The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  Asleep. One eighth awake. Half awake. Then asleep again, yet awake enough to be aware that I was sleeping so that I could feel the white slithering of the linen along my limbs as I turned, now and then the contact of a warm and columnar softness against my knee. I am aware finally that I am not in Stresa but in another part of the world. An embracing silence, no sound but the faint creaking of the ropes that hold the silk to the gondola, as though the Prinzess herself were stirring in her sleep. In my half-waking state I feel an odd dread, a premonition of some watchful and waiting thing that is hostile in a diffuse and unclear way and yet a thing that is most deeply craved. If this thing is awake, I tell myself, it is better for me to be awake too. I crawl out of the sleeping sack of reindeer skin (perdition take the contraption, it leaves hairs all over you just as I expected) and fasten the hood of my coat tighter around the neck against the cold. As soon as I rise to my feet I am struck by the beauty of the scene. The sky is barred with stripes of thin clouds through which the sun, almost on the horizon now, shines weakly and indistinctly, its outline soft as though melted. The sea is an immensely hard and reflecting pewter. Because the sun has sunk into the cloud bank and can no longer warm the balloon even slightly, it has descended until the guide ropes touch the surface of the water. Still the sun is there, now whitish, now greyish, picking its way along the horizon sideways and beginning already to curve imperceptibly back into the heavens again. It was no doubt this white unsleeping sun, at two o’clock in the morning, that filled me with that odd premonition of something not as it should be, of a watchful presence. That and the sinking of the Prinzess so that the three guide ropes, dropping below now in a shallow curve, touch the pewter surface and carve onto it three arrow-shaped marks, not plashing and lacy like the wake of a ship, but as hard as the surface of the sea itself. In some way I had sensed this closer presence of the sea, perhaps because the guide ropes, even though they made no sound detectable by the outward ear, had spoken in some mysterious way to a sense in my inner self. Or perhaps the very slightly greater heaviness of the air itself, as we sank lower, had wakened me. If there are liquids which can detect the coming of a distant storm, shrinking and trying to hide in their tubes of glass, then perhaps in some infinitely tinier capillaries of the body the fluids may respond in a similar way to the lower altitude, imperceptibly, but enough to stir the consciousness already on the needle point of waking. When the föhn sweeps over central Europe the suicide rate triples; the soul is sensitive to the minutest changes in the air around it. The question is not to invent new detectors for the messages of nature, it is to learn to listen to the detectors that are already with us. Well, bother! enough of this philosophising. I should have been a schoolmaster; I rap with my ruler and tell those in the back row to wake up. “Tell us more facts!” they cry out. You are already breathing facts; they pass into your blood and pulse in the hair tubes of the brain, demanding only that you awaken to listen to them. Perdition take it! they would have driven me to an asylum in a week, those inky-fingered boys with their smell of porridge. Which direction are we going? The wind is south again. So much the better. We are headed keenly and willy-nilly toward our destination, that mathematical point where a lot of invisible and quite arbitrary lines converge.

  At my feet my two companions are humped furry rectangles, indistinct in the grey light. Their heads are totally hidden. One of the shapes stirs slightly, a foot flexes and extends in the bag of hide. It is not Waldemer but the other; I can recognize the slenderer form even though the sleeping sacks are identical. Detecting in some way that I am watching, perhaps by a capillary intuition analogous to that by which I detected only a little while before that the sun was watching me, this form stirs, rolls over, and finally a head protrudes from the opening of the sack. Theodor emerges, in absolute silence puts on his cap and winds a woolen scarf around it and over his ears, and then stands up to look at the pewter sea. He is cold. He shifts from one foot to the other and his elbows press against his sides. We converse in low tones in order not to awake our companion.

  With the scarf around his head he resembles a bedouin, an effect enhanced by his dark Persian eyes and his paleness. “I dislike that sun,” he remarks calmly.

  “Because it ought to go away at night?”

  “Not for that exactly. Because in staying up at night, it tries to fool us by looking like the moon. That milkiness.”

  “You don’t like milk?”

  “I detest milkiness and snow, everything white. It suggests things clammy to the touch. Corpses, winding sheets.”

  “In that case I’m afraid you are taking your vacation in the wrong direction. Ahead of us everything is white, the sea as well.”

  “I’m not on my vacation.” Stiffly. “It isn’t a complaint. I am simply remarking my preferences.”

  The well-concealed but unmistakable feminine trace in this temperament comes out now and then in these intuitions, these preferences for one landscape over another. In making it clear he is not complaining, however, he is at his most manly. Theodor is more complicated than he seems, or than he would like to reveal. Bands of India rubber stretch through him on the inside, their tension creating the perfect symmetry of his exterior. I refrain from reminding him that on the Aletschhorn, only a few months ago, he told me he liked white things; but that was in another existence, in another universe, it happened to other persons.

  “Ahead,” I point out, “you can see iceblink.” It is faintly visible on the northern horizon, a band of white against the iron grey of the clouds. “The white sky is caused by reflection of light from the ice beneath it, which is also white. On the ice white animals prey on each other.”

  “And their blood when it is shed is white also?”

