Poe - [Anthology]

by Edited By Ellen Datlow

  When the Christina left him at Southampton Island he was oblivious to the crew’s concern for a man whom they obviously thought mad. Yet they did not try to dissuade him; they had business to attend to, and only a short time before the ice closed in and either forced them home or sealed them in place for long, dreary months. The captain did try, on one occasion, to stop Wallace; but after a few moments he ceased his efforts, for the look in the other’s eyes showed that no words the captain could muster would mean anything. At least the man was well provisioned; whatever qualms the captain might have about his mental state, his physical well-being was assured for a time. And once off the ship he was no longer the captain’s concern.

  Wallace had studied well the texts with which he had provided himself. In addition to clothing and food and tools, he had purchased numerous small trinkets—mirrors, knives, sewing needles, nails—and they paid handsome dividends amongst the Esquimaux, who were at first inclined to laugh at the kabloona come to live among them, but soon learned that he was in earnest about learning their ways. Before long Wallace had shed the outward garb of the white man and adopted the clothing of the Esquimaux, their furs and skins so much better suited to the land than his own cotton and wool garments. Their food he found more difficult, at first, to tolerate; it took many attempts before his stomach could accept the raw blubber and meat without convulsing, but little by little he came to relish it. His first clumsy attempts at building a snow house, or igloo, were met with good-natured laughter, but before long he was adept at wielding the snow knife, a seemingly delicate instrument carved from a single piece of bone which ended in a triangular blade of surprising sharpness. He learned to judge the snow needed for blocks, neither too heavy nor too light, and fashion the bricks so they were tapered where necessary. He learned to make windows of clear ice, and of the importance not only of a ventilation hole at the top of the structure, but of ensuring that it was kept free of the ice that formed from the condensation caused by breath and body warmth, lest it become a tomb for those inside.

  The casual way in which the Esquimaux men and women shared their bodies with each other shocked him, at first; after a time he came to see the practicality of sleeping, unclothed under furs, in a group, but he remained aloof from the women who plainly showed that they would welcome him as a partner. In all other ways he admired the natives of that cold land: what other travelers remarked on as their cruelty he saw as a necessity. Illness or frailty in one could mean death for all; there was no room in that place for pity, or sentiment, and he abandoned without regret the last traces of those feelings within his own soul.

  He became skilled at traversing the fields of ice and snow, and would often set out alone. The Esquimaux, who only ventured across the ice when necessity compelled them in search of food, were puzzled by his expeditions, which seemed to serve no purpose. In reality he was searching, always searching, for any indication that he was drawing closer to the proof he sought, the proof that would vindicate Symmes, and his own life. He did not mark, in that realm of endless snow, how long he searched; but eventually he realized that he would not find the answers he was seeking in this place of maze-like channels. Symmes had been correct when he said that the answer lay from the west, not the east; and if he had been correct in this, why should he not be correct in much else?

  When the Christina put in at Southampton Island in 1836 he had been cut off from his own kind for three years. The captain—the same man who had left him there—was astounded when he recognized, among the natives who crowded to the ship to trade for goods, the figure whom he had long thought dead. He was even more astounded when Wallace indicated—in the halting tones of one mastering a foreign tongue—that he sought passage back to New London. He spoke vaguely of business, but further than that he would not be drawn, except to say, of his time in the north, that he did not know whether he had found heaven on earth or an earthly heaven.

  * * * *

  His igloo is finished. Small as it is, he has had difficulty lifting the last few blocks into place. He is vaguely surprised that the seal meat, coming as it did to revive him after his body’s stores had been depleted, has not given him more energy. Instead, it seems almost as if his body, having achieved surfeit in one respect, is now demanding payment in another regard. After days, weeks, months of driving his body ever onward, all he can think of now is sleep; of the beauty of lying down under his fur robes and drifting into slumber even as the ice bearing him drifts closer to those unknown regions about which he has dreamed for so long.

  * * * *

  Wallace’s reference, in his article, to the west coast of America and “Bering’s Strait” suggests that he felt an attempt on the Arctic should be made from that side of the continent, and this would have been in keeping with Symmes’s own beliefs. No such formal expedition along the west coast was to be made until 1848, when the first of the expeditions in search of the Franklin party set out, but it is clear that Wallace undertook an informal— and ultimately fatal—journey of his own more than a decade earlier. An open letter from Wallace, published in the Richmond Enquirer in April 1837, states his intention of traveling via Honolulu to Hong Kong and thence to Siberia, “which location is ideally placed as a base for the enterprising Polar traveler, and has inexplicably been ignored as such by successive governments, which have declined to take the sound advice of men such as Mr. Symmes, whose work I humbly continue, and whose theories I shall strive to prove to the satisfaction of all save those who are immune to reason, and who refuse to acknowledge any thing with which they do not have personal acquaintance.”

