The Balloonist (33 page)

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.

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.

We go back for the Faltboot and set out cautiously, fanning out a little more than usual to distribute our weight. It soon becomes apparent that the ice is stronger in some places than in others. Several times we have to stop and detour a spot that is too thin and beginning to sag dangerously underfoot.

“Y'know, Major, someone should go ahead and scout out the best route. Then we wouldn't have to keep towing this blessed battleship around in circles.”

A good idea, Waldemer. But who? It should be me, by all rights. But Luisa drops her towline and comes slowly toward me, stopping a few paces from me so that she blocks my path across the lead. Because of the shawl I can see only her eyes, but I know the mouth is set firmly with the little creases at the corners.

“I'm the lightest.”

This is folly. I know the ice best and I am responsible for the safety of all. Besides she … but it has been a long time since conventions, chivalry, the ordinary hierarchies of life in the World of Cities seem to have had any significance. I am uncertain; I hesitate.

“He's right, Major. What d'you weigh, Theodor old man? Not a hundred and twenty, I'll bet. Go ahead and be careful. We'll follow.”

We proceed in this fashion, Luisa two hundred metres ahead and Waldemer and I following with the Faltboot, which slips easily over this skating rink of a surface. We walk always in a film of water a centimeter or so deep, which follows us as the depression made by our weight proceeds across the ice.

We are perhaps three fourths across when I notice a peculiar—as I first imagine it—optical illusion. The ice ahead, between us and Luisa, seems to bulge up a hand's breadth or so, then in another place, a series of bulges traveling rapidly across the ice from left to right. A second later it occurs
to me that seals, expecting as little as we that a lead would freeze over this time of the year, are trapped under the ice and are trying to break out breathing holes for themselves. But almost at the same instant this theory is blasted. Not far from Luisa—surely not more than thirty or forty metres from her—the ice is shattered with a dull bump or thud and an enormous black fin shoots up, followed by a glistening back the size of a hansom cab. Luisa has turned and is staring at this thing, staring across it to us. But everything happens very quickly. In another five seconds a dozen killer whales, perhaps, have broken out of the ice in a thrashing of white water. The huge hideous heads shoot vertically into the air through the holes they have smashed. One breaks out so close to us that we can see the tawny head markings, the small glistening eyes, the terrible array of teeth. They are black above, the lower parts white or yellowish-white. There is a distinctive white slash above and behind the little pig eye. They are ten metres long and weigh tons.

Believing from our shadows on the ice that we are seals, they continue to heave up and split it into fragments, thrashing the water into foam in an effort to upset us and take us into those rows of conical white teeth, in a single gulp. What puzzles them—the reason they are unable to make an end of the business immediately—is that we can move faster on the ice than seals. Luisa has turned and is slipping off rapidly to the left, away from the centre of the danger. But the whales are everywhere. An enormous black shadow, like an underwater cloud, passes almost directly under our feet, at great speed.

Waldemer and I sense the same thing almost instantly: that, against all instinct, we must not abandon the Faltboot to flee away to the left in an attempt to rejoin Luisa. The whales are sure to break the ice under the Faltboot, taking it for a large seal, and without the supplies on it we couldn't last half a day. Without a word we seize the towlines and begin running as fast as we can over the slippery and undulating ice with the Faltboot impeding us. We are attempting to make a large circle to the left and cut back toward Luisa so that we can perhaps be of some help to her. Meanwhile, we wave, indicating to her that she should make directly to the south toward the thicker pack ice only a few hundred metres away.

The ice
disintegrates directly ahead of us and the black spike of a fin, two metres long, surges in the opening. A piece of ice the size of a table tips on edge, poises, and upsets. The head appears and the whale blows with a terrific roar. His breath has an odour of something rotten, of fish and death. Waldemer jerks the Faltboot to the right and I follow. The pig eyes inspect us for a moment, then the whale slowly sinks to try again somewhere else.