  “No, it is red just like ours. Their eyes too are various colours, such as black or cobalt. There are exceptions to the whiteness, but in general the region we are approaching is white.”

  “We don’t seem to be approaching it very fast.”

  “We are, as a matter of fact. We would go even a little faster if we rose a bit, since there is no need for the guide ropes to be in the sea now that the wind is from the south.”

  Together, fumbling a little in our mittens, we work to release ballast. Theodor manipulates the ballast cord with precision and makes no mistakes. A quantity of lead shot, stretching out in a long and indistinct line, falls in absolute silence into the sea. The Prinzess stirs, a little unwillingly (she is sleepy too), and at last lifts her guide ropes out of the water, trails them down to touch it once again briefly, and begins a slow climb. When the sun warms the gas again it will expand, and we will have to release a little of it. In this the balance between these globules of lead and the infinitely finer molecules of hydrogen—our lives lie cupped like moths in a boy’s hand. If we could hide under the fog bank ahead it would protect us from the sun and thus from the loss of more hydrogen, but we will have to climb over the fog bank, otherwise it would be impossible to take observations.

  “What time is it?”

  “After two.”

  “In Paris the cafés are closing, and yet I’m not sleepy. It was strange that the ballast fell so silently.” Did he expect it to ring out on the metallic sea? And yet it was so strange.

  14 July 1897

  At eight o’clock we catch sight of a white gleam below through a rift in the clouds—the pack! This plain of ice stretches away endlessly to the Pole, and on most of it no human being has set foot. In this latitude it is still soft; many crevasses and open leads. Occasionally there is a line like a seam in a fractured and partly healed skull: a pressure ridge. For a few minutes we chatter about this, pointing out to each other features of the pack and estimating its thickness. When we stop talking an extraordinary thing happens: we can hear the ice below. A grinding, a growling in the throat, scratchy coughs, a kind of heave as though someone in the next room were trying unsuccessfully to vomit. It is the sound of a great flat animal lying stretched from one horizon to the other, too weak to
rise and too strong to die. July is not a good time for the pack. It feels its mortality. Let us hope it can hang on for a few more days; we may need to walk on it.

  The sun has climbed up out of the mist and glows redly again, its outline a little rubbery. It gives out a feeble warmth, not enough to thaw our faces but enough to heat the Prinzess and cause her to rise. We are drifting at an altitude of perhaps four hundred metres over a low-hanging sheet of clouds with many holes in it. Through one of the larger openings I catch sight of something and point it out to Theodor: a red stain on the ice, the remains of a bear’s dinner. He gazes at this with some interest. After it is far behind us he still looks back now and then, thinking perhaps to catch a final glimpse of it. The bear is an untidy fellow, a successful Darwinian who has no table manners because he has no enemies. If he scatters blood and entrails around, never mind, there are plenty of other seals, and nobody is likely to interrupt him at his repast. Besides, his tablecloth is self-cleaning. Presently it will melt and everything will fall through into the ocean, the bear too; he always forgets this and has to swim stupidly toward the north in search of something solid to clamber onto.

  All this is mere conjecture. I really don’t have very much experience of bears and leave such things to Waldemer. He, as it happens, is too busy to concern himself with these aesthetic and metaphysical contradictions. He has lowered his cook stove down and is manipulating the cords; the familiar odors of kerosene and hot coffee drift upward into the gondola. We breakfast on coffee and pieces of bread which we thaw by holding them against our coffee cups. After breakfast a sun sight fixes our latitude at 84° north, or about two hundred and forty nautical miles from Dane Island. A little more than three hundred and sixty to go. If this wind holds—and everything indicates that it will—we have a chance of reaching our destination in another forty hours, that is sometime on the early morning of the sixteenth. Afternoon, night, morning; these are only habits we carry with us from the Green World. Here everything is oblique, the sun goes sideways, the night is made out of milk, and morning and evening are diagonal tendencies, so to speak, that converge at a point slightly out of the picture so we can’t see how it is done. What nonsense! This is a strange diary I am writing; or am I writing or only thinking it? I don’t understand it very well myself and I have the impression of another consciousness a little distance away, perhaps looking over my shoulder, for which it all makes better sense, but which does not choose to confide in me what it is all about, and it is for this watching thing that I am writing. (I am writing, damnation take it, here is the small pigskin notebook on my knee, but what I am writing is only our morning position and a few other naked facts that could interest only a positivist like Waldemer). It is possible that cold affects the wit, causing certain neurons in the cerebellum to miss their connections. A harmless aberration, no doubt. Perhaps on the other hand I have merely discovered a new literary form. The frozen diary, or network of irrelevancies, as untidy and inevitable as a polar bear’s meal.

  I am recalled from these numb but interesting musings by the practical voice of Waldemer. “Major. You know …”

  “Ah. It’s time to send another notice of our progress to a breathless and expectant world.”

