by André Gide
But once again a noise broke the stillness and slowly there emerged from the slough a woman who wore a veil resembling a mortuary shroud, her gray veil clung like mist to the rush-bed. The drooping lily inclined its chalice earthward; its sounds spilled out like seeds. And, as she fled, I saw her stoop down near a recess in the darkness and hang her lily like a bell from the neck of a waiting lamb. We found the lamb on the plain.
A third form appeared; sweat covered her face; behind her floated her train, like a tattered cloth, over the leaves of the rushes. And I saw her hold out the lily as she disintegrated and leave the disconsolate lamb with the bell which her dissolving hand had tied to its wool.
In the same way twelve women appeared; we found the lambs afterwards and, like shepherds without crooks, used our hands to guide the flock through the night along unknown paths, between clumps of rushes and off-shoots of ranunculuses.
When we returned to the boat, dawn was beginning to glow. Ellis was in some pain and slightly delirious. I noticed that day, for the first time I think, that her hair was completely blond; blond, nothing more.
The felucca began once more to move up the fluvial waters; long days passed in this way, but they were too monotonous to relate. The banks were always so alike that we seemed not to be making any headway. The stream slowed imperceptibly, stopped, and we rowed through stagnant water, deep and dark. On each bank stood a row of cypresses; from each branch there fell a somber shadow that weighed heavily on our souls. We heard our oars fall into the stream with a muffled rhythm, then the water lifted up by the oars fall back like heavy tears; we heard nothing else. Leaning over the water, each saw his face enlarged and enveloped by darkness for, because of the cypresses which had become gigantic, the water no longer reflected the sky. We looked often at the black water and often at our faces in the water. Ellis babbled incoherently in the bottom of the boat and uttered prophecies. We understand that we had come to the climactic point of our history. And soon, in fact, the gigantic cypresses grew smaller. But we were too overcome by silence and by darkness to be very astounded by a disconcerting phenomenon: the water was beginning to flow, but to flow in the opposite direction. Now we were going back down the mysterious stream. And as in a story read backwards, or as in a flashback, we were retracing our voyage; we came back to the familiar steep banks and again lived through all our boredom. The stolid storks were again fishing for mud-worms… I shall not relate the monotonous scene again; it was too trying to relate the first time. I shall not bewail the lack of proportions in the history; however for if it took as long to retrace the lethargic stream as to ascend it the first time, I was not aware of this fact; I no longer watched the cheerless banks and dour water glide by; only the thought of Ellis made me oblivious to the passage of the hours; or, leaning over the reflection of my unknown self in the water, I sought in my sad eyes to gain a better understanding of my thoughts, and I read in my tight lips the bitterness of regret that tightens them. Ellis! do not read these lines! I am not writing them for you! You would never understand the despair that grips my soul.
But the stream of boredom came to an end; the waters again became clearer; the low banks disappeared, and again we were at sea. Ellis was slightly delirious in the enlarged boat. The seawater gradually became so limpid that we could see the rocks on the bottom. Reflecting on all the boredom of the previous day, on the perfumed baths of the past, I studied the underwater plain; I recalled that Morgain, in the gardens of Haïatalnefus, had gone beneath the waves and walked in the algae. I was about to speak when I glimpsed among the algae on the sand, like an ethereal vision, a sunken city. Still uncertain, I kept looking, not daring to utter a word; the boat was advancing slowly. The walls of the city were visible; sand had filled most of the streets; some, however, still looked green like deep valleys between the raised walls. The whole town was green and blue. Algae reached from balconies down to the fucus-lined squares. One could see the shadow of the church. The shadow of the boat glided over the tombs of the cemetery; green mosses slept on, undisturbed. The sea was silent; fish played in the waves.
“Morgain! Morgain! Look!” I shouted.
He was already looking.
