by George Sand
Was it the effect of an eternal twilight, or the magic of these limpid blocks’ reflections, or of some other phenomenon whose notion escaped me? I saw clearly, not as in the full light of day, but as if by an electric light, sometimes veiled in greenish-blue, sometimes enhanced with purple or golden yellow. I could make out the smallest details of the sublime setting we were crossing, and which, changing in shape and aspect at each step, presented a succession of marvellous tableaux. Sometimes the icebergs were cut up into angular blocks, projecting immense canopies above our heads, fringed with stalactites, sometimes their flanks parted, and we passed through a forest of stocky, flaring pillars, monstrous mushrooms surmounted by capitols in a cyclopean style. Elsewhere, they formed slender columns, prodigious arches, regular obelisks, or were heaped up on top of each other, as if they sought to scale the heavens, then there were caves of a shimmering, ungraspable depth, heavy pediments of native palaces guarded by formless monsters. All the ideas of architecture were there as though sketched out, then abandoned in an attack of boundless delirium, or suddenly halted by hilarious disasters.
These fantastic regions move the heart of man, because he does not confront the implacable menaces without having sacrificed his life, and because he feels shaken at all times by forces which his science, his courage and his industry have not yet been able to vanquish; but, in the exceptional situation in which I found myself, my body protected by an inexpressible well-being and my spirit drowned in a still more astonishing feeling of security, I saw only the grandiose, the curious, the intoxicating elements of the spectacle.
Little by little I grew accustomed to the charm of this vision of external things, and, returning to myself, I wondered if what my memory told me of recent events on my journey was indeed real. There was complete certainty in the present moment. I was indeed in a light bark sledge, lined with bear and seal skins, drawn by three dogs of admirable strength and ardour. There were indeed two other similar vehicles in front of me, one of which must contain my uncle Nasias, the other the caravan’s guide, and the caravan was indeed behind us, following in our tracks. At the head of this caravan a light of inexplicable brightness was indeed travelling; but was this not some scientific lighting technique whose secret Nasias had not deigned to reveal to me?
My gaze fixed on the light radiating from the leading sledge, and I found nothing extraordinary in the fact that it carried a powerful lantern fed by seal oil, which the natives knew how to use to such good effect. Was it not insane to believe that a diamond could shine in the night like a lighthouse, and as for the agreeable warmth I was experiencing despite the climate, was that not probably due to a particular physical disposition? The horrible scene on the ship, moreover, was quite beyond belief. Up to that point my uncle, although stern, had shown his crew as much equity as solicitude. Our companions might indeed have got drunk to celebrate the start of their over-wintering, I might have seen them sleeping below decks; but the horror of their deaths, my uncle’s insane and cruel words, his unbelievable agreements with the Eskimos, and, finally and most crucially, the sudden appearance of Laura on the Tantalus, deep in the polar seas, all this bore the stamp of the most complete hallucination.
The thought that I was subject to attacks of madness threw me into great sorrow; I resolved to observe myself carefully and to make the greatest efforts to preserve myself from them.
An event of the most positive kind finally gave me back my sense of reality. We were making a stop on an islet, in the shelter of a magnificent rocky cave; we had just emerged from the floe’s frozen channel. My uncle got down from the sledge which was travelling in front of me; I hastened to look at the person who was emerging from the sledge in front of him, and, seeing the size and features of a frightful dwarf shaped like a truncated Hercules, I was unable to prevent myself laughing sadly at myself. I inwardly asked forgiveness from Laura for having seen her spectre in this grotesque Eskimo figure, and I waited for someone to come and untie me; for I was indeed truly bound hand and foot by sturdy thongs to my moving bed.
Well, my uncle said cheerily as our men were lighting the fire and preparing the meal, how do you feel now?
I have never felt better, I replied, and I believe I am going to eat most heartily.
