The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  “On peut le prendre dans la chambre jaune. Tu veux?”

  I wanted. Why tell foolish and unconvincing lies? On the ochre wall the late sun from the lake shimmered imperceptibly. In the distance a voice called in Italian, the evening’s first cicada vibrated in the vines. Dear Luisa, why does the peignoir slip from your shoulder when you have not even poured the tea? Soft darkness of hair falling; that Empire bed, with its lilac-flavored linen, is a magnet and a tomb. The tea things are scattered on the bed, the teapot overturned, her faint voice supplicates in my ear, “Oh sweetest one, my love, my cruel Viking, now.” Slightly moving my foot, I brushed the teacup to the floor and it broke with a tiny tinkle.

  16 July 1897

  If the wind gods are aware of us at all they must be amused at these efforts we have made to bore a peephole into their secrets. Three overgrown infants swinging in our crib full of toys: popguns, coils of wire, tubes with flat beans of glass in them which we stick to our eyes. The gale, which is only now beginning to weaken, has been pushing us along before it for thirty hours. In which direction? More or less north, I think. The blowing snow almost obscures the surface five hundred metres or so below us, and without a fixed point on the pack to sight in the theodolite we can only roughly estimate the direction of our drift. That magic and not-existent point can’t be far now. A red sun full of blood manages to appear fuzzily through the clouds again, and with quick work I am able to take a sight. Theodor has written down the times, I read the altitudes from my instrument and enter them. My cold fingers in the mitten manipulate the pencil clumsily, making the large figures of a child in which the nines and the zeros do not quite close. Have I made a mistake in my calculations? Several no doubt. This frozen piece of paper that I am covering with chicken scratches should be preserved for posterity as an example of human fallibility. Trusting in myself, and in the conviction that five eighths of the way from .10012 to .10048 is .10036, I determine that our latitude is 89° 54’ north. And the longitude? What on earth difference does it make only six minutes of arc from the Pole?

  I sight back rather carelessly along the compass and see that in the dying wind we are still floating along more or less to the north. A sky full of tattered clouds, the pack below only partly visible through a veil of whitish mist. The drift I estimate at six knots. This wind that has made its last confession and is breathing only feebly must hang on for another hour. Then it must die, and even turn and blow the other way, but only then. The sight was taken at 0118 Greenwich. What’s the time now? The time! Time is everything now, there will be no more sights taken and time is our only distance. First I take off my mitten, then without unfastening the toggles of my reindeer-skin coat I reach upward inside it, downward to the trousers pocket, and grope around for the watch. The instrument is finally after a certain fumbling brought to light. One forty-seven Greenwich. Of the six miles to the Pole, I guess roughly, we have covered half. Waldemer, to the maneouvring valve!

  “I say now, Major, are you sure of those figures? A fellow wouldn’t want to make a mistake, you know.”

  One fellow wouldn’t, perhaps, but the next one might not be so concerned. “Leave the higher calculations to me, and stand by the maneouvring valve!” And if you pull the wrong rope, you lovable blockhead, we are dead.

  We sink. Imperceptibly that crinkled and fractured plain of ice comes up through the mist. Damnation! I have forgotten to put my mitten back on. The hand is turning the colour of a granite church in Oslo. My face is probably the same, but I form it into an icy imitation of a smile and remark to Theodor, “Facilis descensus Averni-you know your Virgil?”

  “Easy is the descent to Avernus,” he finishes for me, “through every day and night the gate of Dis stands open, but to retrace the steps, to return to the upper air, that is the task and the trouble.”

  “You can see that a classical education, even in a Militärische Hochschule, is of some practical use in the world. It gives advice on handling a balloon. Look sharp now, Waldemer, that stuff below is coming up fast. Leave off spilling gas and spill a little ballast instead!”

