Against the Day (26 page)

Narvik himself, rumored never to
sleep, continued to fidget to and fro as he had all through the night, greeting
customers, bringing out orders from the kitchen, taking money, in general
attempting with Arctic humor to cheer those too long in line. “Canadian walks
into a bar—goes, ‘Ouch, eh?’ TwoItalians prospecting in the Yukon, one
comes running into camp. ‘I found gold!’—the other one says, ‘Eh, a
fangoola
you
anda you mother, too.’ What’s the favorite pickup line in
Alaska? ‘Woof, woof.
’ ”

“Couple of those Meat Olafs, I
guess,” Hunter said at last, “some root slaw, too, with that, oh and can I get
the Mystery Sauce on the side?”

He returned to the island through the
middle of a night now cold and unpopulated as a promise of the winter to come,
in perilous transit through icefields which sought as if with conscious
malevolence to take the unwary down like quicksand, without warning.

And in the ceaseless drift of the
ice, the uncountable translations and rotations, meltings and freezings, there
would come a moment, maybe two, when the shapes and sizes of the masses here at
this “Venice of the Arctic” would be exactly the same as those of secular
Venice and its own outlying islands. Not all of these shapes would be dry land,
of course, some would be ice, but, considered as multiplyconnected spaces, the
two would be the same, Murano, Burano, San Michele, the Grand Canal, each small
waterway in painstaking detail, and for that brief instant it would be possible
to move from one version to the other. All through his boyhood, Hunter
Penhallow had watched for the fateful moment, prayed for its thunderous assault
on his sensorium, for
 
immediate
translation miles and years away from here, to the City of Silence and Queen of
the Adriatic herself. He would “wake,” though it was more like having arrived
after an unsensed journey, in a room in the BauerGrunewald with a tenor in full
heartbreaking cry accompanied by a concertina just beneath the window, and the
sun going down behind Mestre.

But ice always crept back into his
nighttime dreaming. The frozen canals. The security of the ice. To return each
night to the ice, as to home. To recline, horizontal as ice, beneath the
surface, to enter the lockless, the unbreachable, the longsought sleep
. . . .
Down in the other world of childhood
and dreams, where polar bears no longer lumber and kill but once in the water
and swimming beneath the ice become great amphibious white seacreatures,
graceful as any dolphin.

When his grandmother was a girl, she
told him once, the sisters announced in school one day that the topic of study
would be Living Creatures. “I suggested ice. They threw me out of class.”

A
bout
midmorning
, Constance went to the ridgetop, looked down the long
declivity, down the shorn hills, and saw that the miniature ship that had once
lain waiting there, secured only by the lightest of kedgework to the Harbor
bed, seeming sometimes to tremble with its desire to be away, had gone at last,
bound for seas more emerald, aromatic winds, hammocks out on deck. Up here the
view of the sea continued as gray as ever, the wind no colder than usual,
perhaps a minimum austerity of growth, all in shades of white, buff, and gray,
pale grasses, failing by a visible margin to be green, bending to the wind
together, a million stalks all held to the same exact angle, which no
scientific instrument would measure. She looked to every horizon, taking her
time, saving south for last. Not a wisp of smoke, not the last, windmuted cry
of a steam siren, only the goodbye letter waiting this morning on her worktable,
held now like a crushed handkerchief in her pocket, in which he had given her
his heart—but which she could not open again and read for fear that
through some terrible magic she had never learned to undo, it might have
become, after all, a blank sheet.

rom the Journals of Mr. Fleetwood Vibe—

It wasn’t any Rapture of the North. Ask anybody who was
there. They landed. They conversed. They shared their picnic baskets. Jellied
pâté de foie gras, truffled pheasant, Nesselrode pudding, a ’96 Champagne which
they had frappéd in local ice . . .

It was the singing we became aware of
first. In such cases the first thing that has to be ruled out is collective
dementia, though none in the party could agree even on
what was being sung.
Only
after prolonged sweeps with fieldglasses in the direction of that shrill and
unfamiliar music did any of us detect a dark dot, poised low in a frozen sky,
which slowly grew in size, even as the witless chorale, paradoxically yet
mercifully, seemed to abate, though not before the song was engraved upon every
brain. Dating from about 1897, it commemorated the reappearance on the north
coast of Norway of Fridtjof Nansen and Frederik Hjalmar Johansen, back after
three years’ journey into the Polar silence, within weeks of the ship they’d
set off in, the doughty
Fram.
If only for the sake of scientific
objectivity, I feel obliged to include it here.

The world’s gone crazy,Romancin’Over
Nansen and Johansen,Those sturdy young Pals of the Pooole!

Oh, my, there’s legions Besiegin’These
darin’ Norwegians, Where’er in the region they roooll!

Three years ago They sailed off in
the
Fram,
Now that they’re back, Life’s just muffins and jam!

They’ve all got ants inTheir pants,
’n’For Nansen and JohansenThey’re dancin’ right out of controool!

We were stunned at the immensity of
the vehicle which finally came to stand above us. There were scarcely enough of
us to handle the lines they threw down. We must have looked to them like
interchangeable insects, scurrying beneath.

“We are neither in danger,” we
assured them repeatedly, “nor, in fact, in need of any assistance.”

“You are in
mortal
danger,”
declared their Scientific Officer, Dr. Counterfly, a scholarly sort, bearded
and bundled like the rest of them, his eyes concealed by a pair of ingenious
goggles, whose lenses proved to be matched pairs of Nicol prisms which could be
rotated so as to control precisely the amount of light admitted to each eye.
“Maybe you’ve been too close to see it
. . .
.
We, on the other hand, have seen little else, since clearing the
Eightieth Parallel. A Zone of Emergency has been declared for hundreds of
miles’ radius. The peak in whose lee you have chosen to set up your command
post is far too regular in shape to be the
nunatak
you imagine it. Did
none of you suspect an artificial structure? In fact it was not situated here
by accident, and you could have chosen no site more perilous.”