  Wallace’s letter continues, “I shall be traveling without companions, and with a minimum of provisions and the accoutrements of our modern existence, for I have no doubt that I shall be able to obtain sustenance and shelter from the land, as the hardy Esquimaux do, until such time as I reach my journey’s end, where I shall doubtless be shown the hospitality of those people who are as yet a mystery to us, but from whom we shall undoubtedly learn much which is presently hidden.”

  It is not known when Wallace left Virginia, but the diary of the Rev. Francis Kilmartin—now in the possession of the Mission Houses Museum in Honolulu—confirms that he had arrived in the Sandwich Islands, as they were then known, by March 1838, when he is mentioned in Kilmartin’s diary. “Mr. Wallace is a curious mixture of the refined gentleman and the mystic, at one moment entertaining us all with his vivid and stirring tales of life among the Esquimaux, at another displaying an almost painful interest in any news from the ships’ Captains arriving in port from eastern realms. His theories about the Polar region seem scarcely credible, and yet he appears to believe in them with every fiber of his being.” In an entry from April 1838 Kilmartin writes, “We have said our farewells and God speeds to Mr. Wallace, who departed this day on board the Helena bound for Hong Kong. While I am, I confess, loath to see him go—for I do not foresee a happy outcome to his voyage—it is also a relief that he has found passage for the next stage of his journey, which he has been anticipating for so long, and which consumes his mind to the exclusion of all else.”

  From We Did Not All Come Back

  * * * *

  He had not wanted to return to Virginia, but there was that which needed to be done, preparations he needed to make, before setting out once more. He was uncomfortable with his parents, although not as uncomfortable as they with him. His father declared, publicly, that he would wash his hands of the boy, as if Wallace were still the feckless lad who had abandoned his studies so long ago; his mother thought, privately, that she would give much to have that feckless lad back once more if only for a moment, for she found herself frightened of the man who had returned from a place she could barely imagine.

  He left Richmond—which he had long since ceased to think of it as home—in early summer of 1837, and made his way to the Sandwich Islands, thence to Hong Kong, and thence—but later he could hardly remember the route by which he had attained the frozen shore of that far co
untry about which he had dreamed for so long. He seemed to pass through his journey as one travels through a dream world, the people and places he saw like little more than ghosts, pale and inconsequent shadows. It was not until he stood on that northern coast, saw once more the ice stretching out before him, that he seemed to awaken. All that he had passed through was forgotten; all that existed now was the journey ahead, through the ice which stretched as far as his eyes could see.

  * * * *

  The ice moves, obeying laws which have existed since the beginning of time. Currents swirl in the dark depths below, carrying the ice floe upon which he has erected his igloo, carrying it—where? He does not know. It is carrying him onward; that is all he knows.

  * * * *

  Kilmartin’s fears were well founded, for it is at this point that William Henry Wallace disappears from history. What befell him after he left Honolulu is one of the minor mysteries of Arctic exploration, for no further word is heard of him; we do not even know if he successfully reached Hong Kong, and from there north his passage would have been difficult. His most likely course would have been to travel the sea trading route north to the Kamtschatka Peninsula and then across the Gulf of Anadyr to Siberia’s easternmost tip and the shore of the Chukchi Sea, from whence he would have been able to start out across the treacherous pack ice toward the North Pole.

  Whether or not he made it this far is, of course, unknown, and likely to remain so at this remove, although one tantalizing clue exists. When the crew of the Plover was forced to spend the winter of 1848-9 in Chukotka, on the northeast tip of the Gulf of Anadyr, they heard many tales of the rugged coastline to the west, and met many of the inhabitants of the villages, who came to Chukotka to trade. One of the party—Lieutenant William Hulme Hooper—later wroteTen Months Among the Tents of the Tuski about thePlover’sexperience, and in one chapter touches on the character of these hardy coastal people. “They are superstitious almost to a fault,” he wrote, “and signs and events that would be dismissed by most are seized on by them as omens and portents of the most awful type... One native told of a man who appeared like a ghost from the south, who had no dogs and pulled his own sledge, and whose wild eyes, strange clothes, and terrible demeanor so frightened the villagers that they—who are among the most hospitable people on Earth, even if they have but little to offer—would not allow him a space in their huts for the night. When day came they were much relieved to find that he had departed, across the ice in the direction of Wrangel Land to the north, where the natives do not venture. They were convinced that he had come from—and gone to—another world.”

  Historians have debated the meaning behind Hooper’s “a man who appeared like a ghost from the south.” The author would, of course, have been hearing the native’s words through an interpreter, who might himself have been imprecise in his translation. Hooper’s phraseology, if it is a faithful transcription of what he was told, could mean that the stranger appeared in ghost-like fashion; that is, unexpectedly. However, another interpretation is that the man appeared pale, like a ghost, to the dark-skinned Chukchi people; this, when taken with the direction from which the man appeared (the course Wallace would almost certainly have taken) and his decision to head northeast toward Wrangel, means that Hooper’s description of “the man like a ghost” might be our last glimpse of William Henry Wallace, who would have gone to certain death in the treacherous ice field; although whether before, or after, finding that Symmes’s theory was just that—a theory only—will never be known.

