The Balloonist (6 page)

This Prinzess, the
third to bear her name, is enormous. She is at least four times as big as any airship I have ever had anything to do with. Or so it seems now, when the clutter and distraction of the preparation are behind us and we are left to ourselves in the gondola. It is almost two metres from where I am standing to where Waldemer is checking the bolt of his light .256 Mannlicher rifle. Two metres is not very much in a ballroom, but under these conditions it is unbelievably and luxuriously commodious. We stand on a light floor of laminated wood, fabricated according to a new American process, which is removable in sections and under which provisions and spare gear are stored. Circling the gondola at shoulder level is the instrument ring, on which thedolites, magnetometers, and other paraphernalia may be mounted as needed. Between the instrument ring and the gondola itself a set of canvas windbreakers may be fitted in bad weather; in fine weather some or all of these are removed. Everything is stowed neatly; there is room for the pigeons and even for Waldemer's miniature darkroom. If we stretch our hands upward we can touch the bearing ring, a small but intensely strong circle of steel to which the converging cluster of rigging from the gas bag is attached, and from which, in turn, depend the guys that support the gondola. To the bearing ring are fitted the long bamboo poles which serve as yards for the sails, at present furled or rather drawn in on their rings like curtains through a system devised by myself. The gondola of wicker and Spanish cane, the bamboo spars, the hempen ropes stretching up over our heads give the impression of an antique sea vessel, a fantastic craft out of some print of the sixteenth century. Everything is stowed neatly under our feet or in bags attached to the bearing ring. The ballast of fine lead shot hangs to the outside of the gondola, each bag with its drawstring for releasing. A carefully planned and well equipped expedition, the whole paid for by the estimable and well-merited firm of Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H. in Bremen, in return for the privilege of naming our craft and driving therefrom a beneficial notoriety; although this policy may turn back on them if our venture goes badly, so that the product of their brewing is associated in the public mind with doom rather than with the intoxication of success. I have in my pocket a clipping from an Austrian newspaper
which I have carefully cut out and saved in my billfold, for what purpose I am not sure, perhaps to amuse myself in dull moments: ‘Jener Herr Crispin, der mittelst Luftballon zum Nordpol und zurück fahren will, ist einfach ein Narr oder ein Schwindler.” Probably I am a fool and a swindler, Herr Oesterreichischer-Zeitungsschreiber, but what business is it of yours? I am not swindling you. At the most the hardheaded German brewers, who understand precisely the risks they are taking. On the whole, to this heavy-handed Teutonic invective I prefer the humour of the American polar explorer who told a reporter, at the time of my visit to New York last year, which was attended with a good deal of publicity, “People who wish to arrive at the Pole by means of airships, steam carriages, trained polar bears, etc., are attention seekers rather than serious explorers.” Touché! He has me there! Peary himself, it seems, is planning an expedition to the Pole using dog sleds in the dozens guided by whole villages of Eskimos, probably because he finds it easier to train Eskimos than to train polar bears. He is right that I am not serious, I wish I could be, but blast! We will see who gets there first. If he does I will drink to him cheerfully. I forgot to mention that the managers of the Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H., in addition to paying for the expedition, have also made us a gift of two dozen of their best bock packed in a hamper full of straw. We will drink these in time and so they too will serve as a kind of ballast, the bottles and eventually the liquid going overboard to compensate for the gradual loss of hydrogen from the bag. Our lives waver on these handfuls of gas and grams of weight.

I take the Koerner sextant from its case and point it at the coppery disk hanging in the east. Theodor watches the two chronometers, waiting for me to call out the exact moment of the observation. Looking through the sighting tube and slowly turning the screw, I bring the image of the sun in the index mirror down exactly to meet its twin floating in the mercury. Since the sun is still rising the two disks keep persistently trying to creep a hairline away from each other. Wait … wait … Now I've got them: “Allez … houp!”

Theodor writes down the time: 09h 06m 52s GMT. So on until five altitudes have been taken. I average these, discard one altitude which seems to contain an error, and set to work with my logarithms and almanac. In twenty minutes, with fair confidence,
I am able to draw a position line on the chart, locating us at 80˚ 40' north and 11˚ 32' east, or some forty-seven nautical miles north-northeast of Dane Island.

I write this formula on a slip of paper, adding, “All hands well. Altitude 200 m. Proceeding north. Prinzess expedition, 0906 GMT 12 July 1897.” Then Waldemer unbuckles the wicker case under our feet and thrusts his arm in. There is a soft fluttering, some alarmed coos, and Waldemer's arm emerges holding a grey and white pigeon with a pink bill. The pigeon twists his neck and flaps one wing a little, whether in alarm or in eagerness for the coming flight is not clear. I pass Waldemer the slip of paper and he rolls it tightly, screws it into a tiny aluminum tube, and fixes the tube to the pigeon's foot, managing to do all this while holding the pigeon softly pressed against his chest. Then, with the pigeon perched on his right hand, he raises it and transfers it to the instrument ring in front of him. The pigeon looks around brightly with little jerks of his head and pecks at something on his shoulder. He seems content on the instrument ring and shows no inclination whatsoever to fly.

