The birds are leaving and the nights are getting longer.
It’s dark when we wake up and dark when we eat supper. When I’m out on the boardwalk looking in, the windows glow a welcoming orange, and the main room is lit up like a theatre. But when I’m at the Stevenson screen, the mountains loom, and I get the sense of the dark waiting to reclaim the land. Then I’m keen to get back inside and draw the curtains and shut out the night. Only I can’t, as we haven’t got any.
In one of my periodicals, there’s a paper by someone who’s worked out that what we know of the universe is only a tiny percentage of what actually exists. He says what’s left can’t be seen or detected, but it’s there; he
calls it ‘dark matter’. Of course, no one believes him; but I find the idea unsettling. Or rather, not the idea itself, that’s merely an odd notion about outer space. What I don’t like is the feeling I sometimes get that other things might exist around us, of which we know nothing.
In a month, on the 16th of October, we’ll see the sun for the last time. According to the books, there’ll still be
some
light for a few weeks after that, because at noon, the sun won’t be all that far below the horizon. They call it the ‘midday dawn’. After that, nothing.
But my God, the colours we’re seeing now! If it’s clear, dawn turns the sky an amazing pinkish gold. The snow glitters like diamonds. The whale ribs on the shore are dazzling. The roof of the cabin is blanketed in white, its walls crusted with frost. After a few hours, the light turns, and the bay becomes a sheet of bronze. The day dies in a blaze of astonishing colour: crimson, magenta, violet.
So much light.
And now this.
It was after supper, and I was reading and smoking at the table. Algie was playing patience and drumming a tattoo with his fingers, and Gus was outside checking on the dogs. Suddenly he burst in. ‘Chaps! Outside, quick!’
As it was minus ten, ‘quick’ meant a feverish
dragging on of boots, jumpers, waterproofs, mufflers, mittens and hats.
It was worth it.
‘The dogs’ fur was crackling with static,’ murmured Gus. ‘That’s how I knew.’
We stood craning our necks at the Northern Lights.
Photographs don’t do them justice. It’s the movement which impresses you most. The way those luminous pale-green waves roll and break and ripple across the sky – and vanish, and appear again somewhere else – and all in eerie silence. A sea of light. I know that for some people they’re a religious experience, but I found them intimidating. Those great, shimmering waves . . . so vast, so distant. Utterly indifferent to what lies beneath. And in a strange way, that extraordinary light seems only to emphasise the darkness beyond.
Algie broke the spell by whistling, and for once I didn’t mind. Soon afterwards, he went inside.
The two of us stayed, watching the sky.
Gus said quietly, ‘Hard not to be moved, isn’t it?’
I grunted.
With his heel, he hacked at the snow. ‘I read somewhere that the Eskimos believe they’re the torches of the dead, lighting the way for the living.’ He hesitated. ‘They say that if you whistle, the souls of the dead will draw nearer.’
I threw him a sharp glance, but he was staring at his boots.
‘D’you believe in any of that, Jack?’ His face was grave. In the lamplight, frost glinted in his beard.
‘Believe in what?’ I said guardedly. ‘Spirits brandishing torches?’
‘No, no of course not. I mean . . . unseen forces. That sort of thing.’ Embarrassed, he hacked again at the snow.
I guessed what he meant by ‘that sort of thing’, but I didn’t want to talk about it, not in the dark, so I pretended I didn’t understand. ‘I believe in the wind,’ I said. ‘That’s an unseen force. And radio waves.’
For a moment he was silent. Then he snorted a laugh. ‘Very well, then. Be the literal-minded scientist.’
‘I’m not,’ I replied. To prove it, I told him what I’d been reading in the professor’s periodicals.
I must have waxed enthusiastic, because his lip curled. ‘And you envy them, don’t you, Jack?’
‘What?’
‘Those physicists in their laboratories. You want to be the one thinking up the crazy theories about the universe.’
It was my turn to be embarrassed. And flattered, that he should know me so well. Because he’s right, I am jealous. That
should
be me, dreaming up mad ideas in a physics lab.
