Icefields

by Thomas Wharton

  —Do you know who lost it?

  —Yes.

  32

  This book may have been mislaid by Sexsmith, Byrne writes in his notebook that evening, or he may have left it with Viraj. And then perhaps it was tossed aside by the surveyors after they had plundered and torn down the trading post.

  Almost all of the marginal notes concern the plays. But in the last pages are a few scratchy lines about the icefield. And a hastily scribbled map with a blank area at its centre. Byrne copies everything into his own journal. He pieces together the final hours of Sexsmith’s quest.

  33

  Before them lies a sea of drifting, hissing snow. On all sides indistinct peaks rise like islands above the blurred horizon. Sunlight gleams fitfully on the ice cap of the highest summit, far across the plain from where they stand.

  They take shelter in the lee of a rock outcrop at the edge of the open expanse. The Stoney brothers build a thrifty fire with scraps of wood saved from the last encampment.

  Sexsmith says nothing. He stares out at the white expanse, watches it disappear slowly behind a wall of blowing snow. While the brothers cook a meal, Sexsmith goes for a walk onto the snow field in the fading light of dusk. The relentless wind soon turns him back. It is obvious that no animals come here to graze. There is nothing to hunt, there will be no way to replenish the food supply.

  All that I see is stale, flat, unprofitable.

  He has left his journal with Viraj. The only book he carries with him now contains the Bard’s least inspiring creations. Antony and Cleopatra. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Back at the camp, in his tent, he lights the lamp and tries to read, but his wind-blistered eyes are too sore. Instead he makes a few perfunctory marginal notes, pushing the pen with numb, blistered fingers to form words he can barely see.

  In the raw morning, Sexsmith sips his tea while the Stoney brothers pack up the camp.

  Sexsmith spills a few drops of tea onto the snow at his feet. They disappear instantly, even the brown stain absorbed into the white surface.

  He digs absently with the toe of his boot. There is a faint blue shadow in the hollow where the spilled liquid fell. He crouches, brushes away the snow crust with his gloved hands, digging a hole into the powdery layers beneath. Further down the snow solidifies again. Sexsmith stabs his alpenstock into the hole, strikes a hard surface. Rock, he thinks, and scrapes at it, glimpses a faint reflected gleam.

  Blue, silver. What is it?

  He pours the remains of his tea into the hole, hacks at it with the point of the alpenstock. Crystalline shards fly out.

  Ice.

  He understands now that he is walking across a bowl of ice on the top of the world. The glaciers have been spilling from its brim.

  Nothing. A dreary waste of ice.

  The brothers have shouldered their packs and stand waiting for Sexsmith. He turns away and stalks out into the icefield, hacking at the snow crust with his alpenstock. The brothers follow. Sexsmith stumbles in the deepening snow and halts as the brothers approach. He hears them and turns, a bitter smile on his face.

  A spirit place.

  That evening they make it to the camp on the ridge. In his journal, the pages blotched with frozen tears from his inflamed eyes, Sexsmith writes nothing about the plain of ice. Only the date and

  Disappointment.

  34

  But was that all? Byrne wonders. Why would he keep silent about it? Unless, like me, he encountered something that he dared not set down in his memoirs.

  Disappointment. Nothing but snow, ice, cloud, wind. That was all he found. And what he could not accept. A world with a wasteland like this at its summit.

  35

  After many notebook pages of measurement and calculation, Byrne writes down a year, places a question mark beside it. In the summer of that year, he writes, the region of the glacier into which I fell should reach the terminus. Rather, it will be the terminus, and will therefore begin to melt.

  Whatever is embedded within it must, by the laws of nature, reappear.

  Hal

  She is somehow childlike. This older woman who has lived in some of the world’s great cities and written about their dangers, their seductions. She travels like the meandering heroine of a novel for children, shrugging off the entanglements of one chapter and moving on to the next, never stopping long enough in one place for its habits of defeat and cynicism to cling to her. Always asking what’s over the next hill, around the next curve of the river? But never asking how will I get home?

