“Ah non, mademoiselle, c’est défendu.”
“Gustav”—this in English—”show her your card from the ministry.”
In the end I had to show her not only my card from the ministry but a ten-franc bill. When disrobed the dulcimist was wooden and complete in every way, sitting on her complicated machine of sprockets and cogs, still bewigged and slippered, holding her little hammers delicately one in each hand. Garters were painted on her legs just above the knees. At the bottom of the machine was a kind of paddlewheel which rotated in the air, like that of a music box, to prevent her from playing too fast—her metabolism.
The attendant put the dress back on the doll—(her own face was a little pink! she suppressed a smile). Luisa too seemed pleased with herself. I was surrounded by females again, who exchanged understandings around me and over my head that concerned me, probably, in some obscure way. Why had Luisa obliged me to pay ten francs to disrobe a clockwork puppet? Did she wish to remind me that musicians, however talented, had underlinen? Or was it merely the interest in clockwork of a femme-savante? I had begun to doubt that she could separate these two things in her own mind. For my part, I was less interested in the wooden limbs of the puppet than in the air paddle. Machinery, left to itself, would overrace and destroy its own ingenuity. Only air, the thinnest and least palpable of the four elements, was capable of slowing it—the same air that had dragged at Renard’s balloon and exhausted its battery jars in seventeen minutes. The visit to the automaton room had only confirmed what I had earlier guessed in the ruined Benedictine chapel: it is not by striking nature with iron bars that we can hope to subdue it, only by surrendering ourselves to it and floating in the direction it wishes.
At the gate of the conservatory I offered to escort Luisa to Quai d’Orléans—a scientific ruffian might disrobe her to inspect her paddlewheel—but she had to rush to her lesson in Passy. (Which was mysterious, because the voice lessons, as I understood it, were supposed to take place in the morning.) I felt my afternoon had been well spent in spite of the fact that it hadn’t commenced until a quarter after three. I decided to return on foot to rue de Rennes by way of Boulevard de Sébastopol and the Pont-Neuf. It was a clear cold day; the Seine ran like half-congealed lead, slowly, with greyish glints. In Place Saint-Germain I bought a newspaper. A government had fallen in Italy, a skyscraper had risen in New York. In Berlin Dr. Wölfert had made an ascension in his engine-driven balloon. There was an explosion in the air, the balloon fell, and Dr. Wölfert and his assistant were killed. The sun had begun to set behind the old grey pile of the church in the square. There was a chill in the street; back in my room it was warm.
22 July 1897
For four days now we have been stumbling and sliding our way across this landscape that when solid is more vertical than horizontal, and when thawed turns into soup into which we slip up to our waists. If we attempt to go by water, using the Faltboot, the water hardens into granite. As soon as we try to walk over it, it turns into water again. Under the tent, as we try to sleep, it groans most fearfully. It is always slipping, bumping, grumbling, complaining, and turning underfoot. I have lost track of the time and am convinced it is the twenty-second of the month now only because I have made little marks in my Stockholm pocket calendar each time we have camped-but suppose we have camped more than once a day? Impossible; Waldemer has his stout pocket watch, I have my own, and there are the two chronometers, Kullberg 5566 and Kullberg 5587, to verify them. But the climate or possibly the jolts we have subjected them to are not very good for these last instruments. Two or three nights ago (twenty-two minus three is nineteen, so it must have been Monday) I awoke or half awoke and heard them talking to each other in a smooth even ticking, muted so as not to awaken us.
K. 5566: “Let’s speed up. Make the days go faster, bring their happy or unhappy fate to them more quickly and with less fatigue.”
