He seemed then to touch with his fingers eight stars, then he joined them together by drawing an S in the middle of the sky that appeared, after being thus designated, to shine with a more brilliant light.
Sophia allowed her head to rest against Crozier’s shoulder. A warm wind enveloped them.
Then the second mate of the Terror appeared, out of breath, and announced to Crozier that Captain Ross was waiting for him to propose the toasts.
IN THE MIDST of a spotless, sterile landscape as white and vacant as the surface of the chalky Moon that casts an ashen light onto the snow, the bellies of the boats, warm, damp, nauseating, rest like the entrails of some sea monster washed onto shore. Dismasted, sitting slightly askew on the ice that holds them tightly like a vise, covered with tarpaulins intended to insulate them and make them easier to heat, the Erebus and the Terror, jewels of Her Majesty’s Navy, look like dying whales, their bellies aswarm with a multitude of worms.
The damp air smells of coal, wet wool, sweat, and ammonia. Every particle that is inhaled has already passed through the kitchen, the engine room, the hold; it has already been breathed by a hundred other blocked noses, inhaled by healthy or tubercular lungs, exhaled by a hundred sour mouths. It has emerged in the form of a belch or flatulence with the sickly sweet smell that heralds dysentery. And in the midst of a desert of absolute whiteness, in the midst of waves of snow carved by the wind that blows over thousands of miles without encountering an obstacle, this contaminated air enters like a poisoned liqueur and emerges a little more foul, altered by its passing through a new body.
For these reasons it is good to go outside into the open air, despite the cold whose bite is so intense that one might think of a burn, despite the light of the sun which blinds the men. That is why the outside chores are distributed like rewards, and why, in spite of the risks, nearly everyone volunteers for reconnaissance expeditions.
23 March 1847
We have had to strike out the magnetic observations made over the past three months, for after a thousand verifications, they have proven to be incorrect, as if the instruments had been thrown out of order by some mysterious force. I questioned separately the men who took part in the last eight expeditions, and all swore that they followed the usual procedure to the letter. Moreover, as the composition of the teams varies from one foray to the next, it seems to me unlikely that one or more individuals should have knowingly altered the results without the others’ knowledge. It goes without saying that the declination compasses as well as all the instruments have been taken apart so that their various components can be examined from every angle, following which they were assembled again and tested. All the readings obtained corresponded with those already noted. The problem then does not lie on that side. Until it is resolved, I have decided to suspend the expeditions.
– I HAVE NEVER SEEN so many stars at home. Why are there so many here, where there’s no one to look at them?
– They’re not more numerous. It’s simply that we make them out better because for miles around there are no other lights to outshine them and dim their brilliance.
Suddenly, in the vast sky appears a milky green glimmering, a moving wave that dances above the horizon where it unfurls a shimmering, nearly phosphorescent curtain.
– Are these hidden by the city lights in London, too?
– No, these only exist here.
– Why is that?
– Perhaps because we’re here to see them.
Thomas is silent for several minutes, absorbed in contemplating the celestial currents fringed with rose and rippling in the black velvet of the night. Then curiosity gets the upper hand.
– What are they?
– Aurora borealis. The Northern Lights.
Thomas repeats to himself this name, which seems to confirm to him that the place where he is, is at once at the end and the dawn of the world.
LADY JANE WAS well aware of the importance of maintaining good relations with the ladies of high society just as with the wives of various senior officials and dignitaries, never knowing who might prove to be useful for the fulfilment of her plans. Therefore, every Wednesday she invited to tea all who had invited her in the course of the preceding week but who had received by way of response a small card explaining that she regretted that she must decline but would be delighted to have them as her guests.
There were then some fifteen or twenty of these ladies who turned up at Bedford Place around four o’clock one afternoon, when the sun was descending over a city bathed in golden light. In front of her door stretched a long line of carriages, the coachmen waiting stoically for their mistresses who had gone inside to quench their thirst while the horses gently tapped the ground with their hooves.