  For me, every new encounter is a confrontation from which I withdraw into solitude, to examine myself for the marks of deformation. The world is forever pounding on my character, such as it is, shaping it the way water patiently shapes a rock.

  Freya is a waterfall.

  This winter I’ve been reading some of her magazine pieces. I find it almost impossible to read them with any kind of objectivity. The fact is, I find it almost impossible to read them at all. I suppose I’m looking for Freya in her writing, and she’s not there.

  I’ve learned a lot, though, about her working method. The way she impinges on a world and then records its shifts and adjustments to her presence. This is not arrogance or willful blindness on her part. I see that now. She once told me that only in this way can she remain truthful to the people and the cultures she encounters. She can’t pretend to be an invisible translator of another way of life, a recording angel hovering somewhere above the scene. Touching the skin of an unfamiliar city, she knows she has become part of what she touches, but she may never know exactly how. Her trace is quickly lost. If she places herself in the foreground of her narratives it is because she knows this, that her words can only be a transcription of an elusive, endlessly recurring moment of first contact.

  In her swift passage through a new world she moves like a bullet. A small violence. Her writing a record of damage.

  ABLATION ZONE

  THE FIRM LINE, BETWEEN THE INVIOLATE AND THE MELTING ZONES OF A GLACIER, IS OFTEN SHARPLY DEFINED.

  ONCE PAST THIS POINT THE ICE BEGINS TO DIE.

  MELTING CAN BE HSTFM EVEN A FAINT INCREASE IN HEAT A EXTREMITY OF A GLACIER, SUCH AS PRODUCED BY THE FLASH BULBS OF HUNDREDS OF CAMERAS.

  1

  In June of the following summer the alpine club gathers at Arcturus creek. In keeping with tradition, everyone gathers around a bonfire on the first evening to tell stories and make plans for the days ahead.

  When the fire has died to pale embers, Freya hears someone approach from the dark beyond the circle of light.

  —Fine evening.

  The stranger stands back in the shadows thrown by the others gathered there, and Freya cannot see his face. The flare of a match appears for a moment, a hand cupped around the bowl of a pipe, the glint of an eye, a sharp cheekbone.

  They are discussing the quality of the rock in the region.

  —It’s true, the stranger says. The rock is not the best for climbing.

  And he goes on in detail about the composition of several rock faces, the various grades of limestone and quartz. Freya follows his words for some time, but then, lulled by the fire’s warmth, she no longer hears the words but listens only to the sound of the voice. After a while she feels she is floating in space, buoyed up on the rising and falling of the stranger’s voice.

  She can hear, rolling underneath the cold technical language, a turbulence of desires and emotions. She cannot interpret them. This is a voice out of the dark.

  Then the stranger stops talking. He bids everyone a good night. The swish of his long raincoat, his footfalls, recede into the cold dark beyond the circle of bodies. Freya turns to Hal.

  —That was Doctor Byrne, she says, realizing it even as she speaks his name.

  2

  When the fire has gone dark, violet bands of aurora borealis appear in the night sky. Freya and Hal watch them shimmer, fade and reappear. Freya remembers a story she was told as a child.

  —The aurora was the radiance of a
beautiful ice maiden. She lived far in the north, and her coldness repelled all suitors. But the king of elves and flowers fell in love with her, and his desire melted her frozen heart. That is how spring came.

  Hal glances at her while she speaks. Her face, her words: he feels there must be a clue there for him about what he might say. She’s told him a love story, but he already knows she has moved away from him.

  He sensed it already last summer. And he knew it when she appeared at the stable the evening of her arrival. She hadn’t sent a message asking him to meet her at the station. Her greeting, lips grazing his forehead, was the message. Hello, love, goodbye.

  Perhaps this summer she will have enough material gathered for a book about Jasper. He wonders if he will be excised from it, like the thief over the side of the houseboat.

  And tonight all she wants to talk about is their upcoming climb together. Together, he thinks.

  And Byrne. She is intrigued by him.

