The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘But Conway knew better. An old tutor of his was still at the college, and had passed on to him rumours that had caused Conway to seek me out. I had better say a little of these, for they must bear somewhat upon what is to follow.

  ‘As a child, like many others, I was given a volume of Andersen’s fairy-tales, and these affected me deeply, so that in imagination I often dwelt and wandered with the boys and girls, creatures and beings he describes. But one story above all I dwelt upon most often: ‘The Snow Queen’. I felt all the fascination for that chill empress to which his hero Kay succumbs, but more especially I felt the weird white magic of her ice palace calling me too, I felt it, as I should now say, like an ethereal allure, an enchantment upon me. It seemed so fine and remote from the common things of my life that I wanted only to be there, and earnestly felt that I should not wish to be rescued, as Kay was, no matter what the cost. Of course, many a child has felt the thrall of this story, I am sure, but whether they also made its wintry domain their own, over and over, I doubt.

  ‘Such was my inwardness in this and in other matters that I was long regarded as unsuited to school, and had only a succession of mild tutors, many of whom allowed me to read as I pleased, and contented themselves only, since this was their predilection too, with encouraging me in the acquisition of one or two sporting accomplishments.

  ‘The influence of the Andersen story, which I contrived to keep as a secret from my parents and my younger sister, made me always keenly glad when frost, fog or, for choice, snow descended, and our own world was transformed into a faint, dim echo of the Snow Queen’s realm. This was by no means uncommon in our gaunt corner of Sutherland. But, so eager was I for snow to arrive, that I began to acquire the ability to see it in advance. I am tolerably certain that this was little more than a morbidly alert intelligence as to all the meteorological signs that snow was on the way: but since I could not always resist exhibiting this gift, it quickly became a cause both of humour and of a certain wariness amongst those who knew of it. People felt it rather odd to have a weather prophet in the family or in their circle, especially of such a rarefied kind, unable to say anything of rain or winds or sunlight, but austerely and unfailingly accurate as to snow.

  ‘It was while I was at the University that this gift, this curious affinity with snowfall, developed in another direction. I relished to the full my freedom from home life, and in my own study, sparse though it was, my imagination ranged ever more widely than before, in those episodes of refuge I secured from the rush of new friendships, new experiences and new vistas of thought. There was a particularly bleak November in my second year, and I early discerned, with a tingling in my flesh, that we should soon have snow: and as soon as it fell, while I dare say most of my fellow scholars were immured under canopies of quilts, I dashed outside to the Old Field to enjoy it to the full.

  ‘So keen and on edge had I been in the days preceding this, that I had neglected to attend properly to either eating or sleeping, and I do not doubt I was in a peculiar mental condition, somehow preternaturally alert. However that may be, as I leant against the gate watching the silent, graceful gliding-down of the snow, I suddenly saw, with dazzling clarity, into the heart of each snowflake: I discerned its unique pattern. I did not simply see white pellets fall, a softly blurred descent: I saw intricacy upon intricacy, an exquisite dance of pale filigree. And as I stood there, overwhelmed by the experience, I also became convinced that I could make the snowflakes, some of them, by intense concentration, falter or swerve or momentarily halt as they floated down.

  ‘It was while I was rapt in this wintry reverie that ancient Castain, the Professor of Natural History, came by, walking his doleful and daintily-pawed Afghan hound, Ostra. He must have observed me keenly for some moments and I cannot doubt that my countenance must have had some sign upon it of the intense rapture I was experiencing, for he said nothing, but stood by, allowing the snow to form a dalmatic of white upon his black Inverness. At length, I discerned him in the corner of my sight and spoke in the exultation of the moment of how infinitely wonderful the inner crystals were, and, before I could recollect myself, I had told him of all I could see. To my surprise, he did not dismiss me as a young Romantic or as an inebriate, but took my vision gravely, and asked, kindly enough, if I would care to allow him to try an experiment. Thus it was that, in his rooms later that day, he verified under a microscope the designs of snowflakes that I sketched out, as accurately as I could, from simply staring at them and discerning their pattern; and in seven times out of ten my drawing was near enough to be true. Castain cautioned me to say nothing of this gift more widely, for it would surely be misunderstood, and the derision and intensity of interest it might excite could in itself drive this singular insight away.