  From We Did Not All Come Back

  * * * *

  The land ice—the shelf of ice permanently attached to the shore—was easy enough to traverse. He towed a light sledge of his own devising behind him; he had no need of dogs, and now laughed at Symmes’s idea that reindeer would have been a practical means of transport. Here there was one thing, and one thing only, on which he could depend, and that was himself.

  An open lead of water separated the land ice from the pack ice, and it was with difficulty that he traversed it. From that moment his journey became a landscape of towering ice rafters and almost impenetrable pressure ridges, formed by the colliding sheets of ice. On some days he spent more time hacking a trail through the pressure ridges, or drying himself and his clothes after falling through young ice or misjudging his way across a lead, than he did traveling, and would advance less than a mile; on other days, when his progress seemed steady, he would find that the currents carrying the ice had taken him further forward than he anticipated.

  He headed ever northward. He passed Wrangel Land on his left, and could have confirmed that it was an island, not a land bridge across the Pole connecting with Greenland; but by now such distinctions were beyond him. All was one here, the ice and snow and he himself, a tiny dot in the landscape of white. Did he believe, still, in Symmes? Would he have recalled the name, had there been anyone to mention it? But there was no one, and with every step forward he left the world, and his part in it, further behind.

  Each night he built his house of snow. The Esquimaux had built their igloos large enough to accommodate several people; his own houses were small, large enough to accommodate only one, and consequently he had had to train himself to wake every hour or so, to clear the ventilation hole of ice so that he could breathe. It was not difficult to wake at regular intervals; the ice cracked and groaned and spoke almost as a living person, and more than once he sat in the Arctic night, listening to the voices, trying to discern what they were saying. One day, perhaps; one day.

  His provisions, despite careful husbanding, gave out eventually, and for several days he subsisted on melted snow, and by chewing on the leather traces of the harness which connected him to his sledge, his only remaining link with his past. In reality, he was almost beyond bodily needs; he only remembered that it was time to eat when the increasing darkness reminded him that another day was drawing to a close. The seal was the first living thing that he had seen in— how long? He did not remember; yet instinct took over, and he killed it and ate it, and when he had sated his hunger he had a moment of clarity, almost, when his course seemed laid out, stark and level. Either he hoarded the seal meat, turned, and set back for the coast, or he continued, onward through the ice, toward what? An Open Polar Sea? Symmes’s hollow earth?

  It did not matter.

  Nothing mattered.

  His destiny was here, in the north, in the ice. It was all he had wanted, since—he could not remember when. Time meant nothing. The life he had left behind was less than dust. This was the place that he was meant to be.

  He would go on.

  * * * *

  He crawls into the igloo and fastens the covering over the opening, making a tight seal. His fur-covered bed beckons, and he pulls the robes over himself. Around and below him the ice cracks and cries, a litany lilting as a lullaby which slowly, gradually, lulls him to sleep.

  The ventilation hole at the top of the igloo becomes crusted with ice, condensed from his own breath.

  He does not wake to clear it

  And the ice carries him, ever onward.

  “The Brink of Eternity” was inspired by Poe’s “MS Found in a Bottle” (from which my story takes its title) and “A Descent into the Maelstrom,” as well as his non-fiction piece “Eureka.” It incorporates Poe’s belief that at one time mankind was united with the Godhead, and that there was a subsequent division, with man getting further away; at some point man will start to return towards the Godhead, and at the moment of collision there will be ultimate knowledge, as well as annihilation. We see this in the protagonists of the two stories I mention above, who fear their ultimate destiny, but also embrace it, realizing that they will gain knowledge they desire, even at the cost of their own death.

  The story itself is a mix of some fact and much fiction. Poe was a proponent of Symmes’s “Hollow Earth” theory, and a supporter of Joshua Reynolds, and Poe did write an article in support of Reynolds, which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger of
January 1837; the Poe quote I use is taken from this article. The two quotes from Symmes’s pamphlet near the beginning of the story are also real; all other quotes are fictitious, as is William Henry Wallace and the book We Did Not All Come Back. The Mission Houses Museum does exist in Honolulu; the Rev. Mr. Kilmartin and his diary are my own invention. Scoresby and Parry were real, while the Christina and her captain were not. The Plover did over-winter in Chukotka in 1848-9, and Lt. Hooper did write a book about the experience, called Ten Months Among the Tents of the Tuski, but I’ve put words in his mouth (or rather, in his book).

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  Delia Shermanis the author of numerous short stories, many of which are to be found in anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Her adult novels are Through a Brazen Mirror and The Porcelain Dove (which won the Mythopoeic Award), and, with fellow-fantasist and partner Ellen Kushner, The Fall of the Kings. Her first novel for younger readers,Changeling, was published in2006. She is an active member of the Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts and a founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation board. She lives in New York City and writes in cafes wherever she finds herself.