K. 5587: “We should go slower. That way it will be easier for them to keep up with us.”
K. 5566: “Their pace will accelerate with ours.”
K. 5587: “Whatever we do, we must agree. For one chronometer’s time means nothing. It may be out of adjustment. But what two chronometers say is the truth, and the solar system must follow it. Thus if we speed up so will the sun and the planets…”
And so on. Their voices were unhurried, rational, leisurely, discussing all sides of the question with care. I was struck with the fact that they seemed to have our welfare in mind; this mildly surprised me, and I was also impressed that they had talked quietly so that we should have the maximum amount of sleep and be rested for the next day. When I awoke, however, the implication was that as timepieces they were no longer to be trusted very much. Certain other evidence suggests that the rate of one or the other has changed. Which one? Impossible to tell, since I can verify their accuracy only by comparing one with the other. At that time I was not as tired as I am now and I had the wit to notice that the frozen milk overhead had cleared away temporarily so that the sun and the moon were both visible at the same time. Ah! Professor Crispin. Time for a bit of higher mathematics. The method of lunar distances, which may be used not only to find one’s position but also to check chronometers, has ever since the days of Gemma-Frisius been regarded as the most troublesome and difficult calculation in the art of nautical astronomy. Besides, my hands are numb, all the pens are frozen, and our only pencil has been broken so many times that it is hardly longer than a joint of my finger. But I set to it anyhow: first I cock the sextant at a horizontal angle and draw the two limbs of the sun and moon together to measure the angular distance between them. (The two orbs are approaching each other at a dizzying rate and I have to keep turning the vernier. Perhaps, I think, they will run into each other and that will be the universal end of all problems, including our own.) Then I correct for semi-diameters, enter the logarithm tables and the almanac, and begin covering one of our last pieces of paper with hen scratches.
This method, complete with mistakes and the natural inaccuracies involved in taking arcs with a half-frozen sextant, established our position at 81˚ 42’ north, 36˚ 20’ east, give or take a few hundred miles either way (the pencil was very blunt, my hand a numb primordial paw). Since then we have made our way more or less southward as the configuration of the half-thawed pack permitted. Franz Josef Land is somewhere up ahead and to the left, the main mass of Spitsbergen out of reach to the west. Our hands curved permanently to the diameter of the pulling ropes, we go on toiling over a landscape composed partly of white grand pianos set on edge and partly of soup. Theodor’s face, as I anticipated, is not really suited to this climate. It has turned to a darkish and ironlike blue, the points of the cheeks black with frostbite. The shawl is wrapped around it completely now so that nothing shows except the eyes. But he pulls as hard as the rest of us, and as steadily, setting first one foot and then the other into the yielding and soggy ice. It is Waldemer who seems to be tiring, he that I imagined would be the strongest of us. But he makes no complaint either and seems confident that we will eventually arrive wherever it is that we are headed; he leaves the navigational details to me. He is stocky and his breath comes short; perhaps he has a tendency to asthma. When he talks—and he talks frequently, not for the most part to impart information, but to cheer up himself and us, to improve the morale of the expedition—he confines himself to shorter sentences and often waits between them, to see if he can’t wring a little more oxygen out of this frozen skim milk he is inhaling into his lungs.
“If I ever get out of this … I know where I will spend … the rest of my days.”
The sentences, although short, and separated by intervals of breathtaking, are perfectly constructed at least by journalistic standards; he has no pretensions as a stylist.
“The Lunatic Asylum … at Halifax, Nova Scotia …” Pause for breath. “… is pleasantly situated in the midst … of cheerful green hills, and … provides a very … English, I might say … comfort. I recommend it especially.”
There are no more bears after that first one. That is, we see plenty of blurry white dots on the horizon but don’t approach near enough to get in a shot. There is still a large chunk of frozen rib meat in the Faltboot; we hack pieces off it now and then and masticate them patiently to get out the red juice. Once we follow the tracks of a large male for some distance and find that, like Theodor and Waldemer, he has come to a soft spot and slipped down into the soup; so that even he is not above making mistakes in that regard. A little later Waldemer manages to unlimber the Mannlicher and plunk a seal incautiously taking a nap on a floe only a few metres from us; but the little metal bead through his lungs wakes him instantly, he flops and slithers dying to the water’s edge and sinks like a rock. Waldemer is perplexed, as he always is when some mechanism doesn’t behave according to his expectations. But I know the reason; the sea in July, being composed in large part of melted ice, is thin and won’t support the seal, whose specific gravity is equal to that of salt water.
