An Old Captivity (19 page)

Lockwood said: “It’s very inhospitable.”

In that clear air they could see well over a hundred miles. Above the jagged mountains the white line of the ice-cap was distinct. The sea was thick with pack ice for as far as they could see. The coastline was evidently rocky and indented; along its edge there seemed to be a wild mix-up of icebergs and rocky islands. They looked at it with awe.

“I believe the south-west coast, at Brattalid, is very different,” said Lockwood. “There is no pack ice there.”

Ross nodded. “It’s a different sort of place altogether. They have pastures there, and cattle—so they told me in Copenhagen.”

Alix stared ahead. “It doesn’t look as if there’s anything of that sort here.”

Homing upon the Angmagsalik wireless signals, in three quarters of an hour they were over the estuary. Ross switched off his receiver and stared down intently, glanced at his map, and stared down again. “There we are,” he said. “That’s it. See the wireless masts? Along by the water, where the river runs into the sea. There.”

The Lockwoods followed his direction. “I see them,” said the don. “There’s a little house there with a spire, like a church.”

Alix stared down incredulously. “But is this all of it?” she asked. “Seven or eight tiny wooden houses, like that?”

The pilot nodded. “That’s it all right.”

“But it’s not even as big as a village!”

Her father said: “It’s the biggest place in East Greenland. You’d have to go five or six hundred miles to find a bigger one.”

The girl said nothing.

Ross wound in the aerial, and circled low for a landing. The inner harbour was dotted with moored rowing-boats; in the outer harbour the pack was thicker than he cared about at all. When they had told him that there was little ice at Angmagsalik the term must have been purely relative; there was plenty there to impede the landing of his seaplane. For a time he flew in circles at about a hundred feet, choosing the lane between the icebergs in which he would land. Then he went up a little, and turned to the Lockwoods.

“I’m going to put her down in that lane—there,” he said. He showed it to them. “I’m going to fly over it first, about ten feet up. Would you keep an eye open for floating lumps of ice on your side, sir—and you on your side, Miss Lockwood? Especially the little black ones in the water, that don’t show up much. I don’t want to rip a float up in this place.”

The seaplane swept down towards the lane and flew along at slow speed close above the surface; they scanned
the water carefully. Then she went up again and circled round as they exchanged impressions.

“Right you are,” said the pilot cheerfully. “Down we go.”

He rumbled in very slowly over a floating berg, throttled, and let the machine sink down to the water. Then a quick, short burst of engine, the floats touched and sank down in the water, and the machine pulled up with a short run. Ross swung her round and taxied in towards the settlement, threading his way between the lumps of floating ice.

He turned to the girl beside him. “I’ll go straight to the mooring. It ought to be a red buoy, like the others. Would you mind hooking on?”

“Of course.”

She got into the back of the cabin and took off her flying suit and sheepskin boots; then she took off her stockings and put on rubber shoes. Finally she put on the lifebelt over her white overalls. As she was doing this, Ross taxied round the island at the harbour mouth and saw the red buoy on the water. On shore, some men were getting into a boat.

He turned round. “Right you are. There’s the buoy straight ahead.”

The girl opened the cabin door and got down on to the float with the boathook; a wave washed suddenly across her feet. For a moment she gasped, stunned by the cold of it. Then as the seaplane moved forward the buoy came to the float, she reached out and grabbed it, pulled it up, and snapped the cable hook into the ring. Ross, watching her from the side window, cut his switches and the engine came to rest.

Alix turned forward to him, catching her breath and laughing. “This water’s simply freezing, Mr. Ross.”

“I’m sorry—did you get wet?”

“My feet did.”

“Give them a rub, quickly. I wouldn’t fall in here, if I were you.”

“I won’t.”

She got back into the cabin, pulled off her wet shoes, and began massaging her feet. The boat pulled from the shore with three men in it, Eskimos, with merry Mongolian faces. It came alongside the float; Ross jumped down quickly on to the float, and held it off from bumping. One of the men shipped his oar, stood up, and said: “Me Thomas.”

He wore a very old seaman’s hat, a dirty white jumper of sailcloth, serge trousers, and home-made sealskin knee-boots; his face was copper-coloured and dirty, with a cheerful smile. The pilot said: “My name is Ross. Is the Shell representative here?”