And maybe I could do it, after all. Maybe when we get back to England, I can find some way of going in for a further degree. Gus thinks I can. That’s got to count for something.
So now as I sit here writing, I keep breaking off to fantasise about the insights I’ll gain at Gruhuken, and how I’ll astonish the world on my return.
How things change! When we first got here, my nerves were on edge. All that brooding about ‘the great stillness’, and getting spooked by some sealer in a sheepskin coat. But now that Gruhuken is really ours, I’m not on edge any more.
I can’t stand it, he’s insufferable. I know the dogs need fresh meat, and I know that means shooting a few seals. But Jesus Christ.
Yesterday I went with him in the canoe, and I got lucky and shot a seal. We rowed like hell and gaffed it before it sank, then dragged it back to shore. The dogs were going frantic at their stakes. Gus ran down to help cut up the carcass.
Algie was chief butcher, because of course he’s the expert after six weeks in Greenland. So there he is, skinning it – or should I say ‘flensing’ it – with his
nasty great ‘flensing knife’ (why can’t he just call it a knife?). But as he’s slitting the belly, the creature shudders. Its guts are spilling out, its blood soaking the snow, that hot-copper smell catching at my throat, but its eyes are big and soft as plums –
alive.
‘Christ, it’s not dead!’ I croak as I scrabble for a rock to finish it off. Gus has gone white and he’s fumbling for his knife. Algie calmly goes on skinning. It’s only when he reaches the bit over the heart that he sticks in his knife and ends it.
Why? To show us how tough he is? Or is it because he hates this place, and he’s getting his own back?
I told him he made me sick. He said if I felt like that I should’ve done something, not just watched. We would have come to blows if Gus hadn’t hauled me away, leaving Algie fuming.
‘I know he’s been your friend for ever,’ I told Gus when I’d got myself under control, ‘although why that should be I cannot begin to fathom. But you saw what he did. Tell me you’re not going to make excuses for him.’
Gus flushed. ‘No excuses. Not this time.’
I was fiercely glad about that.
You’d think skinning a seal alive would be enough, but today Algie went further – or he would have done, if the two of us hadn’t stopped him.
For days he’s been trying to prevent the dogs from
chewing their harnesses, and this afternoon he declared that enough’s enough, and grabbed his geological hammer.
‘What the hell are you doing with that?’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, old man,’ he said breezily. ‘It’s just an Eskimo trick I know. You break their back teeth. Works a treat.’
Gus and I stared at him, appalled.
Algie rolled his eyes as if we were imbeciles. ‘It’s practically painless! You simply hang them up till they pass out, then tap away with the hammer. They’re a tad woozy for a while, but they soon pick up. Huskies are tough as steel, don’t you know?’
Slowly, I rose to my feet. ‘If you go near those dogs with that hammer, I’ll smash your face in.’
‘Jack.’ Gus put a hand on my shoulder.
I shook him off. ‘I mean it, Algie.’
‘I don’t care if you do, old man,’ said Algie, turning pink. ‘You’re not in charge of the dogs. I am.’
‘I’m not an old man,’ I said, ‘and I’m more than capable of stopping you, so—’
‘Jack, no,’ said Gus. ‘Leave this to me.’ He turned to Algie. His eyes were glassy, his features chiselled in marble. ‘As leader of this expedition, I am telling you, Algie, that I absolutely forbid this. Do I make myself clear?’
Algie’s pale eyelashes quivered. Then he heaved a
sigh and flung down his hammer. ‘Lord, what a rumpus over a few dogs!’
I don’t think he has the faintest conception of what the ‘rumpus’ was about. I think he genuinely believes that animals don’t feel pain. And of course, I’m a Nancy boy for believing that they do.
If he touches Isaak, I’ll break his teeth. See how he likes it.
We’re down to a few hours’ daylight.
Dawn comes, and deep down, you can’t help believing that there’s a full day ahead. It’s a shock when you realise that the light’s already on the turn, and soon it’ll be night again. It’s hard to get used to, that sense of the dark gaining ascendancy. Waiting to take over.