Theodor can’t understand this point. “How can the ice melt if we are freezing?”
“There are different laws of the universe for people and for inanimate matter.”
“Sometimes I think you make up these laws yourself.”
“I do. And I make them work.”
In spite of this talk of freezing, his clothing—the black woolen jodhpurs, the stylish military coat—exudes a steam into the calm frigid air. There is heat inside him yet, a little fire kindled with bear meat and sheer stubbornness, and in time this may even dry out his clothing. As for me, my feet are permanently wet; not even a long stay in a Nova Scotia asylum could dry them out. (That Austrian journalist who said I was either a fool or a swindler neglected to think of the third possibility, by the way: that I am mad.)
And when was this conversation? Yesterday perhaps, although because of the possibility that we have camped more than once a day such calculations are subject to wild chances of error. I firmly believe in my mind that today is Thursday the twenty-second, I have so noted in my pocket diary, and it is four days therefore since we abandoned the Prinzess. The pack that was still relatively firm then—in that dim past—is now rapidly assuming all the characteristics of the sea around and under it, beginning with its liquidity. Even yesterday it was necessary to ferry across several broad leads of open water, each time unpacking and repacking everything in the Faltboot. For the most part, however, we are still able to progress on foot.
Yesterday (I think it was) I saw visible ahead of us a peculiar vaulted light stretching across the horizon, a light under which odd things appeared, or seemed to appear. Little pieces and needles of the horizon lifting up, squirming, and falling back again. Finally a kind of irregular jagged line sticking up, like white saw teeth, from south-southeast to south-southwest. Lower on the sides, a little higher in the middle. Changing shape constantly but always there, for at least an hour. Waldemer is watching it too. He glances at me but I go on pulling, pretending not to notice. Faint smile forms under his mustache. Secret. Waldemer is capable of secrets, of his own kind; usually they are concrete, concerned with real physical or mechanical things, and they are jokes not intended to deceive anybody. Four fifths of the time he watches the wavering saw teeth; one fifth of the time he glances at me to see if I’ve noticed them yet.
The saw teeth sometimes shift, trade places, and resume their old form again. At one point (I’m not sure Waldemer notices) the whole business is elevated off the horizon completely, leaving a strip of sky underneath. This is only for a moment; it settles down and goes on with its wavery squiggling.
“Major.”
‘’H’mm?”
“There’s, ah. Something. I’ll bet you haven’t noticed.”
“What?”
“There’s. Ah. Land up there ahead now. Not over fifty, sixty miles. Has to be Franz Josef Land. Mountains. Nothing else that high.”
“Ah.” I glance ahead as though noticing for the first time. “Bravo, Waldemer.”
He is surprised I don’t make more fuss over the discovery, especially since the calculations, made by me, put us farther to the west and Franz Josef Land far out of reach a hundred or more miles to the left. But he leaves the navigation to me and perhaps he thinks I have known all along the mountains will be there. Theodor makes no comment. We go on pulling. Waldemer remarks that the pesky mountains don’t seem to be getting any closer. We stop to examine them through the glasses. Or Waldemer does. I don’t bother because I know what they are. Then abruptly, soon after he has put the binoculars away in the Faltboot, they loom much larger. Waldemer is exultant. “Not far now. For a while it seemed … atmospheric effects no doubt.”