But Waldemer has learned something about the functioning of this particular mechanism. “Now then, darling.” He carefully extends his gloved forefinger and touches the bottom of the pigeon, about halfway between his virile parts and the place where his legs are attached. Like a clockwork bird whose lever has been touched, the pigeon soars into the air, his wings slapping loudly until he gathers speed and flies more smoothly. At first he dips lower; then he circles the Prinzess at a medium distance, climbing with white flashes of his wings, which beat faster and faster until they are too rapid for the eye to follow, a kind of optical twittering. Finally, gaining speed, he slides off on a tangent and soars away to the south. Smaller and smaller he becomes a dot, a winking pinpoint—and then he has disappeared. Waldemer, with an air of satisfaction, continues to stare in the direction of the pigeon for some time after he is no longer visible. This tiny speck of life, we hope, will make its way some eleven hundred miles to its home in Trondheim. No pigeon has ever flown so far or over so deserted and forbidding a sea, but perhaps this one will. There in the Norwegian fishing town the honest watchmaker and pigeon fancier who is his owner will find him huddled on the sill of the cote, trembling with fatigue. He will give him food and caress him, and he will pull the tiny slip of paper
from the tube and take it to the telegraph office. Electrical currents will carry the words to the
Aftonbladet
offices, whence they will be disseminated by other wires and cables to Waldemer's own newspapers, the London
Daily Mail
and the New York
Herald
. In this way the world will learn our exact location at nine hours and six minutes Greenwich mean time, provided the pigeon reaches his destination and a whale has not eaten the transatlantic cable. Sometimes a Physeter macrocephalus, or sperm whale, scooping krill from the sea bottom with his long jaw, will encounter a submarine cable and snap it like thread without noticing what he is doing. Sometimes, on the other hand, this swimming elephant gets his jaw tangled in the cable and drowns. This of course has nothing whatsoever to do with the Prinzess expedition and the pigeon on his way to Trondheim; it is simply one of many indications that the struggle between nature and civilization is not yet quite decided.

“Well, Major?”

“Well?”

“Thinking again, I see. And I can imagine what you are thinking about.”

He carefully does not make a roguish smile, but the signs of its suppression are visible behind the mustache.

“Can you?”

“The sight of the pigeon flying off. You know. Makes us think of … our—loved ones.”

“Loved ones?”

He thinks it is rather dense of me not to get the drift by this time. “Miss Hickman. Eh?”

I glance briefly at Theodor to see his reaction. No reaction at all. To judge from his face he might not even have heard; but of course he has heard. I decide to follow a mock-dignified and slightly offended line, calm but my chin raised just a fraction of an inch.

“You forget we are still travelling north. And the farther north we get, the less my thinking concerns itself with such—carnal matters.”

Waldemer really
is
embarrassed. The roguish smile emerges from behind the mustache; his defence is to treat the thing as a joke. “Well, Major. I wasn't really referring to—h'mm. Carnal matters. It's just that, you know. One's more tender sentiments …”

“Whenever I notice any such, I go to a doctor. He
gives me a medicine for them.”

“Ahah. Bravo, Major.”

Theodor, by way of ignoring this whole conversation, or pretending to, has been studying the chart, checking our course with the parallel rules and verifying the distance run by stepping it off with the dividers. His glance is intent on this crisscrossing track of pencil lines that begins at the camp on Dane Island, passes between Amsterdam Island and Vogelsang until it clears the Spitsbergen group, and then verges off northward onto the blank part of the chart. Finally, sensing I am watching him, he looks up.

“Well?”

For a moment he hesitates, afraid perhaps that with his lack of experience he has made some blunder in the calculations. “You can check whether I'm right, Gustavus. It seems to me our speed has averaged eleven and a half knots instead of eight. And we're being deflected a little to the east.”

Standing in absolute silence at his side, so that our elbows touch, I pretend to check his figures. But I know without looking that he is right. I frown over this for a moment with my finger on the chart. After a while Waldemer notices that I have fallen into thought again, my Swedish vice.

“Something up with the weather?”

“I think so.”

“Still looks lovely. Not a cloud in the sky except for this infernal haze.”

“What is happening would be a long distance away. Invisible to your mortal eyes, I'm afraid.”

“Ahah. Perturbations in the ether. Well, you'd better consult the Spiritual Telegraph, Major.”

This is said in his usual tone of good-natured banter, but it is exactly what I plan to do. With a quickening excitement that I seek to control, or at least to conceal from my companions, I bend down and unstrap the lid of the leather case stored under our feet. Inside is the apparatus that has occupied my private thoughts for so many months, the climax of my investigations into the relation between aeroelectricity and geomagnetism that go back as far as the
Greenland expedition of 1882. It consists of a coil of fine wire wrapped precisely around a fiber cylinder, a condenser made of tinfoil and waxed paper, and a crystal of galena over which is poised a tiny hairspring. The crystal is connected through a pair of insulated copper wires to the magneto-auditory converter, which to tell the truth is an ordinary telephone receiver manufactured under the Bell-Edison patents. Finally, there is the aerial coil or catching basket, consisting of more copper wire wound around a frame and rotatable through a pair of pivots. I erect all this and verify that the connections are tight. Then, holding the receiver to my ear with one hand, with the other I gently touch the hairspring to various points on the galena crystal.