  —He’s a useful source of information. He knows the ice, at any rate. It wouldn’t hurt to have a longer chat with him.

  Rawson laughs.

  —A chat with him, Freya? He doesn’t chat, he drones. And besides, he has to be aware of your existence first.

  —So I’ll seduce him and then we’ll chat.

  —That unfortunate man.

  3

  Freya visits Byrne at his shelter. She decided not to wait for Rawson, but to go see him herself before anyone else thought of the idea. She got a fire going well before dawn, drank some coffee and then set out, passing between the neat rows of white canvas tents and into the till plain, arriving at the nunatak as the sun rose over Arcturus peak.

  —If you go up the glacier, stick to the south moraine, Byrne tells her. He showed little surprise at her unexpected knock on the shelter door, and even less pleasure.

  —There’s not so much melting and crevasse activity in the mountain’s shadow.

  —What about the icefield itself? she asks. To her surprise he looks vaguely embarrassed, uncomfortable. He runs a finger along the spine of a book on his table.

  —I haven’t been up that far. I’ve never seen the icefield. Since the crevasse accident I can’t climb steep gradients. My arm gives out. So I’m limited to the lower reaches.

  She looks at him, wide-eyed.

  —That’s ridiculous. You can come with us. Three would be more to Trask’s liking anyway. And it would ease some of Hal’s worries. We’ll help you on the difficult pitches.

  He shakes his head.

  —I’m really no climber. I would endanger the two of you.

  She argues. He is a sheer wall. She does not like to yield, but his refusal is final. She shakes her head in frustration.

  —So what can you know about the icefield if you’ve never been up there? Nothing.

  He smiles.

  —I’ve learned a lot from the glacier itself. A way of looking at the rest of the world. Patience. Control of the emotions.

  —That’s wonderful, if you happen to be ice.

  She shakes her head, concedes defeat, asks to take his photograph. He agrees, realizing that this will be the first time he has been captured on film since he first left England on the expedition.

  They step outside for the light. After she takes the picture, she taps her camera and says,

  —This will bring back your icefield.

  He asks her to take note of anything unusual, and to let him know about it when she returns.

  —How do you define unusual? she asks, studying him.

  He meets her inquiring gaze and glances away, leans forward to sort the papers scattered over the table.

  —Anything unexpected, he says.

  Her breath in his ear. He looks up, shocked, into her eyes.

  —You mean something like that.

  4

  Freya and Hal plot the climb of Mount Meru, considering routes on maps and on the diorama in the chalet lobby that Trask has had constructed. A three-dimensional model with tiny scale replicas of the chalet and outbuildings, and the surrounding peaks, all under clear glass. The inconveniently vast icefield is truncated by the edge of the display.

  —I know Meru has been climbed before, Freya tells Hal. But I want to try it, for myself. It’ll also give me the chance to cross part of the icefield. Just so I can say I’ve done it.

  Rawson has climbed before, but not on ice. They practise belays, cutting ice steps, glissades. And at Byrne’s suggestion the next time he meets with Freya, crevasse rescue.

  They do their best to avoid Trask. He would recommend a team approach, six or seven climbers, the way that Freya reached the summits of Arcturus and Parnassus. Even though this will not be a first ascent, nor an especially difficult one, he would frown upon Freya’s choice of Hal, who is not an official climbing guide. In no time Trask would take over the entire expedition.

  —Trask and I share an ancient animosity, Freya says. City builder and nomad. I raid his town, ignore his restrictions and guard rails, and he tells scandalous stories about me.

  —You don’t care? Hal asks.

  —I’ve stopped caring. I realized that the more I goad people like him, the better the material I get. Breaking rules gives me my best copy.

  They hike to the mountain’s base every day, and climb adjacent hills to get a better view. Through his field glasses, Hal picks out an unusual pattern on a snow slope of Meru. A series of vertical lines, blue-shadowed seams in the snow.

  —Those lines are larger than they look from here, Freya says. More like vertical hillocks when you’re traversing them, which I personally like to avoid. In the Himalayas some of the climbers call that effect Parvati’s Curtain.