No doubt at all. In another twenty minutes we come up to them: some ice hummocks no higher than our knees, thrust upward by refraction into Himalayas and Sierras. We have been chasing these phantoms over the ice for two hours or more. The weak sun, shining on the ice and on the darker leads, has warmed the air slightly near the surface and converted it into a giant lens; a lens with us on the inside. Luckily Waldemer has a sense of humour. He is sheepish, knowing that Theodor will rag him about this later, when they are both less tired and in a mood for humour. We wrench the Faltboot into motion and go on pulling. I know exactly where we are, not only because of the lunar sight on the twentieth, but because of the compass in my blood: about eighty-one degrees north or a little better, White Island directly ahead at a range of perhaps fifty miles. Still a long way to go.
And Theodor or Luisa: the shawl covering everything but the eyes—the eyes luminous against the glimpsed fragments of face—which are the bluish colour of iron with traces of rust, bends against the weight of the pulling rope and plants one foot after the other in the white surface that crumbles and slips with each effort of the boots to get a grip on it. He is on my left and slightly behind me because of the geometry of the pulling ropes, so that I have to turn my head a little in order to look at him. And look at him I do every few minutes, not in order to verify anything and certainly not out of sympathy, but simply out of curiosity that this black-covered and efficient machine manages to go on functioning identically in this way hour after hour, never varying its rhythm and leaving its series of exactly evenly spaced depressions behind it in the soft crust of the ice. The right arm stretching behind it to throw its weight onto the rope, the left arm brought around the front of the chest and onto the rope to add its pull. The body at a diagonal to the vertical in the thrust of its effort, the left foot comes forward and the boot stamps into the ice to make a grip for itself. The knee straightens, the body angles downward a little more as it takes the weight, and the other boot comes forward to print its hole in the ice and wrench the body, the rope, and the weight dragging after it another forty centimeters ahead. It is slow; in an hour in this way it is possible to cover two miles if there aren’t too many hummocks and ice ridges. Occasionally he slips as we all do and falls to his knees or entirely horizontally on the ice. When this happens it is our custom that the others don’t stop and wait; it would mean three or four metres of progress lost. He pushes himself up with his left mitten, the pulling rope still gripped in the right, and in a moment or two catches up and is pulling again. Fifteen hours a day of this, eighteen hours a day, and if we don’t rest too much we can hope to arrive some place or other before winter comes.
&n
bsp; In any case, we don’t rest very long because the cold would catch us and we would stiffen. Ten minutes is enough; we heat some cocoa on the primus and gulp it in turn from the saucepan, scalding our tongues and not caring about the brownish crust that immediately freezes on our lips and cheeks; because we spill it, like little children, trying to handle the pan in the clumsy mittens. One day—the second perhaps, or the third—we didn’t rest at all but kept going, especially since the landscape on that part of the journey was composed of jumbled blocks the size of farmhouses and there was no flat space even as large as a pocket handkerchief to set the primus. The next day, the twenty-first according to the pocket calendar, we are stopped a little after eight in the evening by a broad lead that has partly frozen over. I am perplexed at first; it hasn’t seemed cold enough to make sea ice. Then I reflect that there is a layer of partly fresh water on top of these leads, from melted snow or from the slow melting of the old floes, which according to Greely partly free themselves from salt over a period of time and may be melted for culinary water. The layer on the lead indeed looks like glare ice, freshwater ice. It is hard and bluish-white, perhaps four inches thick. I test it with the bamboo pole. Only with a determined stab can the stuff be broken.
What to do? The lead is a half mile or more wide. It might support our weight and the weight of the Faltboot and it might not. In any case, it is too thick for us to break our way through and cross boat-fashion. We might traverse the lead in the hope of finding a narrower place, or a stretch of stronger ice, at some other point. But it stretches away as far as the eye can see in either direction, showing no sign of narrowing. It will have to be crossed on foot.
Leaving the Faltboot behind, we venture out a few metres to test the ice. It seems strong enough to support us. It bends slightly underfoot with a rather ominous creaking noise, and a pool of water instantly collects where it has settled under our weight. But it seems elastic and we don’t actually break through.
The Balloonist Page 24
