They sat on their little ledge, too breathless and tired to speak or to care, or even to think of the earth beneath them at last. And it was barely a perch, besides, which the angering waters threatened to sweep them from. They must ascend. They secured the last of their precious possessions within the well of the remaining, half-ruined kayak, lashing them in like a strange papoose, found a crevice running up the side of the cliff face, and with every muscle a painful knot they winched themselves into it one by one and inched up, their legs braced in the gap and their backs pressed hard against the black rock, each of them praying that the man above would not slip and take the rest in his fall. It might have been half an hour or more before they reached the top and, without a pause to tend their bruised spines or rest their thighs, turned immediately to hoist the kayak up, every smack of its side an anguish, until at last it was safe, the precious bundles intact, even if the hull was hopelessly broken.
And then they paused. The sun had again broken through while they toiled and was warm through the rags they were clothed in; no hard bright ice shone back to blind them, but a scrubby brown earth covered in sparse furzy growth, through which, incredibly, tiny flowers grew. And they could hear birds, the same that they had heard in the distance a day ago, just catching the sound above the crash of the ocean. High above the churning sea, a flight of eider ducks passed, oblivious to suffering and to the joy they brought the starving, ragged men below them. They cast themselves down on the ground on their backs and felt the certainty of soil below them for the first time in over two years, watching the clouds twist and furl above them, each in his own private retreat–a meadow, a lakeside, a father’s farmland, a garden.
The omelette was a luxury he allowed them only for that first meal, until they could be sure of a source of fuel. They were not yet saved; far from it. It was almost September. Aside from the blessing of the eggs, they had barely enough provisions to feed them for two weeks unless there was more hunting to be done; and there were precious few rounds left for the rifle. Edward didn’t dare waste one to see if it would fire at all, after weeks of drenching in salt water. And they would need shelter and stores if they were to last the winter here. He walked the coastline; the telescope revealed, to the east, what he took to be a smaller island, and another to the north-east which he thought was separate from their own, although a thick frozen channel seemed to cement them together. At the southern end of their long, thin island, a greenish glacier carved out a path and ended in a sheer wall of ice to the sea. He could not find its likeness on any map; he still could not say if they were at the edge of the archipelago, far to the west, or on the western edge of the northern group.
If they could attempt to repair the kayak, they might scout the outlying islands. But without wood and tar, barely any tools, and only their own ruined and essential clothing to act as canvas, he doubted it would be possible. And if the party was to be split, how could he split them? He would need Nordahl’s strength and know-how; but could he leave the silent Russian and the stupefied boy in the doctor’s care? The island had saved them, and now they were trapped. They would have to wait out the winter, make what repairs and preparations they could, and set out on the ice again on foot, as soon as it would bear them in the spring.
So he reasoned it out as he wandered the clifftops, his telescope fixed on the hopeless horizon, a king made captive in his own castle.
I have picked you a bunch of yellow flowers, my love. They are flimsy, frail and sullied by my hands, but I know you would see their beauty. Emily, if you were here would you absolve me? I have led these men on a fool’s errand, and can only hope to preserve them through the months to come, and fulfil at least part of my promise and come back to you. I beg your forgiveness that I am delayed here, but hope that our meeting will be the sweeter for our longer parting.
In England, Emily’s hope was fading as the leaves turned brown; she saw the willow yellow and pall and resign, by scraps and tatters, its glory. She knew, as the first frosts came, that he would not return that year; the gunpowder crispness of the autumn air that she had always relished had no joy in it, for though the bonfires burned and the fireworks burst and dazzled, she knew that he would not return until the earth turned green again. The north wind that reached her in England, blowing the sky clear so that the stars shone brighter with the chill of it, had on its breath the ice that now must be closing about him, and at night she left her window open to feel it on her skin. He must by now be snug in his cabin below decks, and would have to wait all winter, storing up his triumph to tell her when he returned (yes, his triumph, because he could not have failed to reach it). So, he would not come this year, he had been detained by the sea; but he would be free of it in the spring and come back to her, and she had waited this long, she would wait. She could not allow herself to believe anything otherwise; for all his black mouth gaped at her in her dreams, it had no words to tell her that she would care to hear.
They spent the first day choosing a campsite, then set about salvaging the remains of what they carried. With oil and a knife, like Romans bathing, they scraped their skins of blackness as much as they could, laughing at the stripes of white left behind by the blade. Cleaner than they had been in months, with tea and the most delectable brown, rubbery omelettes they had ever tasted, they stretched themselves out on the hard, solid earth and toasted the discovery of Mackley’s Land. Edward raised his tin cup to their tribute and inwardly prayed that the island was already named, because if this Utopia was truly a new-found no-place, he might never know where it lay or find his way back from it, and it would remain for ever unmarked on the map.