At the moment there’s a moon, so it isn’t too bad, but you know that it won’t last long. Strange. In the summer, when it was light all the time, the moon was so faint you hardly noticed it. Now you follow its every move.
I’m trying to train myself to find my way in the dark without a torch. I don’t like the way the beam of light draws your eye and renders what’s beyond impenetrable. I suppose it’s the same as when you’re inside the
cabin and you light a lamp and it prevents you seeing outside. Or rather, it doesn’t completely prevent it; there’s a gradation. Light one lamp, and you can still make out the dogs, or the bear post. With two lamps, it’s harder. With three, all you see is the lamps’ own reflections in the panes. A commonplace observation, of course, but here it strikes me afresh. How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.
It’s colder, minus fifteen today. Stoking the stove is becoming a preoccupation. And it takes an age to get dressed, even if it’s only to fetch logs from the wood-pile, right outside the door. When you come back, you’ve got to brush the snow off your clothes and pick frost out of your beard before entering the cabin. Last week we had to break the ice on the stream to reach the water. Now there is no water, and it’s a bucket of ice that we bring back to the cabin.
The birds have gone. The cliffs are silent. There’s a sense of something waiting.
Four days before the sun goes for good.
Dawn comes, then turns to dusk, with nothing in between. But for the past three days we haven’t even seen that, because of the fog. Camp is an island,
floating in grey. No colours, just grey. And the stillness.
You feel this constant anxiety. It’s childish but real; you worry that you’re going to miss the last of the sun. Every day you wake up and tell yourself
surely
the fog’s lifted? But it hasn’t. And by lunchtime you know that you’re facing another twenty-four hours of this dead grey stillness. What if the fog doesn’t lift until it’s too late?
That’s probably why I’m not sleeping too well. I know I have dreams, and that they’re dark and exhausting, because I wake up unrested, with a sense of a struggle. But I can’t remember.
It’s not just me. Algie gets up during the night, and Gus moans in his sleep. And sometimes I come inside and they’re talking, but they fall silent when they see me. I shouldn’t mind, but I do. It hurts. I thought that business with the seal had opened Gus’ eyes. Surely he can’t be drifting back to Algie? The dogs are unsettled, too. And when we let them off for a run, they always head for the eastern end of the bay, never the west.
Today it was my turn for the five o’clock readings. Dark, of course, but even in fog, the snow creates a kind of dim grey gloom. You can find your way if you know the terrain, and although you can’t make out faces, you can recognise creatures by how they move: an Arctic fox, a dog, a man.
My breath crackled in my nostrils as I trudged to the Stevenson screen. I had to watch my footing. Five days ago it rained, and there’s ice under the snow, which makes it treacherous.
I don’t like the way you bring your noise with you. I don’t like it that your hood cuts off your vision, so you don’t know what’s behind you.
Last week I tried bringing Isaak with me, on a rope clipped to his harness. It didn’t work. He was nervous, panting and setting back his ears. I think it’s because the Stevenson screen is only about thirty yards from the rocks, and for some reason he doesn’t like them. Maybe it’s just that he’s scared of the sea.
We’re all a little on edge. It’ll be better once the sun’s gone for good, and we can forget about it and get on with things.
I’ve seen it.
Writing the words makes me break out in a cold sweat. But I have to set it down. I have to make sense of it.
The sky cleared just before noon, so we got our last sight of the sun after all. It was Gus’ turn to take the readings at the Stevenson screen, but I went with
him to watch the sun rise and set – which by now is pretty much the same thing. Algie stayed inside. He said it would spook him to see it go. This time, no one suggested a ceremonial whisky.
Twilight. Behind the bird cliffs, the red glow of dawn, but to the west it was night: the cold glimmer of stars. The black bones of the mountains jutted through the snow. On the shore, the whale ribs glinted with frost, and the rocks sloping down to the sea were white and smooth. The water was dark purple, vivid and strange.