Then that will be the first time in the two months since we left the ship, he replied, feeling my pulse; for, if I had not fed you with good broth in tablet form and piping hot tea, you would have died of hunger, so completely had the fever removed your sense of self-preservation. I was right to tie you on firmly and to attach your dogs’ reins to my sledge, you would have been mislaid on the way like a parcel. At last you are well once more, and you will not speak to me again, I hope, of the abandoned ship, the crew destroyed by a frenetic poison, nor of my daughter hidden on board in a trunk and condemned to act as our guide towards the arctic pole.
I asked forgiveness from my uncle for the stupid things I must have said during the fever, and I thanked him for the care he had given me without my knowing.
We ate a copious meal, and I was no longer astonished to see our provisions so abundant and fresh when I learned that they had been renewed several times en route by fortunate encounters with animals caught unawares in the snow, and night-birds attracted by the bright light of our lantern. I learned also that we had been constantly favoured by the brilliant phenomena of the pole’s electrical light, and, emerging from the cave, I was able to convince myself with my own eyes of the splendour of that natural form of lighting.
My uncle smiled at the chimeras I had harboured and the fact that I wished to confess to him in order to deliver myself from them once and for all.
Man is indeed a child, he told me. The study and examination of nature are not enough for him. His imagination must furnish him with puerile legends and fictions, while the miraculous rains down on him from the sky without any magician having anything to do with it.
At that moment, my Uncle Nasias seemed to me to be a perfectly right-minded, rational man.
While we were conversing, our men were building us a house. The roof of the cave was covered with a layer of ice thick enough to protect us from the winds getting in, they closed its entrance with a wall of snow-blocks, cut with remarkable speed and skill. Thus sheltered and well-warmed, we stretched out in our nice dry sledges, in the midst of our well-fed dogs, and rested as completely and as restoratively as marmots in their burrow.
I think back over that night of warmth, well-being and security in the polar ice fields as one of the most astonishing of my journey. I had the strangest dreams that night. I saw myself at my Uncle Tungstenius’s home. He talked to me of botany and reproached me for not sufficiently studying the fossil flora of the coalmines.
Now that you are travelling through lands that have been so little explored, he told me, you may find plants that are as yet unknown, and it would be indeed curious to compare them with those whose carboniferous schists have preserved their imprint for us. Come now, leave that sledge that madly wrecks our garden paths for a while; tie up those aggressive dogs that lay waste our borders. Try to find the oppositifolia saxifrage in those polar lichens; you shall make a bouquet of it for your cousin Laura, who is to marry on Sunday.
I tried to show my Uncle Tungstenius again that I could not be simultaneously in the realm of the polar saxifrages and in our botanical garden at Fischausen, that my dogs, who were sleeping on an islet in the Kennedy Strait, were no threat at all to our borders, and that Laura could not marry in the absence of her father; but he appeared to be in a most bizarre state of mind and in no way encumbered by the problem of ubiquity.
Just then Walter came, and entered so completely into my Uncle Tungstenius’s opinions on this matter, that I allowed myself to be convinced and consented to show them how the Eskimos beat the snow to make a sort of stone which withstands the intense heat of their dwellings, since this sort of artificial gemstone is the only kind of bed they have. In order to try it out at home, all we had to do was obtain some sno
w in high summer in our garden at Fischausen; for in my dream, time was also ubiquitous, and the June roses were in full bloom in the flowerbed.
We were engrossed in seeking this unlikely snow, when Laura brought us a great armful of eider feathers, assuring us that one could satisfactorily beat and solidify this material; to which we made no objection, and, when we had succeeded in turning it into a tablet fifteen feet square, the wind penetrated the opening of the cave which had crumbled away, and dispersed all the eider feathers to great peals of laughter from my cousin, who collected them in handfuls and threw the flakes in my face.