In the days that followed, they began to build a rough stone shelter, tipping raw eggs down their throats whenever they felt hungry. The eiders’ nests were to be found in every crevice, their long white eggs abundant. Edward tested the rifle on a roosting hen he came upon while egg-hunting; it worked. He would not risk trying to shoot them out of the air (despite Nordahl’s well-meant jibes — ‘You call yourself an English gent, Captain? Are you waiting for the season?’), but when he found such easy shooting he took what he could. Twice he came upon a mother carrying her brood one at a time to the water in her beak, while the others waited patiently for their turn; it needed only one shot, for it was easy to wring the little ones’ helpless necks when they were left undefended, for all they pecked and flapped. They skinned and dried his kills and rendered the fat, salivating, scrimping out small portions of fresh meat, knowing they must lay away provisions; and in the meantime threw another egg down their gullets, garnished for breakfast and supper with the red lichen that clung to the rock. After such privation, the glut was too much for them; they could not control their glee, feeling the dark yellow yolks slip down like oysters. Within a few days, this diet had its inevitable effect.
Andreev complains terribly of his stomach and is beginning to stink to high heaven, as I fear we all are. He says it is the eggs but what else have we to eat? The duck meat must keep, and he will not take what else there is. High heaven indeed; we are so high now upon the world and there is no heaven here in sight. But still, the little yellow flowers, and solid land, are perhaps a poor man’s paradise.
Dr Wilkinson did his best to stave off treating their condition with laudanum, the panacea of the age; he feared wasting their only anaesthetic, he said, although he hoped they would not have need of it. But as the men grew daily weaker, Edward at last insisted that he open the chest and dose them, to soothe their suffering guts. The doctor hesitated, relented, fetched the case from the shelter.
‘Very well, Captain,’ he said, and without taking his eyes from Edward’s he unlatched his store, and lifted out first one then another empty jar, and another half full, which he handed to Edward. There was a single full one left in the case. A pitiful wail drew Andreev and Nordahl from their work to see their captain and the doctor, eyes locked in understanding, and, a little way off, Compton-Hill crouched on the ground clutching his knees, his gaze wide
and watery, chewing and chewing at his dirty nails.
‘I see.’
‘He must have been taking the key while I slept. I should have seen it. I thought he was merely exhausted, and frightened. I didn’t think to check the chest until two days ago and… Look at him. It’s a shame, that’s all, a damn shame. I thought to keep it from his father. I’m sorry, Edward.’
Edward turned to the boy, whose eyes remarkably widened further, and welled with tears.
‘Yes, I see. Thank you, Doctor. Hugh, fetch yourself a blanket, I think you will need it. We will watch over you until it’s out of your system; if you can’t stand it, you will have to learn to do so. And, so help me, you had better pray that none of us has greater need of what you’ve taken.’
Ignoring the grizzling, penitent heap at his feet, he turned to the others. ‘Anton, you suffer worst; ask the doctor to give you a drop. For the rest, we must be more careful, and curb our greed.’
They pegged out a smaller shelter to the side of their stone hut for Hugh to sweat and shiver in, so that their own already troubled rest might not be further disturbed. Edward heard him moaning, bleating, sometimes shouting in his fever; Wilkinson tended him with water and the cleanest cloth they could muster, under strict instruction to feel no pity. His bowels, so long stopped by the remedy the others needed, were let loose, and although his appetite did not recover he was fed only on precious bouillon, unable to digest anything more substantial, taking mournful choking sips from the spoon the doctor held for him between whining apologies. Edward knew the disgust the others felt; but when Nordahl came to him to ask why the boy should have this privilege while Anton must endure, he could only reply, ‘Would you let him die, Lars?’ He did not press for an answer, uncertain of his own.
With every passing midnight the skies began to grow perceptibly darker. Soon, twilight was upon them. The eiders’ eggs grew scant within two weeks of their landing, and one evening, as they settled for the night, Hugh called out to them in a voice so measured and sane that they were drawn outside to find him gazing at the pale purple sky, against which the sad silhouette of hundreds upon hundreds of birds on the wing was cast. Wherever this island was, the five men were left alone upon it; unable to take flight so easily for warmer climes, they must make it their home for the winter.
High over the house, a flock passes, wings spread and rising on an updraught. Julia watches as they vanish into the depthless blue, with a soar of sadness, knowing that homesick pull of the heart.
The end
The weeks passed. They struggled to keep a fire burning with the little fuel they could scavenge, and knew that the darkness would grow ever colder; they stayed huddled together for twenty hours in the day, having brought a chastened and haggard Hugh back into the fold. They covered the floor with what grasses they could crop; the interior of the hut, windowless but for a small hole for a chimney, was dank and reeking despite the cold, the oil that they burned giving off a greasy black smoke which still could not cover the stink of their own effluence. There was nothing to hunt for; the winter sea was barren, the nests empty, disintegrating and finally covered with snow. The sea froze again, ice clinging to the coast and spreading outwards over the open water like a creeping bloom on fruit skin, flowering in patches until all around was whiteness, under the dark and flashing sky. Edward’s record becomes largely diagrammatic, numerical: he lists their ever-decreasing supplies; the angle of the lowering sun, and the moon when it makes its appearance in September; his few active hours spent mapping and mapping the unknown coastline. When he can bear to write in words, he can only offer despair: ‘How impatient I was to leave our safe, warm ship for this. If any of us live they will say I was a fool, and rightly. Your foolish husband again bids you goodnight, for it seems the sun has set.’