“Will you be sorry?” he inquired. As was my custom, I did not reply; but giving way suddenly to a burst of lyricism occasioned by the boredom we had experienced and the joy of seeing once more a town, a silent town, I exclaimed:
“We should be, oh! so comfortable under the cool water on the porch of the sunken church! The taste of the shadows and the humidity. The sound of bells under the waves. And the calm, Morgain!…Morgain, you can not know what torments me. She was waiting, but I was mistaken; Ellis is not like that. No Ellis is not a blond; I was sadly mistaken; I remember now that her hair was black and that her eyes sparkled as bright as her soul. Her soul was vivacious and violent, and yet her voice was very calm for she was contemplative. And the waif that I found on the bank was frail and forlorn. Why? First her parasol displeased me; then her shawl; then all her books irritated me. Yet one does not travel to recover one’s old thoughts; and then she cried when I brought these things to her attention. First I said to myself: ‘Oh! How she has changed!’ but I see clearly now that she is not the same person. And this is still the most absurd episode of the voyage. As soon as I saw her on the bank, I felt that she was misplaced. But what shall I do now? This is all very distracting, Morgain, and I dislike sentimental states of dejection.”
But Morgain seemed not to understand; then I started over in a milder manner.…
It was on the same day, a little after this serious conversation, that thin sheets of ice first appeared on the horizon. A current was carrying them toward temperate waters; they came from frozen seas. They were not melting, I suppose, but dissolving into the blue air, imperceptibly more fluid; They subtilized like fog. And the first sheets encountered, because the water was still almost warm, had become so thin, so diaphanous and diluted that the boat had moved along without our noticing them until alerted by the sudden coolness.
Toward evening their numbers kept increasing, as did their size. We moved through them; as they became even more dense, the boat would strike them and scarcely cut through them. Night fell, and we would have lost sight of them completely had not the light from the stars shone through them pale, purified and magnified. Thus through an imperceptible transition that defies narration, after the splendid shores and sunlit gardens, we were finally to pass through a morose climate and frozen seas and come to arid polar shores.
And imperceptibly also, languishing from her sickness, each day Ellis grew paler, giddier and more blond; she was becoming less and less real, and seemed to be fading away.
“Ellis,” I said to her finally, by way of preparing her for what was to come, “you are an obstacle to my union with God, and I can love you only if you too are fused in God himself.” *
And when the felucca reached a boreal region where wisps of smoke rose from the huts of the Eskimos, when we left her on the shore and immediately set sail for the Pole, she had already lost almost every vestige of reality.
And we also left there Yvon, Hélain, Aguisel and Lambègue—who were sick with boredom and seemed about to die from drowsiness—and sailed calmly on toward the Pole.
* The grotesque figure of Ellis recalls Gide’s inability to fuse in a normal manner the physical and the spiritual. Ellis appears in his Journals as Em, and elsewhere as Alissa, Emmanuèle or Madeleine. “All purity, love, and tenderness” in his other works, she is really his cousin (later his wife) Madeleine Rondeaux.
* We learn from his Journals that Gide frequently suffered embarrassment over his inability to say the right words at the right time.
* * Up to this point the narrator has used the familiar pronoun tu in addressing Ellis. Here he uses the polite form vous.
* Urien continues to use the polite form vous in addressing Ellis. Gide revealed the ambivalent nature of his love for Madeleine, and her patient suffering because of it, in Et nunc m
anet in te, written in 1947 and issued publicly in 1951.
VOYAGE TO A FROZEN SEA
A rather dilatory auroral sky; purple flashes on the sea where pale blue sheets of ice became iridescent. A rather chilling awakening because the limpid air was no longer pursued by warm breezes. The boreal region where we had left wan Ellis and our four sick companions the day before, though still visible in the distance, was on the verge of disappearing; a delicate buoy far out on the horizon linked the sky to the last waves and seemed to lift and lull the vanishing land. All eight of us assembled on the deck for a morning prayer, serious but not sad; then we raised our solemn voices and felt once more the tide of seraphic joy that had surged through us on the day when we drank crystalline spring water. Then aware of our joyous wills and wishing to seize them and sense them rather than to allow them to vanish, I said to them:
“The hard trials are over. Far from us now are the morose banks where we thought we would die of boredom, farther still the shores with their forbidden pleasures; let us acknowledge that we are happy to have known them. For one can reach this point only through them; the loftiest cities are reached by the most perilous routes; we are going toward the divine city. Yesterday’s tarnished sun is tinged with rose. Resistance first quickened our wills; nor was our idleness on the gray swards futile, for when the landscape disappeared, we were left with our wills completely free; because of our boredom, our indeterminate souls managed in those regions to become sincere. And when we act, now, it will surely be in keeping with our aims.” *
The sun was rising as we began our prayers; the sea radiated with reflected splendors; rays shot across the waves, and the illuminated sheets of ice, vibrant and responsive, shuddered.
