“There is something in what you say,” I admit. “But you oversimplify as usual. Swedes are quite possibly metaphysical in the winter, but they are hedonistic in the summer. Around Easter a transformation takes place. From then till autumn they’re as free from metaphysics as you Americans. They develop enormous appetites. They become amorous. I can assure you that in the summer a Swede never thinks at all.”
“But it’s summer now. Therefore, if your theory is correct, you shouldn’t be falling into thought.”
“Ah. But you see, it’s precisely from summer to winter that we are journeying. In Stockholm the air is balmy, on Dane Island it was brisk but still hardly cold, and now we are headed for ice and snow. In short, my dear Waldemer, space and time are interchangeable. Ordinarily it would be necessary to wait for several months for my metaphysical phase to come on, but we can produce the same effect at will by a geographical displacement.”
“Too deep for me. One of your paradoxes, I imagine. What’s this, Major, you’re not eating your breakfast.”
“I might, if we were headed south.”
“Very witty. Here, give it to me, I’ll finish it off.”
What is left of my bread and butter, the greatest part of it, to tell the truth, disappears into Waldemer. Then in a systematic way he sets about his morning ablutions. First it is necessary to answer the call of nature, which he accomplishes by means of the door in his underwear and a sanitary apparatus we have brought along for the purpose. Theodor finds something to look at in the other direction during this process. Then, after carefully washing his hands in a minimum of water, Waldemer turns to shaving. He fills a teakettle, puts it on the primus stove, and lowers the whole affair over the side again as in the business of coffee making, Following the rule prohibiting inactivity at any time, he brushes his teeth while waiting. The water is soon hot and the kettle below, with a kind of snoring noise, begins emitting a plume of vapour. He pulls it up, fills the shaving mug with hot water, and in a trice he has covered his face with foamy soapsuds. His straight razor he removes from a walnut case, tests for sharpness with his thumb, and holds poised over the waiting cheek.
“Ah.”
Something is troubling him. He looks in the toilet case, turns everything over, and assumes an expression of concern mingled with annoyance. “Drat it, I don’t seem to be able to find my pocket mirror. I was sure it was here.” He turns to me hopefully, apologetically, expectantly. “Major, I wonder …”
No, unfortunately I have not brought any mirror. I don’t intend to shave on this expedition, I explain, and I predict that he won’t either when he sees how difficult the process gets as we go farther north.
He turns to Theodor, but Theodor politely and regretfully shakes his head.
“Ah.”
Waldemer is perplexed. His face is covered with shaving soap, which is rapidly drying. The water in the teakettle is returning to the temperature of the atmosphere.
“H’mm.”
He takes a teaspoon from the provision basket, a bright and shiny new one, and tries unsuccessfully to catch his image in it, even the reflection of a small part of his cheek the size of a postage stamp, which he might shave and then pass along to the next piece.
“Bother!”
The spoon is far worse than those distorting mirrors at carnivals that send us back images of ourselves as dwarfs with three-foot foreheads. Waldemer is genuinely troubled at the lack of a mirror; if the expression were not out of character for him, I might say that he is metaphysically troubled. It is clear, if one observes him carefully, that his anxiety cannot be accounted for by his mere inability to shave. He could shave blind, by feeling with his fingers, or it would be possible for him not to shave at all. If he hurries, the water in the teakettle will still be warm enough for him to wash the soap from his face. No, Waldemer’s perplexity at the moment goes beyond shaving. What troubles him deeply is that there is nothing in the universe—since the universe for the present consists of the airship and its contents to reflect his image back to him and thus verify for him his own existence. If one looks in a mirror and finds an image reflected back, something must be generating the image, and this something is one’s self. It is not enough merely to feel your knee with your left hand, or bump your head against a wall. This sort of thing only proves that you are having sensations. But what is having sensations? Perhaps the sensations exist in themselves, hanging in a void, pretending to themselves that they belong to a person. A mirror represents confirmation from the external world. Naturally Waldemer if he chose could ask one of us whether he exists. “I say, old man, I am still here, aren’t I, and just the same? Or just about the same.” Thus the women who are continually asking if we still love them, or if they are pretty today, or if we like their dress. But it is typical of Waldemer that he has come to rely on a machine—since a pocket mirror is a tiny and simple machine—for a need that others satisfy through human relationships. Waldemer is troubled and I am not quite sure what is taking place in my own soul either. For I stole his mirror from his toilet case, last night in the shed, and hid it under the crate that served as our chair. It’s still there in the shed, no doubt, where Eliassen will find it as he found my pocket diary—which I left behind quite inadvertently, incidentally; no metaphysical motives there. “Ah, pity, Mr. Waldemer has forgotten his mirror. How will he shave?” How indeed? Why indeed have I been so furtive and so perfidious? I don’t know. Waldemer doesn’t know why he misses the mirror so profoundly and I don’t know why I stole it. I conclude—I prefer to conclude—that it was playfulness on my part. A mirror is a trivial thing and to be annoyed because one has no mirror is petty. It is a little joke, like cutting off a fellow’s suspender buttons. Without suspender buttons his pants fall down and he has no dignity. It is really an American form of humour, like Waldemer’s jolly bantering. Also, it gives me pleasure to know that there are no mirrors in the airship. What do I mean by that? I’m not sure. Perhaps that I have no need to verify my existence with a little machine, or perhaps that I prefer not to verify my existence. This little trait of mine, which I have just discovered, is perhaps dangerous, I am not sure. Perhaps not.