  A grey rivulet of lead streams down; the ice below is only a hundred metres away now. We are descending far too fast! With a pocket knife I cut away a bag of shot entirely. After a delay of only a few seconds we hear a faint thump from the ice below. Our plummeting has been slowed by the dropped ballast, but now I am concerned about sideways drift. I turn and look north in the direction of our motion, where clumps and uneven blocks of ice are streaming toward us and passing underneath at an alarming rate. Five knots at least! Thunder and tarnation. Unfortunately, we can’t pull the bursting valve as we land, because we have a use for the balloon later. At an altitude of ten metres we race over a ridge made of jaggy hillocks. An extraordinary phenomenon—that this lazy drifting, as it seemed when we were higher in the air, has turned into the violence of a charging buffalo as we settle toward the ice.

  It would be nice if one could think over in a leisurely manner the best way to handle this maneouvre. But since no human being before us has ever done what we are doing now, we will have to grit our teeth and trust to our instincts. Attention! Achtung! The guide ropes behind us are slithering over those jagged teeth we just missed, slowing us a little. The bottom of the gondola makes contact with snow or soft ice, lifts free again, then strikes more heavily. The gondola tilts sideways with a lurch and the enormous spherical shape over our heads moves on, away from us, with the wind. Is the Prinzess going to go off and leave us? She sways, strains, drags the gondola another bumping metre or two, but Theodor with great presence of mind has dropped to the ice, run back to the guide ropes, seized them in his gloved hands, and pulled backward, digging his boot heels into the soft and crystalline surface under him. The bulk of the gas bag overhead still wishes to travel on but seems content to stop for the moment, straining only slightly.

  We can breathe easier.

  I pass Theodor the ice anchor and he digs a hole for it and sets it firmly. The only trouble is that the Prinzess, deprived of the weight of both Theodor and the ice anchor, now wants to go up again as well as sideways. Theodor, bending his knees, pulls down at the ropes. He can’t keep that up very long. The Prinzess is sixty kilos light. In all my calculations I never anticipated this very obvious problem. We have come safely down on the ice but we can’t get out to stand on it, since the weight of a handful of lead shot is enough to make the balloon go up or down. Should we step out of the gondola, the Prinzess would fly off and leave us. And yet that is precisely what we have come here for, to step out. Theodor, his boot jammed down onto the ice anchor, stands waiting.

  For a while, a minute or more, the situation seems an impasse. We don’t even discuss it since no one can think of anything to say. Valve off more gas? Impossible. We will never leave here unless we conserve every handful. Subtracting our weight from the gondola, in order to get out and take some steps toward mooring the Prinzess more securely, would undoubtedly result in the anchor tearing out of the ice. We are two metres from our goal but have no means of reaching it. Except for Theodor who—it occurs to me only at this moment—is the first to stand on this long-sought-for mathematical point.

  In the end it is Waldemer who thinks of the solution. Theodor is brought back into the gondola, giving the ice anchor a final jam with his foot before he leaves it. Then Waldemer gets out onto the ice with certain implements of iron, including a saw and a long-handled axe. He is almost as skillful with these as he is with a rifle or a cook stove. In only a few minutes he has cut out of the ice a squarish lump two metres long and the width and thickness, approximately, of a man. Since it is blockier than a man it probably weighs even more. We struggle to get this thing into the gondola with our mittened hands. The Prinzess very slowly rises and falls, threatening to pull the anchor out of this rotten July ice at any moment. The block of ice falls once onto Waldemer’s foot, but we manage to wrest it upward over the instrument ring and into the gondola.

  “Ha.” His panting make
s him steam, coating his mustache with rime. “Another two like that should do it.”

  In half an hour the three Ice Men have taken our place in the gondola and we are able to get down onto the stiff, very faintly heaving surface of the pack. Waldemer is exultant. Theodor is still breathing a little hard from our struggle with the blocks of ice and if he has any emotions he doesn’t bother to indicate them. The air is oddly still now, only a faint breeze on our faces. A thin but curiously opaque frozen mist hangs over the ice. Horizontally we can scarcely see farther than we could throw a stone; vertically the view is clearer and we can see clouds overhead, the sun appearing occasionally in some fracture in the white blanket. The temperature is minus twenty centigrade, the barometer low but steady. I might take another sight to confirm our position, but to what end? It would be impossible to move now that we have come down where we are. And so this place is the place we have set out to come to, I so declare as commander of the expedition.