Toward midday some whales appeared; they were swimming in a flock; they would dive under the sheets of ice and reappear farther away; but they stayed at a distance from the ship.
It was now necessary to steer clear of mountains of ice; as their bases were slowly melted away by waters still not very cold, they would suddenly capsize; their prismatic peaks crumbled and disappeared in the agitated sea, churned the water like a tempest, shot up again with cascades all around them, and kept oscillating for a long time in the tumultuous waters, uncertain of their posture. The majestic impact of their fall echoed across the sonorous waves. Sometimes walls of ice fell into the spouts of foam, and all these moving mountains were incessantly transformed.
Toward evening we saw one so large that it was no longer transparent; at first we mistook it for a new territory covered with immense glaciers. Rivulets plummeted from its summits; white bears ran along its edges. The ship came so close to it that its main yard brushed against a snag and shattered some delicate icicles.
We saw some in which were imbedded huge stones torn from the natal glacier and which therefore carried over the waves fragments of alien rock.
We saw others which had imprisoned whales when drawn together by some mysterious force; above the level of the ocean, they seemed to be swimming in the air. Leaning over the bridge, we watched the moving icebergs.
Evening fell. At sunset the mountains were opalescent. New ones appeared; they trailed laminated algae, which, long and fine as hair, appeared first as captive sirens, then as a vast reticulation; the moon shone through as a jellyfish in a net, as nacreous holothurian; then moving freely through the open sky, the moon turned azure-colored. Pensive stars went astray, whirled, plunged into the sea.
Toward midnight appeared a gigantic vessel; the moon illuminated it mysteriously; its rigging stood motionless; the bridge was dark. It passed close beside us; there was no sound of oars, no noise from the crew. We finally realized that it was caught in the ice, between two icebergs that had closed in on it. It passed on by, silently, and disappeared.
Toward morning, a little while before dawn, a cool breeze brought alongside us an islet of purest ice; in the middle, like a globed fruit, like a magic egg, gleamed an immortal jewel. It was a morning star on the waves, and we could not tire of gazing at it. It was as pure as a ray from Lyra; it vibrated at dawn like a melody; but as soon as the sun rose, the ice that had encased it melted and allowed it to fall into the sea.
That day we fished for whales.
This marks the end of my memories and the beginning of my undated journal.
* * *
Into the abyss transplendent with tempest-tossed spume, where no man had ever intruded upon the savage feasts of the albatrosses and eiders, Eric descended, swinging like a diver from a thick elastic cord and brandishing at the end of his naked arm a wide swan-slaying knife. A humid current rises from the depths where the green waves writhe and the wind drives the spume. The great frightened birds wheel and deafen him with the beating of their wings. Bending over and gripping the rock to which the cord is attached, we watch: Eric is above their nests; he descends into the heart of the turmoil; in snow-colored feathers and exquisite down sleep the young eiders; Eric the bird-killer puts his hand on the covey; terrified, the little ones awaken and struggle, trying to escape; but Eric buries the knife in their feathers and laughs when he feels their warm blood on his hands. The blood streams down their feathers, and their beating wings splatter it on the rock. Their blood streams down to the water, and their blood-drenched down is scattered by the waves. The great startled birds are trying to protect their young! Eric, menaced by their claws, slashes them with his knife. And then from the waves arises a vortex of enraged spume; driven between the walls of the abyss by the sea wind, white as the swans’ down, it rises, rises, rises, and driven furiously upward with its neverending spirals of feathers, disappears in the sky which we see, whirlpool blue, when we look upward.