These imagined things provided entertainment, if one may call it such, in my slumbers; but I was woken by a joyful clamour. Our Eskimos, who were already up—for it would have been broad daylight, had we not been enveloped by the inflexible polar night—had spotted a group of wild geese that had just come down on our islet. These birds, tired or lacking discernment, allowed themselves to be caught by hand, and a veritable massacre was carried out: a pointless act of cruelty which revolted me, for we were not short of food, and the number of our victims far exceeded what we could eat and carry away with us. My uncle found my sensitivity misplaced, and mocked it so disdainfully that my suspicions returned. I saw flashes of ferocity pass across his usually grave, gentle physiognomy, reminding me of the scene, or the dream of the scene, on the ship. As for me, I was upset to see the destruction of these phalanxes of travelling birds whom my uncle classed as stupid and which were not wary of human stupidity, for they came to throw themselves into our hands as if to ask us for protection and friendship.
After a few days’ rest and feasting in the cave, we set off again, still travelling northwards on ice that was polished and shining almost everywhere. The fever took hold of me again the moment I was in my sledge, and, sensing that my mind was wandering, I bound myself to my vehicle in order not to succumb to the desire to abandon it and venture into the lonely, savage wilderness. I do not know if we had re-entered the mist; if the polar light had been eclipsed or if our lantern had gone out.
We travelled as if at random in the darkness, and I felt frozen with terror. I could see nothing in front of me, nothing behind; I could not even make out my dogs, and the quiet sound made by the wake of my own sledge did not reach me. At times I imagined that I was dead and that my poor self, deprived of its organs, was being borne away to another world solely by the impetus of its mysterious potentiality.
We were still moving forward. The darkness receded, and the moon or some dazzling white star that I took for the moon came to show me that we had entered an ice-tunnel, a few leagues in length. From time to time, a fissure in the roof or a break in the wall allowed me to make out the immensity or the narrowness of this sub-glacial passage; then everything disappeared, and, for quite a long time, which sometimes seemed to me to last more than an hour, we plunged back into the most complete, terrifying darkness.
During one of those moments, I felt a sudden attack of lassitude, despair or irritation. Deciding that I would never see the light again and telling myself that I was blind or mad, I began to untie myself with the vague intention of delivering myself from existence; but all at once the icy roof ceased to shelter me, and I distinctly saw Laura travelling close to me. I scarcely had the strength to let out a cry of joy and to stretch out my arms to her.
Forward! forward! she shouted to me.
And mechanically I whipped my dogs, although they were already doing at least six miles per hour. Laura was still travelling on my right, outrunning me by at most one or two paces. I saw her face clearly, for she turned it constantly towards me to make sure that I was following her. She was standing up, her hair streaming out, her body enveloped in a cloak of grebe feathers which formed thick, satiny folds about her, like new-fallen snow. Was she on a sledge or carried by a cloud, pulled by fantastical animals or supported by a snow-flurry at ground level? I could not be sure; but for quite a long time I saw her, and my whole being was renewed. When her image vanished, I wondered if it had not been my own that I had seen reflected on the shining wall of ice along which I was travelling; but I did not want to give up a vague hope of seeing her again soon, however insane it might be.
The various encampments and monotonous events of our journey have left few traces in my memory. I can scarcely gauge its length, as I am not certain of the date when we left the ship. I know that one day the sun reappeared, and that the caravan halted, shouting out for joy.
We were on terra firma, at the summit of a high, mossy cliff; behind us, the immense glaciers of the two banks of the strait which we had crossed stretched out as far as the eye could see to the south, and before us, the open ocean, limitless, dark blue, broke at our feet, on harsh volcanic rocks, with a fearsome sound. Never had music by Mozart or Rossini been sweeter to my ears, so much had the dismal silence and solemn rigidity of the ice fields frustrated my need for external life. Our Eskimos, drunk with joy, erected the tents and prepared the equipment for fishing and hunting. Clouds of birds of all sizes filled the pink sky, and we saw innumerable whales frolicking in the warm tides of the polar sea.
Others had reported and consecrated it before us, this long-problematic sea; but, almost alone, at the end of their strength and in a hurry to retrace their steps, so as not to succumb to the fatigue and perils of the return journey, they had merely greeted and glimpsed it. We had arrived at this limit of the known world all in good health, rich in munitions, having lost none of our dogs, and with none of our precious equipment damaged. It was a such an unlikely conjunction of circumstances, that the Eskimos regarded my uncle more and more as a powerful magician, and that I myself, forced to admire his foresight, his skill and the faith that had sustained him, gazed upon him with a superstitious respect.