“Major, I wonder if I might borrow your sextant. The fact is that this infernal soap is drying at a dizzy rate. If I don’t get it off soon I’ll be caked with the stuff, like a Grand Guignol actor, for the rest of the trip. Drat me for being so stupid as to forget my mirror.”
The sextant is essential to our navigation in this enterprise, that is to say, to our survival. It is a Koerner of the latest model, modified through the addition of a mercury level for the purpose of establishing the horizontal plane in the absence of a horizon. Taking it carefully from its wooden case, I hand it to him. Waldemer has respect for the sextant. There is no danger that he will break it. Carefully—most carefully—he takes it in his left hand while holding the razor in his right, and shaves himself by observing the tiny piece of his cheek which is visible in the index mirror. Man, contriving instruments to measure the world, succeeds in taking the measure of himself. Or more simply: Man as Reflected by His Instruments. When Waldemer is done he returns the sextant to me and I put it back in the box. Then he pours the rest of the water, which is still slightly warm, into his hands and vigorously rubs over the shaved places. To finish he dries himself neatly with a towel and hangs the towel in the rigging to dry. It immediately freezes.
Through all this Theodor has said nothing. He has eaten his breakfast with dignity, retrieving each crumb and wiping his fingers afterward with a linen handkerchief, but all rather absentmindedly, as though he were scarcely noticing what he is doing. Now he has set the coffee cup aside and is gazing with intelligence off into the horizontal plane, where there is nothing whatsoever to be seen. Theodor has many fine qualities but he is not quite sure yet who he is. He fancies himself a poet, and in fact writes fairly decent poetry when he is able to surmount the influence of Heine, but he is also fond of military clothing. His parents—the parents of Luisa�
��consist of an American father, now deceased, and a mother who was born of mixed blood in the Portuguese colony of Goa on the coast of India. The two came together somehow in Paris, but this is a whole story in itself. The mother in many ways is an interesting person, although I can’t say I care very much for the Goans I have known. The combination of bloods, in my experience, produces little more than a medley of Portuguese excitability and Oriental sloth, the least attractive side of both races. The mother’s main contribution to the world has been to bequeath her complexion to Luisa. Or to Theodor; I forgot for the moment that I was thinking about Theodor. His complexion is a translucent olive, pale like the moon and yet in some way at the same time dark; exactly—come to think of it—like the moon, which also gives this impression of darkness. But unlike the moon, which suffers from various pockmarks, this complexion is flawless and of a single substance, like a fine china teacup. Moons, china, there are too many metaphors in all this. But persons like Theodor demand metaphors; they evoke them, so to speak, from the ambient atmosphere. His voice is clear and rather high, a voice that would be almost a soprano if it were a woman’s voice, but since it is his voice it merely sounds refined. Theodor is a person of considerable culture, particularly in science and in languages. In addition to English and Portuguese he speaks French flawlessly, Swedish only after wrinkling his brow a little, schoolbook German, and the Italian of a Swiss hotel clerk. With his dark eyes and long aristocratic Silva e Costa face he is strikingly handsome, especially when he is speaking French or Swedish. Why have I brought him along? Because he has studied aerostatics and can sight through a theodolite, and also, no doubt, because he can regale us with some poetry if things get dull. I am beginning to see that, in spite of careful plans, there are many doubts and ambiguities in what I have brought along on this expedition and what I have left behind; for example, that I have deleted a mirror, which is useful, but have brought Theodor, who is vulnerable to the accusation of being merely decorative.