Quickly relieved by Alice of their parasols and mantillas, they were greeted by Sophia, who led them to the sitting room where tea was served. Lady Jane had never been a woman to be content with little, and since this tea party was the showcase she was offering to the world, it had a duty to reflect her: surprising, bold, exotic, complex, and incomparable.
A samovar of finely worked silver had pride of place at the centre of the table; from it came an aroma of spices in which the more adventurous of her guests could recognize clove and cardamom. Other teapots held more discreetly the traditional Earl Grey, African red tea (a beverage that inspired a certain suspicion, in which the courageous who ventured to try it tasted a hint of brown sugar), and for delicate natures subject to palpitations, an infusion of pale camomile blossoms that floated on the surface of the steaming water.
Among the cheese scones and jam tarts, the shortbread and the sandwiches of bread sliced so thin that it was nearly diaphanous and allowed one to see the filling (egg, cucumber, salmon), Lady Jane was careful to scatter some exotic foods that reminded her guests – lest they had forgotten it for a moment – that they were enjoying the privilege of sharing this meal with the wife of one of the greatest explorers in the world: translucent Turkish delight scented with rose, mint, or pistachio and coated in icing sugar; fresh figs, imported at great expense, that had been roasted with a drop of alcohol or a hint of nutmeg; rose-coloured biscuits from the city of Reims that crunched when bitten into; Greek delicacies composed of a fragile assemblage of paper-thin sheets of pastry soaked in clover honey. Each of these strokes of inspiration was accompanied – and this was the goal of the display of tidbits – by a story that recounted its origin, the etymology of its name, or the first encounter between Lady Jane and the dish in question, under the desert sun or in the cool shadow of the walls of a medieval city. These ladies, even if they had never travelled farther than to her sitting room, would nonetheless have journeyed practically around the world.
In an armoire that held the place of honour were shelves on which the treasures from Lady Jane’s travels were displayed. While the artifacts and sundry objects collected by her husband and his subalterns during his explorations sat imposingly and very visibly in the library, this showcase was devoted entirely to the fruits of her own peregrinations, and were all the more precious for having been discovered and arranged by her own hand, like a bouquet of rare flowers.
There, side by side, were a desert rose, the irregular harmony of whose delicate spines invariably roused the admiration of these ladies, though Lady Jane preferred not to reveal to them the source of such singular beauty; a dagger with a carved blade in a repoussé leather sheath, for which she had negotiated fiercely with one of the blue-clad men who smelled as strong as the camels whose existence they shared; a grigri made of horn, feathers, and onyx marbles that had always created in her a very slight anxiety; the perfectly preserved fossil of a flower on which the veined petals and even the small bristling hairs that covered the leaves with a coarse fuzz could be made out; a mosquito held prisoner in a large drop of honey-coloured amber, suspended for all eternity in its translucent gold; a sculpture that depicted with nearly obscene crudeness the silhouette of a woman with well-developed breasts and rounded hips (which t
he women pretended not to see for fear the others might imagine those same forms hiding beneath the petticoats, chemisettes, and crinolines they were decked out in themselves); gossamer figures in brightly coloured blown glass, purchased on the island of Murano, a concession granted by the adventurous lady to the fashion of the time, for the small figures, while silly and indeed quite common, were nonetheless the work of genuine artisans. Moreover, Lady Jane was fond of telling the history of the glass-blowers who had been relegated to that island because of fears that they might set fire to immortal Venice. The workshops of sand and fire set down in the middle of the lagoon struck her as a rather pretty image.
After duly admiring Lady Jane’s collection of curiosities and the paintings that adorned her walls, the guests sat in armchairs upholstered in tapestry that depicted mythological scenes such as Diana hunting the stag and Io fleeing Zeus; they tasted the various sweets that were offered them, and soon a confused murmur filled the room, a combination of dozens of high-pitched and polite voices trying to be heard above the others. Gracefully, Lady Jane went from group to group, bestowing the same attention on each.