  ‘It was shortly after this, in an access of over-exuberance, that I gained a brief notoriety for converting the statuettes of the angels and the apostles on the chapel walls into snowmen, often in unbecoming attitudes; and for this I was sent down for the quaint crime of blasphemy, though Castain did what he could to urge the authorities to clemency; my neglect of my studies did not help my cause. He had, however, a greater service he could do me, for Conway had been his student some years before, and when he learnt from him of the Spitsbergen expedition, he drew upon their shared interest in the esoteric to suggest my inclusion, giving the impression that I had helped him a deal in his researches into the properties of snow. That is how our introduction at the Iamblichus came about.’

  The Connoisseur paused, sipped somewhat at a shot of a nasturtium-flavoured spirit, the hue of burnt orange, savouring it on his palate, and remarked that he would omit some pages about the preparations for the voyage. Finding the place where he wished to resume, he began again:

  ‘We reached Ice Fjord in June after we had described a delicate measure through the floating ice floes which, serene and silent though they were, could have any one of them holed our ship and sent us down. These, to my exultant mind, were like mystic citadels of the great Arctic kingdom to come, as if a land could have floating watchtowers which might go wherever intruders arose: and, still harking back to my childhood I imagined them piloted by hidden winter-imps. I had remembered, of course, that Andersen places the furthest, most dreadful abode of the Snow Queen in Spitsbergen, and wondered at what half-heard myths from ancient whalers or walrus-hunters he might have drawn upon for his story. These weird white crags, palely haunted by the brilliant blue of the sky, and all luminescent under the bright sun, gliding within the glinting ripples of the ocean, were a constant allure to us, yet we knew we must keep our course true and avoid even the merest of them.

  ‘At our first sight of landfall, at the head of the fjord, we were all, I am sure, seized by the same restlessness to set foot upon this untrodden terrain. We were used by now to the absolute clarity of the air, and the unyielding blueness of the sky, as sharp as the edge of a whetted knife, but even the pure elegance of the ice-floes had not prepared us for the beauty of the island itself, peak upon peak of purest white, a great panorama of mountains, plateaux, crags and domes of sweeping crystalline sculpture, enough, as Conway observed, to raise “the arctic fever” in anyone. Though we had planned to navigate further in, we could not stop ourselves from making a landing, so drawn were we, and Conway went with one of the Norwegian crew to take the lie of the land. Garwood, the ablest mountaineer among us, could not be prevented from climbing Mount Staraschin alone, despite the rockfalls and avalanches which might imperil him. Trevor-Battye and Gregory contented themselves with searching for specimens, so I was left to make my own foray as I wished.

  ‘I took myself to a snow-cave formed by a great overhanging cornice and tried to train myself into the state of mind that had enabled me to see into the heart of the falling snow that day at university which seemed now so long ago. But though I felt the spirit of the island steal over me, and found I could not stop from simply gazing, I did not think that this was any more than the aesthetic wonder that my comp
anions were also feeling, though they might hide this beneath a practical busyness.

  ‘The only unusual discernment I think I achieved concerned the air; I was convinced that there was a fine, high, singing within it, more to be felt than heard, as if all the flesh were raised to alertness by a distant summoning, somewhat the way a hound’s whole body becomes taut when a strange far-off sound is heard.

  ‘Garwood, gruff, deep-eyed, ogre-like in his belted jacket and big boots, said little upon his return from the slopes of Staraschin, though we pressed him to describe what vaster expanses he had seen from its crest. “Very silent; but a listening sort of silence, if you take me” was about the most he offered.