Still, it is better not to be confused about anything so fundamental as the sexes. Theodor is a man among men, the beau ideal of a young adventurer, and in spite of his complexion he is inured to the common hardships of cold, discomfort, and fatigue. I have climbed the Aletschhorn with him over the glacier and he never asked for quarter, although my legs after a while pounded like hammers. He is as contemptuous of the needs of his own body as he is of other human beings. What does he love? I hardly know. Perhaps his clothes, perhaps his dead father, or even me, in his contemptuous way. It is curious that for all his beauté he never looks in mirrors. How does he confirm his existence? His existence is inside himself. He is indifferent to the fact that his complexion and his dark eyes were never made for these latitudes. There is something Persian about him, a languor of oases, an indolence, which he subdues or ignores with the contempt for physical discomfort inherited no doubt from his frontier father. His only delicacy is a modesty about the needs of nature; in these things he is almost girlish and retreats behind a canvas stretched across a corner of the gondola. Although Waldemer hasn’t noticed it he, Theodor, hasn’t shaved yet this morning and yet his cheek is as smooth as it was yesterday. There are some things to come still in his manliness.
This Prinzess, the third to bear her name, is enormous. She is at least four times as big as any airship I have ever had anything to do with. Or so it seems now, when the clutter and distraction of the preparation are behind us and we are left to ourselves in the gondola. It is almost two metres from where I am standing to where Waldemer is checking the bolt of his light .256 Mannlicher rifle. Two metres is not very much in a ballroom, but under these conditions it is unbelievably and luxuriously commodious. We stand on a light floor of laminated wood, fabricated according to a new American process, which is removable in sections and under which provisions and spare gear are stored. Circling the gondola at shoulder level is the instrument ring, on which thedolites, magnetometers, and other paraphernalia may be mounted as needed. Between the instrument ring and the gondola itself a set of canvas windbreakers may be fitted in bad weather; in fine weather some or all of these are removed. Everything is stowed neatly; there is room for the pigeons and even for Waldemer’s miniature darkroom. If we stretch our hands upward we can touch the bearing ring, a small but intensely strong circle of steel to which the converging cluster of rigging from the gas bag is attached, and from which, in turn, depend the guys that support the gondola. To the bearing ring are fitted the long bamboo poles which serve as yards for the sails, at present furled or rather drawn in on their rings like curtains through a system devised by myself. The gondola of wicker and Spanish cane, the bamboo spars, the hempen ropes stretching up over our heads give the impression of an antique sea vessel, a fantastic craft out of some print of the sixteenth century. Everything is stowed neatly under our feet or in bags attached to the bearing ring. The ballast of fine lead shot hangs to the outside of the gondola, each bag with its drawstring for releasing. A carefully planned and well equipped expedition, the whole paid for by the estimable and well-merited firm of Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H. in Bremen, in return for the privilege of naming our craft and driving therefrom a beneficial notoriety; although this policy may turn back on them if our venture goes badly, so that the product of their brewing is associated in the public mind with doom rather than with the intoxication of success. I have in my pocket a clipping from an Austrian newspaper which I have carefully cut out and saved in my billfold, for what purpose I am not sure, perhaps to amuse myself in dull moments: ‘Jener Herr Crispin, der mittelst Luftballon zum Nordpol und zurück fahren will, ist einfach ein Narr oder ein Schwindler.” Probably I am a fool and a swindler, Herr Oesterreichischer-Zeitungsschreiber, but what business is it of yours? I am not swindling you. At the most the hardheaded German brewers, who understand precisely the risks they are taking. On the whole, to this heavy-handed Teutonic invective I prefer the humour of the American polar explorer who told a reporter, at the time of my visit to New York last year, which was attended with a good deal of publicity, “People who wish to arrive at the Pole by means of airships, steam carriages, trained polar bears, etc., are attention seekers rather than serious explorers.” Touché! He has me there! Peary himself, it seems, is planning an expedition to the Pole using dog sleds in the dozens guided by whole villages of Eskimos, probably because he finds it easier to train Eskimos than to train polar bears. He is right that I am not serious, I wish I could be, but blast! We will see who gets there first. If he does I will drink to him cheerfully. I forgot to mention that the managers of the Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H., in addition to paying for the expedition, have also made us a gift of two dozen of their best bock packed in a hamper full of straw. We will drink these in time and so they too will serve as a kind of ballast, the bottles and eventually the liquid going overboard to compensate for the gradual loss of hydrogen from the bag. Our lives waver on these handfuls of gas and grams of weight.