“What a magnificent gown. And the colour is ever so becoming.”
“It is even worse than one might think, for her son-in-law became involved, and you can imagine what happened.”
“A gem, I tell you. My sister who lives in Bath couldn’t get over it.”
“Incidentally, what did you tell him?”
“Not before dinner, thank you.”
“And what would happen otherwise? Someone must have conducted the search to know to whom the inheritance would fall …”
“It’s pistachio, I believe. I have trouble distinguishing among all these nuts.”
“My dear, you have scored a bull’s eye. But keep it to yourself, of course. Otherwise tongues might wag.”
“And what is the name?”
“I assure you, I have invented nothing: a thousand pounds.”
Lady Jane and Sophia emerged exhausted from these weekly receptions, their ears buzzing, their souls occupied by a profound sense of emptiness. Most often they went to bed without eating, and the servants had crustless sandwiches and pastries dripping with honey, enough for two days.
WITH THE RETURN of spring, Peddie went back to the herbarium for which he gathered leaves, flowers, mosses, seaweed, even the smallest twigs that poked their heads through the pebbles and gravel that covered the inhospitable soil of King William’s Land. With a magnifying glass screwed into his eye, he devoted entire evenings to identifying his precious finds with the help of the numerous botany books in the library of the Terror, then meticulously arranging his specimens according to the family, genus, and species to which they belonged, writing their Latin and English names in a clear and scientific hand. Adam had been helping for a few weeks to classify and organize the specimens and to peruse the botany books in search of possible cross-references. When by chance the two, after exhaustive research, found nowhere in the books descriptions or illustrations corresponding to some plant they had collected or one that had been brought to them – for it goes without saying that anyone who left the ship invariably came back with some present for Peddie, the herbarium thereby becoming a collective project – Adam would christen it with the name of the crew member who had brought it to Peddie to be studied, or with the name of another with whom it seemed to him to share some physical or moral characteristic. Peddie saw nothing wrong with this so long as his assistant took care to inscribe, under the invented names, the factual elements they had been able to determine beyond any doubt. It had occurred to him recently that, fundamentally, most plant names had been similarly invented, but as that thought created a kind of malaise in him, he had chased it away at once.
And so the delicate Draba nivalis, which in winter raises tiny arms bearing oval, translucent capsules out of the snow, a small vegetable creature whose apparent fragility conceals a force comparable to that of the ice, silent and diaphanous, was given the name Veronica, in memory of a soft-voiced nun in the orphanage, as well as the boringly descriptive appellation snow whitlow grass. Similarly, on the wide, beige pages one saw next to the ranunculus, anemones, and Aronia ovalis, with its delicious fruit, some Hornby’s Trumpets, MacDonald’s Lilies, and Eliot’s Bells, named for one or another of his companions.
Satisfied with the work of his young apprentice, Peddie suggested that he write a description of one of the plants just identified, the Arctic Willow. The young man had read enough of such writings, the surgeon considered, to be capable of replicating the structure. He himself would correct the inaccuracies that would no doubt slip into his work. The few lines that Adam turned in, however, left him deeply perplexed. The fine, elegantly formed letters, leaning slightly forward, themselves resembled the delicate stem of some simple with overly ornate flowers:
It would appear that the Arctic Willow belongs in equal measure to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, an unlikely cross between the Cherry and the Caterpillar. Completely covered with a silvery Down which resembles the coat of certain Arctic animals, the plant measures no more than a few inches in height but it stretches out in some cases across a surface several feet square. It bristles with bright Red and Yellow antennæ, which end in a slight Swelling, and are stuck into black, velvety scales. Overall it is reminiscent of the Softness and the colour of the wings of a Butterfly as foreshadowed by the Caterpillar.