“Ah,” twinkled Dr. Vormance, “and you
can see right down through the snow at the base of it, I suppose.”

“Nowadays, as you know, sir, there
are Rays, and there are Rays, and it can be readily contrived for wavelengths
other than those of light to travel all the way through even the most obstinate
of media.”

Nunatak,
in the Eskimo tongue literally “land
connected,” refers to a mountain peak tall enough to rise above the wastes of
ice and snow that otherwise cover the terrain. Each, believed to have its own
guardian spirit, is alive, an ark sheltering whatever lichens, mosses, flowers,
insects, or even birds may be borne to it by the winds of the Region. During
the last Ice Age, many of our own mountains in the U.S., familiar and even
famous now, were
nunataks
then, rising in the same way above that
ancient frozen expanse, keeping the flames of species aglow till such time as
the ice should recede and life resume its dominion.

At their invitation we crowded into
the spacious control cabin of the great airship, where scientific gear occupied
every available cubic—perhaps hypercubic—inch. Among the
fantastical glass envelopes and knottings of gold wire as unreadable to us as
the ebonite control panels scrupulously polished and reflecting the Arctic sky,
we were able here and there to recognize more mundane items—here Manganin
resistanceboxes and Tesla coils, there Leclanché cells and solenoidal magnets,
with electrical cables sheathed in commercialgrade Gutta Percha running
everywhere.

Inside, the overhead was much higher
than expected, and the bulkheads could scarcely be made out in the muted light
through three hanging Fresnel lenses, the mantle behind each glowing a
different primary color, from sensitiveflames which hissed at different
frequencies. Strange sounds, complex harmonies and dissonances, resonant,
sibilant, and percussive at once, being monitored from someplace far Exterior
to this, issued from a large brass speakingtrumpet, with brass tubing and
valvework elaborate as any to be found in an American marching band running
back from it and into an extensive control panel on which various metering
gauges were ranked, their pointers, with exquisite Breguetstyle arrowheads,
trembling in their rise and fall along the arcs of italic numerals. The glow of
electrical coils seeped beyond the glass cylinders which enclosed them, and
anyone’s hands that came near seemed dipped in blue chalkdust. A Poulsen’s
Telegraphone, recording the data being received, moved constantly to and fro
along a length of shining steel wire which periodically was removed and
replaced.

“Ætheric impulses,” Dr. Counterfly
was explaining. “For vortex stabilization we need a membrane sensitive enough
to respond to the slightest eddies. We use a human caul—a ‘veil,’ as some
say.”

“Isn’t a child born with a veil
believed to have powers of second sight?” Dr. Vormance inquired.

“Correct. And a ship with a veil
aboard it will never sink—or, in our case, crash.”

“Things have been done to obtain a
veil,” darkly added a junior officer, Mr. Suckling, “that may not even be
talked about.”

“Interesting. How’d you come by
yours?”

“A long history, of some complexity.”
At this point Science Officer Counterfly advised us that the Special Ray
Generator had come up to speed, enabling us to view the
“
nunatak
”
in a different light, so to speak. He
led us into an adjoining compartment, where translucent screens glowed at
various colors and intensities, and over to a panel, before which he seated
himself.

“Now, let’s adjust the gain here
. . . .
Good. Can you see it? Look on the
reflectingsheet, there, just below the quartzwork.”

It took some moments to interpret
what the curious
camera lucida
was revealing. At first all was a blurry
confusion of strange yellowish green, in which areas of light and dark moved in
a squirming restlessness, seeming in their slow boil to penetrate, while at the
same time to envelop, one another. But once taken into that serpentine
hypnosis, we became aware that the frame of visibility was moving ever
downward, even as the glaucous turmoil began, here and there, to coalesce into
a series of inscriptions, rushing by, that is, upward, too fast to read, even
had the language been familiar.

“We believe them to be warnings,”
remarked the airship Commander, Professor St. Cosmo, “perhaps regarding the
site of some sacred burial
. . .
a
tomb of some sort
. . . .
”

“Uneasy reference,” chuckled Dr.
Vormance, “I take it, to the recent misfortunes of certain Egyptologists
imprudent enough to have penetrated
those
realms of eternal rest?”

“More like due diligence,” replied
Dr. Counterfly, “and a respect for probabilities.” He gestured toward the image
transmitted by the prisms of the instrument, which had been growing steadily
clearer, like a fateful dawn none await with any eagerness. Too soon we
discovered that we could not look away. Though details were still difficult to
make out, the Figure appeared to recline on its side, an odalisque of the
snows—though to what pleasures given posed a question far too
dangerous—with as little agreement among us as to its “facial” features,
some describing them as “Mongoloid,” others as “serpentlike.” Its eyes, for the
most part, if eyes be what they were, remained open, its gaze as yet
undirected—though we were bound in a common terror of that moment at
which it might
become aware of our interest
and smoothly pivot its awful
head to stare us full in the face.

Oddly, questions of its being “alive”
or “conscious” never figured in our decision to recover it. How deep did it
lie? we wanted to know. Was there snow all the way down there, or would we run
into rock of some kind? Practical matters. A muscular approach. Not a dreamer
in the lot of us, to be honest, much less any dreamer of nightmares—the
presence of at least one of whom, on any expedition of this sort, ought in
future to be required by statute. Whatever we thought we had seen upon the
viewing instrument, we had already, in mute fear, dismissed.