Tales and Imaginings (9 page)

The blackbird’s sudden stirring under the bushes behind me made me open my eyes;
the splendour of light surrounded me like a solid block. The bird rustled again; the silence was reimposed. Then I heard the woman calling from the house, and her voice released me from the weight of light upon me. I stood up and went back onto the lawn. She was at the upstairs window, holding the curtain, half hidden. ‘I wondered where you were, it was so quiet,’ she said. Her voice was thin and hesitant. I said, ‘The blackbird made me jump. It sounded odd – like a single foot kicking the leaves about.’ She smiled a little, and bent forward as if she were about to lean out of the window, but then she withdrew. She said, ‘Is the poplar still ticking away?’

‘Yes, a little, although there’s no breeze at all now.’

‘I won’t come down again now. Don’t stay out too long, will you?’

‘I’ll just be out here, under the peartree,’ I said. She nodded to me, and stepped back out of sight. I heard the murmur of her radio
for a little time, as I leaned my forehead against the lowest branch of the tree where the bark still bore the faint marks of the two ropes of the swing. There were a few pears hidden among the dusky green leaves above me, but it was the variety of the leaves themselves that held my attention, the way in which each one curved its surface so that the sunlight gleamed off it at a different angle, or outlined itself against the sky with some twist or defect in its contour. Some of the leaves had tiny irregular holes in them, or segments cut out from the edge; on one leaf most of the flesh was eaten away and there was little left but a few branching veins. The patches of sky that showed between the leaves were very deep blue straight above me, and paler in other directions; some were tiny triangles that appeared and disappeared with my breathing, and some were so complicated in outline that I lost myself in trying to follow round the hundreds of angles and curves that made them up. I heard the harsh breathing of the old woman dying in the bedroom, and I looked up at the house, at the dark glinting stonework between the lustrous wine-red masses of the creeper, and the rectangles of sky held by the slim white bars of the windowframes. I waited until the moaning began. It didn’t last long; there was a brief choked cry, and then I waited a little longer, listening to the gentle fretting of the leaves, for the breeze had started again. Looking down at the shadow of the peartree I tried to follow out the heavier ribbons of shade cast by the branches, a network that in places was boldly printed across a patch of sunlit grass, and in others was confused and almost obliterated by the tremulous overlapping layers of
broken
shade from the foliage. I could hardly distinguish my own shadow at all. I decided to stay under the peartree a bit longer before going back to the garden seat.

The glacier covers an area of about four hundred square miles. Most of it is above the 5000-foot contour, but in the valleys
intersecting
the mountain range ice
descends to a level at which the rate of melting counterbalances its downward flow. This equilibrium position varies with the rate of snow-deposition on the higher ground and average warm-season temperatures. Because of the extreme slowness of travel of the ice
there is a delay in the effect. Thus a sequence of three or four hard winters may result, a decade later, in an advance of the glacier’s termini, and so it is sometimes in a milder period that the glacier increases in extent. However, over the last century at least, the general trend has been a slow retraction of the ice
limits, a further remission of the fourth ice
age.

Many of the limbs of the glacier end in a vertical ice-face above a lake through which the melt-waters are fed into a stream,
eventually
to flow into the sea to the west or be absorbed by marshes to the east. One such terminus is
accessible by foot, without special climbing gear, and although the ascent is a stiff one it is
a favourite excursion for tourists following the coastal route to the north. The side-road leading to the village below the glacier is
clearly
signposted
. Leave your vehicle at the restaurant, which is as far as you
can drive, and walk on up the valley through birchwoods. Paths lead in various directions among the trees, and especially in summer these perspectives of pale green and silvery grey are alluring and a little bewildering; it is best to follow the marked trail on the left bank of the stream. Higher up the woods dwindle into a sparse scrub, enabling you to observe that the sides of the valley have steepened and closed in, and that the way ahead leads between cliffs. At one point towering precipices overhang on either side, and two splendid waterfalls, uninterrupted plunges of more than five hundred feet, confront each other. Clouds of spray rise from the deep basins worn into the rock by the water’s impact and drift and mingle above the path. Frequently when the evening sun shines up the valley a small rainbow is
thrown ahead of the climber. The fall on your left is
known as The Husband and the other as The Wife, and of course there is a legend to hand, according to which there once lived near this spot a couple so perfectly complementary in all their qualities and desirings that they were rash enough to wish aloud that they might live forever in each other’s sight. The god of thunder from whom this valley derives its name overheard them, and his laughter shook down their little home; he snatched them up and set them upon these precipices, condemned to a perpetually renewed suicidal leap towards each other, in the forms of terror and beauty now before you.