The sun paid us a short visit that day; but its appearance in a sky all marbled with shades of pink and orange had given me back my confidence and cheerfulness. For a long time the sea was lit up by a twilight that was transparent as amethyst; we looked for a place sheltered from the wind, and at the foot of a glacier of immaculate whiteness we chose a charming valley carpeted with a fresh, velvety moss in which flowered lychnis, hesperis, lilac saxifrages, dwarf willows and Bermuda blue-eyed grass.
The following day, having noted that the seawater was as warm as in temperate climes, we gave ourselves the pleasure of bathing. I then climbed up onto quite a high peak with my uncle, and we took greater stock of the unexplored land we wished to reach.
This land was the west bank of the strait we had crossed, which stretched out in a straight line to the north on our left, while on our right the northern lands of Greenland seemed to flee away in a concave, horizontal line. In front of us lay nothing but the limitless sea. The western coast, also low-lying over a long distance, rose up again in powerful volcanic masses, the Parry Mountains no doubt, already seen from far off and christened by those who came before us, but never reached.
We have done nothing, said my uncle, if we do not go that far; we have two good canoes, and indeed we shall go; how does that seem to you?
We shall go, I replied; even if, as I believe, we find only lava and ice, we shall certainly go!
If we did not find anything else there, went on my uncle, it would be because your divinatory sense and mine had been obliterated, and then we should have to go back to mankind’s incomplete and tardy practical science to discover, in five or six thousand years perhaps, the secret of the polar world; but if you have doubts, I do not: I have consulted my diamond, this mirror of the globe’s interior, this revealer of the invisible world, and I know what incalculable wealth awaits us, what glory lies in store for us, erasing all of humanity’s past and present glories!
Uncle, I said, fascinated by his conviction, let me look at it too, this diamond whose bright light, which your eyes can penetrate, has been too powerful for my weak sight up to now. Make haste, the sun is already setting. Let me strive to raise myself to the heights of your vision.
Gladly,
said my uncle, presenting me with the gemstone he called his pole star. From the moment when you at last believe and submit, you will be able to read this talisman as well as I can.
I looked at the diamond, which suddenly seemed to me to take on the proportions of a mountain in my hand, and I almost fell off the top of the cliff into the sea when I saw in it the image of Laura, perfectly clear and clad in her ideal beauty. Standing, dressed all in pink, smiling and animated, she executed a great triumphal, gracious gesture, showing me a far-off peak well beyond the Parry Mountains.
Speak! I cried out, tell me …
But the sun was disappearing into the purple of the sea’s horizon, and I could no longer see anything in the diamond but the sky and the waves.
Well, what did you see? said my uncle, taking back his treasure.
I saw Laura, and I believe, I replied.
We resolved to wait until the days were longer. Our encampment was most agreeable and abundantly provided with game and firewood. The shore was covered with driftwood debris, and the mountains were clad in a thick layer of lichen. I was extremely surprised to see the remains of powerful vegetation beached on this coast.
I, said Nasias, am surprised only by your surprise. Beyond these far-off banks whose details our eye questions in vain, I do not doubt that there exists an Eldorado, an enchanted land where the cedars of Lebanon are wedded to gigantic laburnums and perhaps to the richest products of tropical nature.
My uncle’s assertion appeared a little risky to me, and I keenly regretted having neglected the study of botany, which would have enabled me better to analyse the plant remains I had before me. It seemed to me that I could sometimes recognise among them the stems of tree ferns, sometimes the overlapping bark of immense palm trees; but I was not sure of anything, and I lost myself in conjectures.
After the pleasantest of camps, we were disposed to undertake the crossing of the polar sea, when our Eskimos, who up till then had been so confident and joyful, remarked to us that, given the time needed for the return journey and the exceptional warmth of the year, we ran the risk of being caught in the thaw, which would make the route impracticable by sea and by land.