Dead Water (4 page)

So they will walk towards Foyn, as they have walked towards Foyn before, as they have walked towards Foyn every day since they left the crash site. Having made their decision, Eling and Bonfanti have no choice but to persevere. But they are like ants on a gramophone turntable. Yes, the ice drifts south, towards the island, the only fixed point in that corner of the Arctic map. Yes, it brings them closer and closer to dry land and the possibility of rescue. But even as the island looms out of the mist, the current swerves and carries the pack east, away from Foyn, and bears its struggling human burden into uncharted territory. They cannot find a way off their spinning hell because the ground moves under them. Worse, the ground moves relative to itself. It is a shattered gramophone whose pieces shift against each other, eddying and waltzing, so that even relative movement is impossible to plot.

For twelve days they have walked towards Foyn. Each time, with the target barely a day away, their energy failed them. Then followed days of whiteout. Navigating blind, stumbling into cracks and puddles, they entered a surreal war zone where the ice, cracking as it warmed, fired pistols at them. When good visibility returned, Foyn lay at an intermediate distance that mocked their whole enterprise.

After that Eling begins to lose track. What he sees and what he thinks are becoming increasingly hard to separate. His imagination, freed by degrees from its obligation to the dying body, wanders at will over the mist’s grey screen. If there is a mist. And if there is a mist, how much the worse, for spring mists in the Arctic rot the ice so that puddles of freezing water form on the surface, and at night thin crusts form over the puddles, and breezes scatter a little snow over the crusts, and every day Bonfanti and Eling fall for the trick: they step into the puddles, sometimes up to their knees in the gelid water, and there is nothing they can do – they are being carried further into the warm and rotten unknown.

Thursday, 3 May 1928: Three weeks before the
Italia
destroys itself

Eling takes out his red notebook and writes: ‘Off to North Pole. Thought you might like this brick.’ He tears the page out of the book and tucks it into his sheepskin flying jacket. His thick reindeer-skin boots, stuffed with grass, get in his way as he climbs up into the envelope of the
Italia
. Bags like great bellows rise either side of him, filling the space forward and aft: bloated columns to support a soft grey ceiling. The columns come in two mismatched parts: under the gas bags are air bags which are filled from an opening in the bow. When the hydrogen in the gas bags contracts, the air bags swell. The airship breathes. Breathing, it keeps its shape.

A narrow keelson runs the length of the envelope. Either side of the keelson lie the expedition’s supplies. Food, clothing, tents, sleds, balloons, glass altitude bombs: shapes indistinct under sheets of blood-brown tarpaulin. Eling thinks of a ribcage: brown muscles packed between slim metal bones. There is gear here to anchor the airship in an emergency. Chains and wicked hooks, ropes – even bricks, though he can’t imagine what purpose they might serve. He steals one. It is yellow, and porous as a sponge. He ties his message round the brick with a piece of twine.

A catspaw swipes the
Italia
’s bow and the whole ship surges and billows. Eling watches the wave travelling towards him through the fabric of the ship. He’s used to the
Italia
’s eccentricities. He relaxes, feet apart, loose-hipped, hands on the wire handrails strung either side of the keelson. The flexible keelson gives a mild kick, softened further by the felt soles of his Russian-made boots.

A gangway crosses the keelson and out through openings to port and starboard, providing access to the motor nacelles. In the draught of the port-side opening, one of General Nobile’s engineers, Giovanni Bonfanti, is brushing rubber cement over the bottom of an airbag.

Out in the open air at last, poised on the narrow gangplank connecting the envelope to the nacelle, Eling looks down. The suburbs of Stockholm turn and turn. He unbuttons his coat and takes out the brick. Far below him, his mother waves. She is standing in her garden, both arms upraised, reaching for him. Clutching a brick to his chest, Eling falls forward. The wire handrail catches him across the stomach and flips him over. He falls. Bonfanti’s cry of surprise is the last thing Eling hears before he hits the water.

He hits the water.

He hits the water.

He hits the water.

He plunges through boundary layers between waters of different thicknesses. The colder the water becomes, the thicker it gets. At freezing point, water releases energy and expands catastrophically and Eling rises, cased in ice.

Saturday, 16 June 1928

They have not moved in three days. The chocolate is all gone. They have nothing to eat. The only ice that is remotely potable forms in yellow icicles and they sucked their last one to nothing over a day ago.

Sprawled in the lee of a hummock of broken ice, Eling moves his arms and plates of ice fall from his flying jacket. The tips of his big felt boots poke out of the spindrift. The lack of sensation in his legs is total. He tries moving his feet and he sees the tips of the boots move back and forth, left and right. Dare he believe his eyes?

In the flat glare of the ice field, the edges of Bonfanti’s bundled form are impossible to map. Only where snow has failed to adhere to the material is there anything to see at all: an irregular scattering of brown patches, each distinct, sharp-edged, the shards of a gramophone record scattered over a marble surface. With so little to see, just a pattern of brown patches against an even white, vision can proceed only by analogy. Now the bundle is like a wave. The brown squares are patches of turbid water, peaking through a web-work of foam.

Air hits the wave, is driven up over it, curls under itself as it rises, curls back, rubbing itself against itself – and knots itself in place.

Eling stares at the bundle.

The wind knots itself in place.