I take the Koerner sextant from its case and point it at the coppery disk hanging in the east. Theodor watches the two chronometers, waiting for me to call out the exact moment of the observation. Looking through the sighting tube and slowly turning the screw, I bring the image of the sun in the index mirror down exactly to meet its twin floating in the mercury. Since the sun is still rising the two disks keep persistently trying to creep a hairline away from each other. Wait … wait … Now I’ve got them: “Allez … houp!”
Theodor writes down the time: 09h 06m 52s GMT. So on until five altitudes have been taken. I average these, discard one altitude which seems to contain an error, and set to work with my logarithms and almanac. In twenty minutes, with fair confidence, I am able to draw a position line on the chart, locating us at 80˚ 40’ north and 11˚ 32’ east, or some forty-seven nautical miles north-northeast of Dane Island.
I write this formula on a slip of paper, adding, “All hands well. Altitude 200 m. Proceeding north. Prinzess expedition, 0906 GMT 12 July 1897.” Then Waldemer unbuckles the wicker c
ase under our feet and thrusts his arm in. There is a soft fluttering, some alarmed coos, and Waldemer’s arm emerges holding a grey and white pigeon with a pink bill. The pigeon twists his neck and flaps one wing a little, whether in alarm or in eagerness for the coming flight is not clear. I pass Waldemer the slip of paper and he rolls it tightly, screws it into a tiny aluminum tube, and fixes the tube to the pigeon’s foot, managing to do all this while holding the pigeon softly pressed against his chest. Then, with the pigeon perched on his right hand, he raises it and transfers it to the instrument ring in front of him. The pigeon looks around brightly with little jerks of his head and pecks at something on his shoulder. He seems content on the instrument ring and shows no inclination whatsoever to fly.
But Waldemer has learned something about the functioning of this particular mechanism. “Now then, darling.” He carefully extends his gloved forefinger and touches the bottom of the pigeon, about halfway between his virile parts and the place where his legs are attached. Like a clockwork bird whose lever has been touched, the pigeon soars into the air, his wings slapping loudly until he gathers speed and flies more smoothly. At first he dips lower; then he circles the Prinzess at a medium distance, climbing with white flashes of his wings, which beat faster and faster until they are too rapid for the eye to follow, a kind of optical twittering. Finally, gaining speed, he slides off on a tangent and soars away to the south. Smaller and smaller he becomes a dot, a winking pinpoint—and then he has disappeared. Waldemer, with an air of satisfaction, continues to stare in the direction of the pigeon for some time after he is no longer visible. This tiny speck of life, we hope, will make its way some eleven hundred miles to its home in Trondheim. No pigeon has ever flown so far or over so deserted and forbidding a sea, but perhaps this one will. There in the Norwegian fishing town the honest watchmaker and pigeon fancier who is his owner will find him huddled on the sill of the cote, trembling with fatigue. He will give him food and caress him, and he will pull the tiny slip of paper from the tube and take it to the telegraph office. Electrical currents will carry the words to the Aftonbladet offices, whence they will be disseminated by other wires and cables to Waldemer’s own newspapers, the London Daily Mail and the New York Herald. In this way the world will learn our exact location at nine hours and six minutes Greenwich mean time, provided the pigeon reaches his destination and a whale has not eaten the transatlantic cable. Sometimes a Physeter macrocephalus, or sperm whale, scooping krill from the sea bottom with his long jaw, will encounter a submarine cable and snap it like thread without noticing what he is doing. Sometimes, on the other hand, this swimming elephant gets his jaw tangled in the cable and drowns. This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the Prinzess expedition and the pigeon on his way to Trondheim; it is simply one of many indications that the struggle between nature and civilization is not yet quite decided.
The Balloonist Page 4