  ‘We rejoined our boat and made our hesitant, careful way up the fjord to our scheduled landing, at Advent Bay, unloaded our stores and made our camp, without any particular incident. Then Conway, Garwood and I set out for our exploration of the unmapped interior, all boastful and gloating, as I now see, of how we would soon be across its wastes and watching the sea glint on the further shore.

  ‘The going, however, was not at all easy. We soon found that at this season Spitsbergen was not an island wholly of snow, but there were stony troughs coursed by streams of meltwater, and morasses of moss and mud, a slimy brown-green in colour, and our ponies and sledges often had to be hauled out of ruts or oozing pits. Even where we traversed snow, it was light and unformed, so that we sank down into it.

  ‘We laboured against these obstacles for several days, pushing ourselves to the limits to make what headway we could, until we reached a knoll which gave out at last into a mountain range of sheer snow. During all this dull haul my spirits had faltered considerably, for it was all we could do simply to make headway at a pace of no more than seven miles a day, and our only thought was to push ourselves on as far as we could, strike camp and seek some fitful sleep in tents battered by dense rain and dank gusts of wind. All our joy at the glimmering, unsullied land we had seen from the ship, had been quite sucked out of us and replaced with a grim hostility to a treacherous and shifting terrain. It was as if the island had been a hybrid heraldic beast, fair, silvery, crested and unicorn-white in its upper body but dark, foul, gnarled and reptilian beneath. Tiredness and dejection prevented me from remarking any other mood upon the land than this, but I have come to feel that this may after all have been a necessary purgation for what was to follow, for by the time we achieved the knoll we were thoroughly chastened in spirit and in body. On several occasions when we plunged into some rotting hole or were thrown down by some grinding cascade of stones, it was as though the land itself were actively assailing us, turning upon us, until at last we had begun to understand it somewhat, and to avoid the worst of its deceits.

  ‘We rested briefly for a day at the camp on the knoll and, as if the place knew that we had been humbled enough, we were spared further storms. Staring out over the range of low mountains before us, we began to become entranced anew by their bleak pale beauty. We took some days to ascend each of the gently inclined peaks before us, finding ourselves now on firmer, harder snow: and at times when we rested during these climbs, I began to hear again that wordless soaring call tremble through my limbs. At last, on reaching the top of a horned ridge, which we had left to the end of our survey as it seemed uninteresting, we saw before us a fine route into the heart of the island.

  ‘It was a great broad plateau of undisturbed snow, as far as the eye could see, gently rising and falling in long, slow hollows, a snowfield of the widest extent we had so far seen, beautifully high and bare: Conway has said, meaning it no doubt in a commonplace sort of way, that it “invited us to cross it.” But it did, I would aver; it did invite us, it called to us with a command we could not disobey. And so we set out, and though we had no real reason to suppose this any more adventitious than the other routes we had explored, yet we all three had an absolute conviction that this would lead us to a pass down to another shore.

  ‘The air was perfectly clear, ahead of us there was that bright expanse of snow, and on the distant edge curving banks and cornices of its smoothly carved whiteness. Here and there miniature peaks jutted up like incredible castles, as if they had been curiously contrived by master architects of the arctic, and I found myself thinking of them as perhaps the fortresses of the courtiers of the Snow Queen, casting who knew what spells in these wintry fastnesses. Staring keenly at these as we passed, I imagined them girt about with the banks of low cloud we had found on other journeys, and in my mind’s eye they seemed to flicker and waver and become not quite anchored to the land. As if we had not wonder enough before us, though, we witnessed a scene even more exquisite; for as it fell upon the glittering body of snow all about us, the sunshine was shivered by the ice-crystals into a glorious rainbow, actually lying on the snow-field, so that we quite literally walked upon a rainbow, and the wan, subtle hues played about us.