  Although I have controlled my excitement externally, it has had its usual physiological effect on me. I wander unobtrusively around to the other side of the gondola and perform a much-desired discharge of bladder contents. There is a good deal of steam. Some of the golden droplets solidify before striking the ice and roll across it like tiny amber pearls. When I come back around the gondola I see that Waldemer has set up his photographic apparatus on the tripod fifty metres or so away from the Prinzess. Theodor and I are obliged to stand in negligently heroic attitudes by the gondola while he slips several plates in and out and reaches around to trip the shutter by hand. (The rubber air bulb is frozen and breaks at the first touch.) Then a shot in trio; the apparatus has a delayed-exposure device that enables him to trot over and take his place by our side before it clicks. He folds everything up, the tripod over his shoulder and the oaken box clasped in his arms like a baby, and carries it back to the gondola.

  And what is the fantastic fellow doing now? Up there in the gondola with only the Ice Men for company he has found one of those bits of tissue paper we use for pigeon messages, and for five minutes now he has been covering it with endless sentences in a script as minute and meticulous as fine needlepoint. The task warms him up; the pink comes back into his face, the rime on his mustache disappears. The ink freezing, he continues with a pencil sharpened to a needle point with a bit of sandpaper. At this distance I can’t read his dispatch and probably couldn’t read it even if I held it to my eye, but I can imagine what it says. Alert! Herald and Aftonbladet! Stop presses! Valorous polarnauts report from the earth’s axle bearing! An impressive triumph for mankind and the rubberized-silk industry. The heroes tired and cold but in good spirits as they stand on the peak of our planet. Thinking of loved ones. Report some difficulty in going to the bathroom and in keeping fingers warm but otherwise in good health. Could not have made it without help from Divine Providence. And so on. Oh, he is covering that tissue with a lot! Can the pigeon carry it all? I climb up into the gondola to see if he has really turned it over and is writing on the back now.

  “Major, you know, I have here …”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Just a few words. Later, of course, I thought …”

  You will write a book and stand on platforms from Durban to Ketchikan, recalling this moment. The photographs will be projected by a magic lantern. Here are my two companions, Major Crispin and young Theodor. And here are the three of us together. Perhaps you wonder who is operating the shutter. A polar bear? No. Ha, ha! As it happens, the photographic apparatus we had with us was fitted …

  The slip of tissue in his fingers, he is bending now over the wicker aviary.

  “Allow me, Waldemer. I’ve anticipated you.”

  With some difficulty due to double mittens, I have removed the quilt, opened the wicker case, and extracted a pigeon. He is already perched on my wrist. A little dull and stiff he looks, poor fellow, he probably didn’t expect it would be this cold at latitude ninety. And besides, all the pigeons are off their feed for some reason; the Indian corn is hardly touched. Waldemer rolls the small square of paper and passes it to me. I insert it into the aluminum tube on the pigeon’s leg and in removing my hand I surreptitiously extract it again with my fingernail and slip it into my mouth. The thin tissue dissolves like a sacramental wafer and it is hardly necessary to swallow it. The tossed pigeon flutters indecisively, recovers himself, and begins to flap his wings more efficiently just as he is about to settle on the ice. He circles the Prinzess once or twice and then flies off in the wrong direction, but it is not a serious error. Waldemer is not aware of it, the pigeon is not aware of it, and only I know there is no dispatch in the aluminum tube. Another little dishonesty, one of my typical crimes. I hide Waldemer’s shaving mirror, I extract his prose from the pigeon tube and eat it, and so on. Why do I behave in this way? Perhaps because of this perverse impulse I have, a totally indefensible quirk of my makeup, to withhold whatever I know from the common and vulgar fund of information, my secretiveness of a medieval alchemist. And perhaps too because I am anxious that the world down there below should not become too infatuated with progress. Our coming to this place was at least in part an accident, a whim of the winds, but mankind would only believe it was done with its machines and become even more puffed with pride than it already is. But won’t the secret be known, won’t my companions talk when they come back again to the World of Cities? Perhaps they will, or won’t. Perhaps we won’t come back.