Peddie had been obliged to reread the lines twice to assure himself that the young man had not mistakenly given him someone else’s fable or a poem just for fun. Then he wondered if this Adam had meant to mock him as he endeavoured to carry out a serious scientific venture that had nothing to do with this … literature. Once he had named the thing that he was holding in his hands, he felt somewhat better and ready to confront his assistant. As a man of patience and persistence, he armed himself first with one of the descriptions of which he was proudest, one that struck him, because it was concise and precise, as a model of the kind, the one he had written for the purple saxifrage (Saxifraga oppositifolia).
Small low plant having a rose-fuchsia blossom with five stamens (which are a vibrant yellow). Grows on rocky soil where it forms a thick carpet, appears at the end of June and disappears in September. Its smooth, deep green leaves are most often packed tightly on their stems, but on some specimens may be very widely spaced. Exceptionally hardy, saxifrage is sometimes the only plant that will grow in particularly infertile soil. It does not emit any aroma.
Next came a detailed Linnaean taxonomy whose subtleties he had not considered it necessary to explain to his young apprentice; that would have required, among other things, lessons in Latin, which he felt neither the wish nor the competence to undertake.
When Adam came back the next day to give him new specimens the men had collected, Peddie invited him to sit down and cleared his throat.
“I read what you gave me yesterday … It’s … very fine … hmmm … But, you see, my lad, it’s important to be more rigorous. We must note facts, objective observations …”
Adam interrupted him. He seemed slightly disappointed but not surprised.
He took from his pocket a paper folded in four.
“I didn’t give you this yesterday because I was not absolutely certain about the sub-class … But I checked this morning, it does indeed belong to the dilleniidæ. Excuse me, I’m expected in the galley.” And he left.
Unfolding the paper, Peddie saw, written in the same hand with fine upstrokes:
SALIX ARCTICA
Regnum: Plantæ
Subregnum: Tracheobionta
Phylum: Spermatophyta
Subphylum: Magnoliophyta
Classis: Magnoliopsida
Subclassis: Dilleniidæ
Ordo: Salicales
Familia: Salicaceæ
Genus: Salix
Incredulous, he took the book that he used for reference most often, a dog-eared catalogue with a leather cover crazed from too much handling, and began
feverishly to consult it, as if he were hoping to discover a flaw in this taxonomical tree that he knew would turn out to be perfectly correct.
29 May 1847
Some days ago the men started building a cairn with the same energy they would have put into erecting a lighthouse or, if shipwrecked on a desert island, a raft on which they would hope to brave the waves. Sir John, who since the beginning of the expedition has been fiercely opposed to our leaving any useless sign of our passage, apparently does not have the heart to forbid their project. It must be said that we left the shore of Beechey Island littered with empty tins and various sorts of trash, as well as planting the three crosses that testify in silence to our time here. Perhaps he believes that, planted where they are, they render vain any attempt to pass unnoticed. Or perhaps he thinks rather that the cairn, located in a declivity a few hundred yards from the desolate shore, runs no risk of being seen.
All I know is that when Fitzjames came to make that request, he gave his consent straightforwardly. As the landscape is covered with a heavy layer of snow, it has taken a few days to gather the rocks needed to erect the tower, which is scarcely taller than a man. Into it was slipped one of the sheets of paper on which a message is typed in five languages, the same one that I cast pointlessly into the sea along with a button; Fitzjames wrote on it a few lines that Sir John read absent-mindedly, as if the contents were of no interest to him. He then held out the paper for me to read and I noted that it contained an error: we spent not the winter of 1846–1847 on Beechey Island, rather that of 1845–1846. Sir John and Fitzjames shrugged their shoulders, as if it were something inconsequential. I did not insist, for I have trouble imagining what use one could make of the message: as long as our ships are iced in not far away, they point out our presence, and once we have weighed anchor, it will point to the location that we occupied the year before and will, as a result, be absolutely null and void.
On the Proper Use of Stars Page 12