On these schistous cliffs the guillemots build their nests. The females remain perched; the males fly around them; they cry out stridently and their cries and the noise of their wings deafen anyone who approaches. They fly in such great hordes that they darken the sky in passing; they wheel ceaselessly. Grave, motionless, never shrieking, the females stand expectantly in a row on a huge ridge where the rock overhangs slightly. They sit on their solitary eggs, deposited there furtively, like droppings, and not in nests but on the bare sloping rock. They sit there, rigid and grave, holding the eggs between their feet and tails to keep them from rolling off.
The ship ventured between the sheer cliffs, into a dark, narrow fiord; the rocks seemed to drop sharply to unknown depths in the transparent water, appearing at times to be the reflection of the cliffs; but the depths were dark and the cliffs white with birds. The males above our heads made so much noise that we could not hear each other. We were advancing slowly; they seemed not to see us. But after Eric, a skilled slinger, hurled a few stones into the opaque cloud and killed several of them with each stone, causing them to fall near the ship, then their redoubled cries enraged their mates on the cliff; leaving behind the nuptial rock and the hope of progeny, all of them took flight, emitting horribly strident screams. It was a fearsome army; we were ashamed of the commotion, especially when we saw all the doomed eggs, now forsaken and no longer held against the ridge, roll down the cliff. They rolled the entire length of the cliff, their broken shells leaving horrible white and yellow trails. Some of the more devoted brooders tried in taking flight to carry their eggs in their claws, but the eggs soon fell out and broke on the blue sea, dirtying the water. We were upset by the commotion and left in great haste, for the terrible stench of the coveys was beginning to engulf us.
… In the evening, at the time for prayers, Paride had not returned; we looked for him and called out to him until night, but we were unable to find out what had happened to him.
The Eskimos live in snow huts; their huts, stretched out across the plain, look like tombstones; but their souls are entombed with their bodies; a wisp of smoke rises from each hut. The Eskimos are ugly; they are small; there is no tenderness in their love-making; they are not voluptuous and their joy is theological; they are neither evil nor good; their cruelty is unmotivated. Inside their huts i
t is dark; one can hardly breathe there. They neither work nor read; nor do they slumber; a small lighted lamp mitigates the long night; as the night is motionless, they have never known the meaning of an hour; as they need not hurry, then-thoughts are slow; induction is unknown to them, but from three tenuous hypotheses they deduct a metaphysics; and the succession of their thoughts, interrupted from start to finish, devolves from God to man, while their life becomes this succession; they measure their age by the point which they have reached; some have never managed to arrive at the point of their existence; others have passed it by; still others have not noticed it. They have no common tongue; they are forever reckoning. Oh! I could say much more, for I understand them quite well. They are stunted, pug-nosed, slovenly. Their women have no diseases; they make love in the dark.
I am speaking of the more intelligent Eskimos; there are others who, at the dawning of the solemn day, cut short the succession of the syllogism and depart for the frozen sea and the melting snow in search of reindeer and moose. They also fish for whales and return with the dark, laden with a new supply of blubber.
Each climate has its rigors, each land its diseases. In the warm lands we had seen the plague; near the marshlands, lingering illnesses. Now an illness was springing up from the very absence of sensual delights. The salty provisions, the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the studied resistance in which we took such great pride; the joy of living wretchedly in unkind lands, and the strong attraction of the outside world on our enraptured souls gradually eroded our strength; and while our souls had then longed, serene, to undertake supreme conquests, scurvy was beginning to afflict all of us and we remained dejected on the deck of the ship, trembling for fear that we would die before finishing our tasks.* Oh, chosen tasks! Most precious tasks! For four days we remained in that condition, not far from the land of our expectation; we saw its icy peaks plunging into the slushy sea; and I believe that our voyage would indeed have come to an end at that point if not for the exquisite liquor that Eric had taken from the Eskimos’ hut.