The Eskimo beamed at him. “Me Thomas. Me Shell representative.”

The pilot said gravely: “I’m glad to meet you. Have you got my petrol here?”

The man nodded emphatically. “Plenty petrol. Plenty gasoline. Plenty oil. Plenty in store.” He pointed to the shore.

“That’s fine. We’ll come on shore with you and have a look at it.”

They collected their luggage, left the machine, and got into the boat. As they approached the shore a man came down to meet them, a white man dressed in a seaman’s jersey and top-boots like the rest.

“Good morning,” he said, speaking in English with a strong accent. “I am the governor. Have you had good flying?”

They went up to his house and trading post. He called his wife, an Eskimo, who greeted them shyly and took them upstairs to the attics. There were two rooms. In one there was a bare camp-bed with no mattress or bedding; the only other furniture was a couple of dead ducks hanging by their feet from the roof. In the other there was no bedstead, but a miscellaneous heap of pelts and woollen trade goods. The woman pointed to these hospitably. “Bed,” she said.

Ross said quickly: “It’s very good of you to let us stay here.”

She grinned and shook her head. Alix produced a laborious sentence in Danish; the woman grinned again, and made a deprecatory gesture. Then she said: “Vi vill spise snart,” and went down the steep ladder staircase to the room below.

Lockwood asked: “What did she say then?”

Alix said: “Dinner before long, Daddy.” She stared around her at the attics.

Ross turned to her: “I’m afraid it’s very rough,” he said. “I’ll get our sleeping-bags up from the seaplane after dinner, and we’ll be able to fix up something comfortable. But it’s not just like the Savoy, is it?”

Lockwood said: “Don’t worry about us, Mr. Ross. It’s very kind of them to take us in at all, in a small place like this.”

The girl said slowly: “I believe it’s going to be fun.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said the pilot. “Which room will you have?”

“I think I’d like to have the bed.”

“All right. After we’ve got the fuel on board we’ll bring the bags up here, and see what we can make of it. It’ll only be for one night, I expect.”

Alix asked: “Is Julianehaab like this?”

The pilot shook his head. “It’s a much bigger place. There are over twenty white people living there.”

They went down to a meal of pickled vegetables, bread and butter, and home-brewed beer. They found the governor to be a cheerful, hospitable man, much looking forward to his retirement in Denmark. His English was not so good as they had first supposed, and they very soon found that a combination of English with Alix’s Danish dictionary served them best.

The meal over, they went with Thomas to the fuel store. Ross was surprised at the amount of aviation fuel and oil of various brands that was in store at Angmagsalik. It seemed that every Greenland expedition using aeroplanes habitually left a quantity of petrol behind, having brought with them fuel for flights that never came off, for aircraft that were
quickly crashed. In this way a great quantity of petrol had accumulated in the store and, what was even more important to Ross, one or two pumps of highly efficient design for putting the fuel into aeroplanes.

They found refuelling at Angmagsalik absurdly easy. With two or three men to assist they rolled down two drums to a large row-boat, got them on board, and rowed out to the seaplane. With a length of hose and one of the expedition pumps from the store they put a hundred gallons into the machine in half an hour. Ross checked the filters and the sumps, and passed down the sleeping-bags into the boat. In very little more than an hour they were on shore again, with the machine ready to start off in the morning.

They went up to the wireless station. The pastor was there with the wireless operator; they had then met the entire non-Eskimo population of Angmagsalik. Ross asked the operator for the weather reports from Julianehaab.

They were not very encouraging. There had been a fog at Julianehaab the day before. That morning had been clear, but there was fog there now. The weather was settled; to-morrow it would probably be clear in the morning and foggy in the afternoon.

“There has been much fog in Greenland this year,” the man told him. “The ice broke early, but there has been much fog.”

It proved to be impossible to get a morning weather report before seven o’clock, and that only by a concession on the part of the operators, who had regular hours of watch. As they left the wireless station Ross discussed it with the don.