After so many years of study, and too late, the insight comes. He needs his notebook. He needs to write this down. He tucks his right mitten under his arm, meaning to pull his hand free so that he might unbutton his coat and get at his notebook. But the mitten is tied securely with a cord. It takes him a second to understand this – long enough to realize his folly. He must not take his mittens off.

Concentrate.

He will have to remember this. He will have to keep this in mind, for as long as his mind holds.

His eyelashes have frozen shut. He nudges his goggles aside to rub his eyes. They tear up in an instant against the beat of sun on snow. Refracted by his tears, the sunlight curls into a coloured rope. It moves around him on the ice: a snake. He catches his breath, the illusion is so beautiful, essing towards him through colour fields that change as his tears cool, leaving their salt to crust around his eyes.

And then, without warning, the snake strikes at his eyes, all fangs and scales, shards of colour, glass fragments, glass dust, and he shakes and squirms, squealing, frantic to be free of his hallucination. His eyes are burning in the light. Where are his snow goggles? In a panic, he wrestles off his mittens and feels for his goggles. They are hanging over his right ear. His fingers are frozen and without feeling, and he uses his hands like blocks to knock the goggles back over his face. He tries to put his mittens back on but he cannot think straight enough or move freely enough to manage it. He crawls on his hands and knees over the ice. ‘Bonfanti, listen! The gale is passed!’

His fingers are swollen white tubes. Weeping, Eling uses his teeth to pull the mittens over his clubbed hands. He staggers to his feet. The wind has dropped, the sky has cleared. What time is it?

All around him, ice lies piled: there is no level ground. Edging out from behind a nearby hummock, topped by an unlikely crown of ice spires: something black. A rock.

It is Foyn. Again: the island of Foyn. Their destination. Their goal. Lothar Eling explains to Giovanni Bonfanti that the hull of the ferry is trapped in standing waves on the boundary between water layers of different density. The ferryman can spin his propellers as fast as he likes, his vessel will make no headway.

The logs of every voyage of Arctic discovery, from the
Dobbs
to the
Fram
, contain reports, sometimes several in a day, of how their steering suddenly gave way. A hull can come unstuck from these waters as surely as the wings of a plane, caught in an eddy, can lose their grip on the air. When waters of different densities and temperatures pour into each other they do not mix. Instead, they settle into layers. Run a propeller through these layers and you will make no headway, however fiercely you drive the engine. You’re just cavitating: chopping up waves into froth.

‘The locals have a name for it,’ he says.

Who says?

He says.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Dead water.’

Eling has forgotten that Bonfanti is dead.

Bonfanti’s huddled form casts a shadow over the hideous red leather something in which Eling writes, the pencil jammed between crooked black fingers.

The notebook falls out of his grip. He bends down, but his fingers are swollen, he cannot pick it up, and as he bends over, staring at it, it –
flexes
. It squirms uselessly. The ice provides no purchase, it cannot get away. A hideous red leather something. Eling thinks of the flexible keelson of the
Italia
: equipment, shapeless under blood-brown tarpaulin, squeezed between sleek metal bones, like the compact muscles of the back.

Eling sits frozen to the ground, marvelling at the compact musculature of Bonfanti’s back, laid open before him upon the ice as though upon the marble slab of a mortuary.

Bonfanti’s spine, torn away at last, a hideous red something, spasms and contracts to form a shallow spiral. Eling blinks, dazzled, unbelieving. The meat snake sparkles. Glass shards rise between knuckles of bare bone: new scales, new skin. It esses. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. It is waving to him. Signalling to him. It is trying to tell him something. Eling copies the spiral in his notebook. Beneath it he writes:

‘Towards a Unified Theory of Ocean Circulation.’

He puts the book away in his jacket, topples forward, and hits the water again and again and again. He descends. On the sea floor there are sponges. He picks one. He will give it to Vibeke, Professor Dunfjeld’s daughter, as a present. He jackknifes, gazes up at the silver undersides of the waves, and strokes powerfully for the surface – but he does not rise.

In his sudden terror he exhales. The bubbles go straight down. These are forces Lothar Eling understands only now, after years of study, and too late. Why the weather will not die. Why the waters will not stop in their courses. Why the winds will not cease to blow. Why the heart will not cease to desire.

He glimpses open arms, outstretched arms, the arms of his mother perhaps, waving to him from her garden in Stockholm, reaching for him, drawing him in. The blow from those arms is so powerful, so fast, he does not see it coming. It all but decapitates him. In the few seconds left to him he is vaguely aware of a lump in his throat. How the lump pulses. How it squirms and explores.

But the bear has gorged on Bonfanti already and it leaves most of Eling to other bears, to arctic foxes, and gulls.

The Musandam peninsula extends into the Strait of Hormuz, guarding the entrance to the Persian Gulf. It’s a rocky fretwork, an outlandish calligraphy. There is no level ground. In the folds of its cursive script pale green squares stand for gardens, their soil gathered laboriously from miles around and contained by dry-stone walls. Alfalfa one year. The next year, nothing. Musandam is the homeland of the Shihuh, the
ichthyophagoi
of Ptolemy, who speak Kumzari, a language all their own, and spring from some nameless corner of Central Asia; who are said to bark like dogs after a meal and who, having nowhere else to put them, once buried their dead under their floorboards.