Late evening, the sun long since vanished now: in her mind Julia inks in the contours of an unknown vista, a silhouette against the snow.
Edward gazed out over the frozen sea. The sky shivered gold and rose above him, silver cords winding across it. The lights no longer seemed to blaze the fire of his own ambition; they were remote, aloof, teasing his vanity with their impossible insubstantial beauty. He was half blind with hunger. Then something moved, out on the ice: a fox, now as motionless as one of John’s mounts, paw raised to run. His sight sharpened; he watched her with a clarity akin to hallucination. He could see her skinny flanks shudder. He could see the rime of her breath on the air. She could smell the stink of him. Her black eyes met his. He fired.
The faces of his companions appeared at the door to the shelter, alerted by the blast in the silence. It echoed about their heads, as hollow as the night. Edward had reached his kill; they watched as he lifted her, scrambling up a ramp of rock and ice until he reached the top and fell to his knees, laying her down so that he could support himself with both hands, light-headed, laughing. He struggled to his feet. He could barely carry her; he brought the body to them, holding her aloft by the scruff of her scrawny neck.
‘A pity to let this one pass me by.’ It was as close as he could come to a joke in this misery.
And so they fell upon that last feast, the last fresh blood they would taste. They retreated to the shelter, hunkering in together, pulling the lice from their rags and slipping them between their lips, just to feel the crunch between the teeth. They did not speak unless it was to speak of dying; none believed they would be saved in death.
Julia puts a hand to her mouth, forces herself past it, past the place she has so often stopped. Having followed him so far, all through his journey, she cannot now abandon him.
Anton lost his left hand today; the right is but a thumb. He has lost, too, his English; I do not think he knows where he is, or what. He does not return a man’s gaze, but seems to search our faces as we feed him, as if he cannot quite make something out. As if to say, politely, ‘Forgive me but I don’t quite follow.’ Like those happy drunks and madmen one sees on the city street. With his bland smile, dribbling, he is returned to infancy, and I am glad for him. He would not wish to know himself as he is.
Two days later, by Edward’s reckoning, Andreev died.
Dr Wilkinson began to fade, as quietly as he had lived; Hugh, distraught at the loss of the man who had pitied him, fussed around him with futile, frostbitten hands, swabbing at his face with a dirty cloth. In the half-sleeping fug of the shelter, Edward became aware of a muttering, low and unceasing for hours, stopped only by the precious pieces of freshwater ice that Hugh placed on his patient’s tongue. In what should have been the morning, the murmur of the doctor’s mind at last ran down. Hugh, who had let his head drop exhausted in the man’s lap, was woken by the silence, filling it with a wail when he saw the dead eyes, the jaw agape. He was alone with the corpse; he could hear outside the striking of metal against earth like iron; Edward and Nordahl were digging a grave in the hard ground.
It was some hours before they returned for the doctor’s body, exhausted, to find their labour doubled; for the boy lay prone, spittle still foaming at the corners of his cracked mouth, his pupils flooding his eyes black, wide with terror at whatever he had last gazed upon. They had to prise the drained glass phial from the clutch of his dead hand.
This, at least, is Edward’s tale; and there is no other to contradict him, so we must trust with Julia that this is how the boy met his end. ‘Hugh is dead, and the last of the tincture gone. For Lars and I there will be no last escape into oblivion. Perhaps I cannot blame him; perhaps I envy him. But now at least there is not the temptation; we will not be unmanned but go sober to our end if it comes.’
He was calmed by the moonlight but terribly, desperately lonely, a loneliness that was so hopeless it became one with the feeling of calm. No panic now; no fear or trembling, but for the cold. ‘The human spirit, Emily,’ he writes, ‘has reserves of fortitude that I had never wished to imagine, and that I hope you must never plumb the depths of; for they are what I call upon in the quiet emptiness of this desolation.’
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br /> And Edward is right: these weeks of darkness and ending are far beyond the safety of today’s sunshine; he does not have the liberty of simply setting the book down. To Julia, this above all is hardest to conceive of, this period of nothing but survival, of sleep and half waiting for the ease of death, and imagining sometimes, waking to darkness, that it is already come. But Emily, who lived and waited in comfort while he was starved and frozen, still knew in her way what it was to feel quiet and empty, and desolate.
The night drew on, day after day, without lightening; they waited for the sun. Their brief hours of daily toil were divided between exhausting ventures upon the floe, for freshwater ice to melt for drinking; salvaging what they could of sleds and snowshoes; and digging a last grave, so that one at least might be decently buried if such a time came. Edward does not reflect on this morbid labour, perhaps to the last resisting total despair; he insists on his belief in the spring. ‘We can do nothing but wait for the first light, and hope to last so long; wait for the birds to return and then I will walk back to you, if I have to crawl.’
The Still Point Page 17