  In any case, the pigeon flew off in the wrong direction. What is this talk of directions anyhow, since at this mathematically peculiar place where we are, there are only two directions, pole-hither and pole-hence? It is impossible to go farther north, there is no east or west, everything is south. I walk pole-hence a few steps to contemplate the scene. My two companions are working efficiently. They have got the tarpaulin out of the gondola and stretched it up on a pair of bamboo poles to protect us from this frozen drift mist, and Waldemer has lighted the primus. Theodor is unwrapping from butcher paper the chateaubriand we have brought along to celebrate the occasion. And in fact we are hungry! Great God, in our excitement we haven’t eaten for twenty-four hours! A few metres from them, as they crouch behind their canvas, the gondola is wedged at a slight angle against a ridge in the ice. From it, diverging upward, the skein of rigging rises until it embraces finally the gigantic mass of the gas bag, its higher curves—latitudes I almost said—beginning to soften in the mist. And in truth there is a curious symmetry here. I stand on the very peak of the globe, mottled in its way with continents and other features, and on top of it, bolt upright, stands the balloon—this other soft planet with its own markings, the tapering red and white stripes that correspond to the meridians of the larger sphere. The thought of man has unwittingly contrived a metaphor of the planet on which he whirls through space. And powerfully I feel that just as I am a passenger on this balloon so am I on earth, a black speck in the immensity of space; and whoever is guiding it, the Great Nobody, is not very sure of his navigation.

  Another of my vices: abstract thought. Twenty more steps backward, incidentally, and I will be permanently lost in this directionless mist and my ruminations will become even more metaphysical, since they will no longer be hampered with a body. The danger always lurks for the transcendentalist that he will achieve his goal, to be united with nature, and so cease to exist. Back the other way, then, polehither, to rejoin my companions.

  Waldemer has got the cooking machine working with great efficiency. A blue flame hisses from the burner, the warmth is perceptible on the face even at a distance. Theodor ceremoniously produces the chateaubriand, a thick piece of Norwegian flesh from the tenderest part of the ox. This is soon crackling in the pan, but because it is frozen solid it will be some time before it is edible. I had expected a delicious savor to arise from this cooking, after our long hours of fasting, but for whatever reason the steak gives forth almost no odour.

  “That pigeon—ha!” conjectures Waldemer, bending to adjust the primus t
o an even hotter flame, “is probably well on his way to Trondheim now. What part of the way would you say, Major?”

  “Oh, well on his way. Not halfway perhaps, but well on his way.”

  Turning the steak with a pocket knife and not looking up, Theodor says simply, “The pigeon is dead.”

  “Ha! Theodor. You’re revealing yourself for a pessimist just like the Major. Here we have arrived, haven’t we? Where no man before us has set foot—even though the Major was full of gloom and doom and talked about the pack ice drifting, difficulty of navigation, and so on. So let us look on the bright side of things and imagine the pigeon well on his way.” Waldemer in his mind’s eye sees not only the pigeon flying through the air toward Trondheim but all those printing presses, gigantic, waiting for that little slip of tissue paper to fall into them, whereupon they will begin spewing out extra editions like Niagara.

  “Gustav, I think this piece of meat might be done now.”

  He removes it from the pan and cuts it into three pieces. In fact, it is crisply carbonized on the outside and a pale pink in the interior, a perfect steak in the American manner.

  “Named after a poet. Did you know that, Waldemer?”

  “No,” jovially. “I thought it meant, ‘Your hat’s on fire.’”

  “That’s chapeau brûlant.” Theodor and Waldemer have at least one thing in common, they like to make bad jokes together. “The poet was Francois René de Chateaubriand. Who came to America and observed the redskins singeing buffalo flesh over their campfires.”

  “Did he?” Waldemer considers all information valuable, even when it doesn’t interest him personally. “H’mm.”

  “Did you see that on the prairies, Gustav?” “I’ve already told you, I never went west of Philadelphia.”