“We’ve got to watch our step here, sir,” he said. “It’s a bit over five hundred miles. It’ll be some time before we can get into the air after getting the weather report, especially if the ice is like it was to-day. If we don’t get off the water before eight o’clock it will be one by the time we get to Julianehaab, and by that time there may be fog down there.”

Lockwood nodded. “We’ve got plenty of time in hand.
If the governor can put up with us, we can afford to wait for a decent day.”

The pilot nodded. “Still, I think we should get on with it,” he said. “Jameson should have got to Julianehaab yesterday. There’s nothing to prevent us going straight to Brattalid as soon as we arrive.”

The don said: “Of course, the more time we can have upon the site the better.”

Ross thought for a minute. “I wonder why the operator at Julianehaab didn’t have any message for us from Jameson? He must be there by now.”

“That’s rather curious.” They discussed it for a minute or two, and decided that it was not worth a special message. “We’ll probably be there to-morrow morning.”

In the evening they took a short walk up the hill above the settlement. The little harbour lay below them with the the yellow seaplane moored in the middle, bright and conspicuous. Beyond the harbour lay the coast, mountainous, rocky, and desolate, rising up out of a sea thick with ice.

Lockwood said: “My goodness, it’s a terrible country.”

Alix shivered. “I’ll be glad to get away from here. It’s uncanny.”

Ross glanced at her. “Why do you say that?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But I wouldn’t like to stay here long.”

He nodded. “Neither should I. But the people are nice—what there are of them.”

She stared around. “I know—but the country’s horrible. It’s so absolutely barren. Just these tiny plants among the rocks.” She indicated them with her foot.

Her father said: “It’s really not a habitable land.”

“I should think not.”

They went back to the governor’s house and had an evening meal of porridge and dried fish and coffee. Then, at about nine o’clock, they went up to the attics. Ross carried up the sleeping-bags, and put one on the bed.

“They’re all the same size, Miss Lockwood,” he said. “It’ll be too big for you, but that’s a fault on the right side.”

With the coming of the night the room was bitterly cold. The windows were sealed tight, nor did they want to open them especially. She asked him: “What do you do with it, Mr. Ross?”

He showed her how it opened. “Get into it and go to sleep. Look, I’ll get you some of this stuff from our room to make a mattress to put it on.”

She looked at him, amused. “Are you supposed to undress properly and wear pyjamas in it?”

He smiled. “That’s nobody’s business but yours, Miss Lockwood. I’m not going to take off much myself. It’s too damn cold.”

He went into the next room and attacked an opened bale of blue serge cloth; he carried a large quantity of this back into the girl’s attic, and arranged it in many layers over the skeleton of the bed. “There’s your mattress,” said the pilot. “Now the sleeping-bag on top of that.” He arranged it for her. “Now if you don’t take off too much, you should be really comfortable.”

She turned and faced him. The wavering light of the one candle in the room threw moving shadows in the corners. The two dead eider ducks hung from the beam, their wings outstretched and throwing a grotesque shadow on the wall.

The girl said gently: “Thank you, Mr. Ross. It’s been good of you to take so much trouble. You’ve made me a lovely bed.”

The pilot said: “I hope you have a decent night. Good night, Miss Lockwood.”

“Good night.”

He went out, closing the door behind him. In the attic the girl stood deep in thought, looking after him. Then she roused herself, took off her overalls, and got into her sleeping-bag in her underclothes.

In the other attic Ross found the don laying out his bed upon the floor, methodically and efficiently. Ross joined him; they contrived to make good beds upon the trade goods. They took off their outer clothes, wriggled into their bags, and lay for a time before sleeping.

Lockwood said: “I suppose this represents the most difficult part of the flight, Mr. Ross?”

“That’s so,” said the pilot. “After this, we shouldn’t get any more ice. Julianehaab’s a bigger place than this, too. And at Brattalid we’ll have a proper camp. No, this is the really tricky bit. Taking off to-morrow in all that ice is going to take a bit of doing. I may have to dump a good deal of fuel to get her off the water in the space we’ve got.”

“I suppose you must have done a lot of flying in this sort of ice?”

“Not more than I could help.” The pilot yawned. “Hudson Bay gets a bit like this at the break-up. But there it’s all in slabs—you don’t get bergs like these.”