  —Is there somewhere on this planet you haven’t been?

  —Lots of places. Up there, for one.

  They set up their base camp at the foot of Arcturus glacier, which they will ascend on the first day of the climb. From there they will traverse across part of the icefield, to reach the less precipitous slope of Meru.

  5

  —What do you think of Byrne? she asks.

  They are walking up the glacier from the doctor’s shelter.

  —I admire some of his qualities—his coolhead-edness, his keen eye. He’s forged himself an impressive suit of armour. But I can’t really relax in his presence. I don’t know how anyone could. He doesn’t let that facade crack, not that I’ve ever seen.

  —He does. With Elspeth.

  —What’s this about?

  —I’m wondering what keeps him coming out here day after day. He’s looking for something, or waiting for something. What is it? And the icefield. It’s like some kind of sacred place to him. I mean, it’s got a certain fascination, I can understand that, but for him it’s something more. He can’t wait for us to come back and give him a full report.

  —We could make up stories, when we get back, about what we found up there. The ruins of a lost civilization or something. And see how he reacts.

  —No, I couldn’t do that. This place is the man’s obsession.

  She walks on ahead.

  6

  An overhanging carapace of ice, hollowed underneath by melting, forms a dome illuminated from above by the sun. Freya hacks steps to it, and Hal follows.

  They stand together, watching as capillaries of water run and swirl along the translucent ceiling of the dome. In places the thin trails flow together, swirl and let fall a spray of glittering droplets. They can see a whole labyrinthine network of interlacing rivulets, lit by the sun, threading among the rounded crystals of the deliquescing ice. Freya sets up her camera and squints into the viewfinder, then turns to Hal.

  —I sometimes have the feeling the ice is alive.

  7

  They cross the bergschrund to the north face and step onto a steep slope of icy limestone. From here it will be a short vertical pitch to the icefield.

  Midway up the rock face they discover a niche, a place to huddle and rest for a moment. They edge toward it. A kni
fe wind off the ice above whips glittering shards into their eyes. Hal stumbles into the niche, blinded. He slips on a seam of verglas, slams his knee painfully against the rock.

  Freya kneels beside him, clutches his arm. For a moment, in the haze of snow, she is a stranger.

  He thinks, What am I doing here with this person?

  For an exhilarating moment he can’t think of anything that he knows about her. There is no history and no impending future without her. He leans forward to touch her face and she moves away, her hand slipping down his arm to grip his hand and help him to his feet. He remembers.

  8

  With field glasses Byrne keeps watch on Meru. He knows the two climbers will not be visible until they reach the peak. He hopes then to catch a glimpse of them. Freya agreed she would flash a mirror from the summit.

  The sliver of icefield he can see from the nunatak is painfully bright in the morning sun. The edge of a radiant white planet rising too close to the earth. He lowers the field glasses and rubs his eyes.

  He ducks back into the shelter, the red branch of an afterimage floating before him in the dark. He sits down at the table where he has been working.

  Trask has asked him to put together a short primer on ice and glaciers, to accompany his diorama with its interestingly misspelled inscription:

  Ariel View of Jasper and Environs

  He sets aside an earlier draft and picks up his pen, begins again on a fresh sheet of paper.

  The icefield is the source of several major river systems, and a storehouse of fresh water. The layers of ice deep within the field may be hundreds of years old, formed from snow that fell here before the discovery of America, before the birth of Shakespeare, before the industrial revolution.

  He writes of the Swiss glaciologist Louis Agassiz, and quotes his dramatic imagining of the Eiszeit, the great ice age of the past:

  The land we call Europe, before that time a tropical jungle inhabited by elephants, enormous reptiles and gigantic tigers, was swiftly buried beneath a great sheet of ice covering valleys, plateaus, and mountains. Over all descended the silence of death. The rays of the sun, shining down on a frozen world, were met only by the shriek of the wind, and the groaning of crevasses as they yawned open across the surface of this vast ocean of ice.