  ‘Subdued, over-awed, we marched southwards along the shimmering plain for above two hours, each with his own thoughts, until we came finally up to a crest that grew narrower and narrower, until we feared we had not, after all, found our route. It was as we paused, presented with a choice of numerous defiles, that I felt the thrumming in my flesh again and I glimpsed, disappearing into the furthest west passage, the quick flurry of an Arctic fox. I urged my companions, for no reason other than a surge of instinct, to follow.

  ‘Conway laconically observes merely that we followed the track of a fox to a peak (which we then called Fox Peak) where, as he puts it, “an enchanting and indescribable prospect burst upon us”. We had reached, in fact, one of the highest points in this part of the island, and could see the valley plunging down to the shores of Van Mijens Bay, all in wafting and dissolving ice-clouds. “If only,” Conway remarked, “some of those clouds would clear, we should probably see our way through to the bay”.

  ‘We stayed upon the peak for some while and the drifting cumuli performed a pale galliard below us, so that, as with the ice floes, I was struck by the thought that they were moved by some sensate force, guarding the island’s secrets by the use of these insubstantial citadels. But all the while we were willing them to shift aside or away. Half-mocking myself, as we gazed keenly on the white swirls and filaments, I wondered if I might work upon them as I had upon the snowfall back in the Old Field at university. Tired from the long day’s march, lean from the sparse rations we allowed ourselves, I could not be remote from the condition I had been in then. I stared fixedly below us and began to see in them all the great play of hovering droplets and crystals, to discern their individual pattern and their connectedness. I willed them to disperse.

  ‘The clouds cleared, and we descried our way. They might, of course, have done so anyway.’

  The Connoisseur halted again, rose, and stirred the fire to renewed warmth. ‘This is where Hazleton finds it hardest to describe his experiences,’ he commented, and paused thoughtfully. ‘I may say, by the way, that it was Gaspard who put me in touch with the librarian of the club that owned this account, and I had the feeling it was being deliberately entrusted to me. It has itself directed my research into many curious avenues—but they will have to await a later telling.’ He seemed as if immersed in a distant strand of thought, before reading further from the quarto journal.

  ‘We completed the journey over the next few days across this corner of the island, from one bay to another; the first of our crossings. But what Conway had really come to do was bolder still: to traverse the widest expanse of Spitsbergen, from the North West over to the South East, and go into its unknown interior. This first expedition had been but a dress-rehearsal for that. Re-victualling ourselves from the base camp at Advent Bay, and making contact again with our two naturalist companions, still assiduous upon the margins of the island, we prepared for the short voyage to our new departure point close to Magdelina Bay, and the hard campaign on foot across the trackless wastes.

  ‘From the outset, our journey was almost always ascending, making even harder dem
ands upon us than our first foray. No-one, not even Conway, made many comments; they had nothing to say except for commonplace observations. And we had to conserve our strength, as we had no real idea of what we would be experiencing. However, as we trudged on through the tingling, sunlit silence, I soon came to think that Garwood was keeping a special counsel of his own, as if under some sort of inhibition.

  ‘Not for the first time I wondered how much of my curious gift Garwood was aware of; whether Conway had told him, or that he somehow knew. And as we slowly tracked our way South the one moment, and more towards the East the next, I felt my affinity with the snow starting to make itself felt in such a way that I was certain that my previous experiences, even during what were periods of intense rapture, were as nothing.

  ‘As we gained altitude I began to feel that it would take very little effort indeed to slide off the snowfield. Although we were plodding upwards, we were walking against the curvature of the earth. When I had consulted maps and globes in order to ascertain the exact position of Spitsbergen, I had been struck by the entire archipelago’s remoteness, its position of seeming to cling to the steepening polar curve of the planet like some eyeless white parasite to a rotting fruit. The land seemed to be kept there in position by mere sufferance; traversing it, I felt that my position was infinitely more precarious. One wrong or uninformed step and I would not only slide back down the slope, but perhaps slide up and off of the earth.

  ‘I felt that Garwood, in his brooding silence, would have understood this. But I said nothing.