  I scrawl the morning position onto a scrap of tissue paper, and Waldemer adds a few descriptive details for readers of the New York Herald. I can’t see what he is writing in his fine precise hand, but I catch a glimpse of “…northward…progress…hopeful…” The paper is screwed into the aluminum tube and we open the wicker case, which we have covered with a quilt to keep these small flying machines warm. Still, these are Norwegian pigeons and the climate here in July is no more severe than it is in their home in Trondheim in the winter. I notice, however, that they have eaten little or none of the Indian corn we put into the case the night before. They seem nervous and evade the hand that penetrates the case from the top. Waldemer manages to grasp one—evidently one of the less agile—and removes it from the case. Bird and tube are assembled, and Waldemer places them on the instrument ring as before and touches the invisible lever between the legs. But this pigeon is not very energetic. His wing droops shabbily, his eye lacks luster.

  “Come now, Jewel. It’s away to the south and home.”

  The pigeon contemplates him out of a dull eye. Waldemer, insisting on his view of the pigeon as a mechanism that can be made to function once the design is grasped, scratches him encouragingly in other places, and the pigeon raises each foot in turn and puts it down. Would like to go back to sleep apparently if Waldemer would stop bothering him. Homing instinct is lacking or totally paralyzed. Finally Waldemer takes him in two hands and tosses him outward into the void. The bird comes to himself, staggering and flapping, and manages to fly in a ragged circle back to the instrument ring again. Waldemer is still cheerful but a determined set is forming on his mouth. He flings the bird out with two hands again. This time the poor creature is too weak, or the gondola no longer seems an attractive place to him. He attempts a kind of caricature of flying, mainly with one wing, but sinks constantly lower. Finally it turns into a soft fluttering ball, the single wing still beating convulsively. Waldemer declares that the pigeon was not well, that it was suffering from an illness of some kind. “It certainly was an ill-bred bird,” I agree. “Probably not a homing pigeon at all but some loafer from the public square that the dealer has palmed off on us.” But the sight of this soft ball plummeting into the cloud has depressed us all—Waldemer especially, although I too for some reason am affected by the weight of this omen—and there is no talk of trying again with another pigeon. The incident is closed. Yet by watching Waldemer covertly I can see he is still pondering over the thing. He doesn’t like maladjustments. Does the tiny machine need oiling, is there a screw that needs to be tightened? By God, he will give it oil. He will adjust its ball bearings until it sees the light and does its proper duty, by heaven, he is not going to be outwitted by a cooing thing no bigger than a glove. Well, at least the stove works. The stove is a wonderful contrivance, Waldemer. It doesn’t blink and coo at you, and when you jerk the string it cooks the coffee, every time. That is because you made it and not God. Waldemer stamps his feet to warm them and is soon cheerful again. Foolish to be put out of sorts by a clockwork bird!

  A sharp crack from below, like a rifle shot. A particularly brittle piece of ice has split under the pressure from the sea. Extraordinary how something so unsubstantial as water, even in congealed form, can make so metallic a sound. The cloud layer below us is a little thinner now and the pack is visible most of the time, only hidden now and then by a veil of gossamer-like mist. But behind us, to the south, something important is preparing to happen. The white clouds are huddling together in a wall around the horizon, this wall is darkening along its lower edge, and ragged streamers are detaching themselves slowly from the wall and drifting away in fragments. The disturbance I overheard on the Spiritual Telegraph on Monday has deepened into a storm, as I expected. This is certain to be good news for us. It will produce a strong south wind, and if the laws of rotating mechanisms are still in operation, the wind will later veer into the northwest and north for our return journey. And in fact, after only half an hour or less, the Prinzess leans a little to the first puff of wind, swings gracefully and slowly for a few moments like an enormous pendulum, and begins to accelerate her pace.

  Theodor and I secure all the loose gear and rig the canvas windbreakers against the snow that is sure to come now. Then we busy ourselves with the instruments. By triangulation with the theodolite we calculate our speed at eighteen knots. It is a strange sensation to have the storm come upon us and yet feel no wind, since the Prinzess is carried along in the air and moves evenly and silently with it. Only now and then, when a random gust a little stronger than the others strikes her, does she shudder slightly and sway until she has adjusted herself to the new velocity. This pendulum swinging is a pleasant novelty. The motion is dignified and very slow, requiring perhaps three or four seconds
to sway to one side, pause, and swing back to the other. Now and then for some reason the Prinzess begins very gradually to rotate, as imperceptibly as the hands of a clock, so that when the next gust strikes her the result is a circular or elliptical motion, the gondola tracing slow conoidal patterns in the air. The wall of nimbus to the south moves toward us with surprising speed. Tatters and fragments of it are already overhead, and our speed over the ice has increased to twenty knots or more. This a piece of luck; we had not expected to career north so fast. But there is a disadvantageous side to this useful storm. As the clouds cut off the sun the gas in the envelope cools and contracts, and its lifting force is reduced. Furthermore, a plaguey rime begins to form on the balloon and its rigging, and this adds a further weight to the load the diminishing sphere of gas can scarcely lift anyhow. Theodor sights down at the ice to estimate our altitude, knowing that the guide ropes are a hundred metres long. “A hundred and twenty metres. A hundred and ten.” We scud along at an astonishing pace, a velocity that seems even greater because of our closeness to the ice. Now and then the guide ropes brush the surface of the pack, sending the Prinzess into more graceful swayings and circlings, until she manages to rise a few feet again.