, with the consequence that next day two were sick. He would eat little himself, and his blackening lips showed signs of scurvy. Adam decided that this state of affairs could not go on, and that it would be better to send him home with one sledge. He had no doubt where his own duty lay. Even if Falconet was dead he must reach him and make certain of his fate. He might be alive and crippled or ill; in that case the only hope was to winter with him and nurse him. If provisions ran short he would get him down to the nearest depot on Independence Fjord, the farthest north of those which the schooner parties had established. Adam, with his blistered flaking skin and bleared eyes, would not have seemed to an unskilled observer a man in the best physical condition, but he knew that his body had never been harder, and he believed that he had strength enough and to spare for his purpose.
He gave Nelles one final trial. Down perilous icy shelves they descended to the shore of Independence Fjord, and, travelling half a day to the east, found without trouble the beacon which marked the ultimate food depot. The cache was a large one and in good order, and they strengthened with boulders its defences against inquisitive bears. A fresh snowfall had covered all but the top of the dwarf Arctic willows and the heather, but there was at least a hint of vegetation, the first they had seen for many weeks. They went into camp, and since the place had a reputation for game they went hunting. A seal was killed which gave the dogs fresh food, and, though each of the men had a touch of snow-blindness which made stalking difficult, they managed to get a young musk-ox and a brace and a half of ptarmigan. That night they had a feast of fat things.
But the meal did not change Nelles’s purpose, though it seemed to give him a better balance. The sight of something other than snow and ice and the taste of fresh meat had increased his determination to go back. He began by arguing reasonably. This, he said, was the last chance, and there was just time, if God willed, to reach the ship before the winter gales. They would go down the coast and get supplies from the chain of depots. He understood sledging on shore ice better than on the ice-cap, and he had no fear for the journey. Otherwise only death awaited them — death beside a dead man, if indeed they ever found Falconet’s corpse. When his arguments did not prevail his voice grew wild and shrill, he gesticulated, implored and wept. Adam came to a decision.
“I am going on,” he said, “for I have a charge laid on me. You are different. If I find Falconet you will only be another mouth to feed, and if I fail you will be another victim. I order you to go back. You have a map with the depots marked, and you already know something of the coast route. I put you on your honour to take no more food than you need from the caches, for Falconet and I must depend on them on our way south. If the ship has gone when you reach Shannon Island you can winter comfortably in the huts. If she is still there, you will tell Captain Tonning to come back as soon as the seas are open and to send his sloop to scout up the coast. Tell him I will have Falconet home by next summer.”
That night Adam heard Nelles babbling in his sleep. Next morning he set off with four dogs and one of the sledges for Cap Rigsdagen, and did not once look back. He was whistling as far as his cracked lips allowed him.
Beyond Independence Fjord Adam entered a fantastic world. The shadow of the coming night was beginning to droop over it, but it had a queer sunset opalescence, so that often it was hard to believe that there was substance behind the dissolving shapes of cloud and rock and snow. For the first days there was little wind, the four dogs travelled well, and Adam had peace to consider his plans. He had enough food and petroleum to last him till the spring, but not enough for more than one. Falconet and his companion had taken ample stores with them for the time they expected to be absent, but not enough for a winter. There was no chance now of getting back to the ship before it was forced to escape from the grip of the ice; so, if he found Falconet and supplies were short, there would be nothing for it but to make for the nearest depot — Independence Fjord — and work their way from cache to cache down the coast. Even in winter such short journeys would be feasible. He must find Falconet, alive or dead, for he could not have missed him on the road. He had never met him, but he had heard much of his furious energy and resolution. That was not the sort of man to be easily beaten by difficulties. Adam was fairly certain of his course, and had taken observations as regularly as a deep-sea skipper. In four days — a week at the most — he should be across the low ice-cap of Peary Land and looking down on the ultimate Polar Sea.
But suddenly the weather worsened. A gale blew from the north while he was among a chain of nunataks glazed into black ice, where the going was hard. One evening he saw a great white wall moving towards him, which was the snow blown into a solid screen by the wind. He and his dogs were almost smothered; in the teeth of it movement was impossible, and it was late before the tent could be pitched and the stove got going. For the first time he really felt the Arctic cold, since that night the heat of his body seemed powerless to conquer the chill of his soaked clothes. As he peered through the blizzard he began to share Nelles’s forebodings of what might lie beyond it.
The storm died down, and there fell a strange calm; the air was still and not too cold, but even at midday there was a sense of twilight. At last one afternoon he found himself looking down on a long sword-cut which cleft the ice-cap, and beyond it to a wilderness of opal and pearl, and he knew that he had reached his goal. But the gale had blown the sun out of the sky. The whole heavens were a pale gold, and pinnacles of the land ice were tipped and flushed with fire. Even as he gazed a grey shadow seemed to creep slowly from the horizon and one by one put out the fairy lights. Adam realised that he was watching the Polar night emerge from the Polar Sea, and that for a third of the year the world would be sunless.
He guided the dogs without difficulty down a cleft of the ice-cap to the edge of the fjord. There he saw what he expected. On a mound of snow a discoloured American flag hung limply from a post. There was something beside it which startled him — a little cross of wood, with an inscription burned on it — M. P., July 27th, 1919. He remembered that Falconet’s companion had been called Magnus Paulsen.
His first thought was that he had arrived too late. Falconet was gone, after burying his dead comrade under his country’s flag. . . . Then a little to the left under the lee of a
cliff he saw something which was not a hummock of snow. A boulder, riven from the precipice by some winter storm, made a small cave over which a kind of roof had been stretched. Inside there was darkness, and Adam stumbled over something which he recognised as a food box. He struck a light, and saw a rough bed on which lay the figure of a man. He thought he was dead, till his breathing told him that he was asleep.
III
Adam found a lantern and lit up the interior of the cleft. It made a lop-sided hut, but, except at the mouth, where blocks of snow had been piled to lessen the aperture, the floor was dry. The light woke the sleeper, who started up as if to reach for a weapon, and then dropped feebly back. Adam saw a face as thin and beaky as a crow’s, with pallid skin showing between a black, tangled mane of hair.
“Who the devil are you?” The words came out in slow gasps.
“I was sent to find you. Melfort’s my name — an Englishman. You’re Falconet, aren’t you?”
“What is left of him,” was the answer. “You can’t move me. . . . I think my back is broken. . . . Paulsen is dead — his head was smashed to pulp by an accursed ice-fall. The dogs too — I had to shoot the last to put him out of pain. I’m for it all right. . . . But I’m glad to see you, whoever you are. . . . I’d like company when I peg out.”
“You’re not going to peg out. Let me have a look at you before I put things straight.”
Slowly and painfully layers of filthy clothing were stripped off, till Falconet’s body was revealed. His back and shoulders were a mass of bruises and unhealed scars, and his left arm was broken and unset. He was in the last stage of emaciation. Adam had enough medical knowledge to decide that there was no damage to the spine, but that lacerated muscles had induced a partial paralysis of one side. The man was worn to a shadow by pain, malnutrition and poisoned blood.