Having passed through the vapour of the two falls, you see that the head of the valley is
filled by a crumpled, greyish mass shaped like a tongue, stretching down towards you from a smooth horizon of gleaming snow. This is your first sight of the glacier, or at least of the fragmented ice
it discharges into this valley, and it is not so impressive as you had expected. But when you have climbed towards it for another half hour and it seems no nearer, you begin to realize
how big it is.

It frequently happens, on this western side of the mountain
range, that banks of low-lying cloud move in from the Atlantic, fill the long fjord-valleys and flow some way up tributary valleys such as this, leaving their upper reaches clear for a time. Looking back from the point you have now reached, you find the regions below darkened by rain, the road and the village being lost to sight, while above you the sky is still a pale cold blue, though progressively veiled from the west by a high film of whitish cloud. There are other waterfalls to left and right, taller than the earlier pair but
scattered
and broken by shoulders of rock leaning out from the precipices; the reverberations of their numerous thunderings absorb all other sounds, and the stones of the path are slippery with their spray. The stream you are following winds in under the cliff on the left; you must cross to the other bank, and re-cross farther up, by jumping from stone to stone.

As you climb, the curtain of ice
ahead seems to retreat from you into the mountains, but now another, deeper, recess, a dark corrie with a stream cascading out of it, opens up on your left and
suddenly
reveals, quite close, a second arm of the glacier, a vast ruinous confusion of grey masses apparently half buried in snow, forming a steep end-wall to the valley. Beside the cascade a spill of boulders forms a series of rough steps, quickly bringing you up to a lip of rock retaining a small lake. The terminal face of the ice-flow, at the other end of this lake, has ridden out a yard or two over a
rockledge
and hangs like a cliff over the dark water. It will take you longer than you think to walk round the lake. Large lumps of ice are drifting in it, very slowly, stirred by the indefinite currents of air that reach down into this arena-like hollow, or perhaps with the residual momentum of their fall from the ice-face. If you are lucky you may see such a piece break off and plunge beneath the water, not showing itself again for some minutes after the commotion of its fall has died away, and then only very slowly exposing a portion of its upper surface. But you will more probably wait a long time
without witnessing this shedding of a fragment – though you may be sure that the whole bulk moves forward imperceptibly while you stand here. You could even calculate how far the glacier advances to meet you during your climb towards it.

Now look above the abrupt end of the ice-flow. You see a chaotic slope of huge grey ridges and folds like a shattered staircase, filling the valley and widening upwards towards a rim of brilliant white. How far away is
that pure wind-like curve of the icefields? Do you feel you are in a presence? If you think of the glacier as a giant, then what confronts you here is only his fingertip; you could lose yourself in a pore of his skin. Even if you shouted your heart out, he could not possibly become aware of you.

You would like to go and see how thick the layer of ice is,
where it breaks off so sharply above the lake. Dare you walk right round the shore to it? For between you and the glacier proper is
a dazzling pyramidal slope of rounded translucent masses, fantastically perched one upon another and heaped in thousands at a dizzy pitch up the angle between the valley wall and the flank of the glacier. These are the remains of ice-falls, started perhaps by the collapse of a pinnacle or an overhang far above; the violent rolling and
grinding
together of the fragments during a few minutes of avalanching down to the valley floor has reduced them to these immaculate ovoids. The smallest such mass, hurtling down, could crush you. But nothing has stirred up above while you have been here; in fact there has not been the slightest sound from the glacier. So, go on quickly over the marshy grounds, as far as the nearest of these
glacier
-eggs. It is
much bigger than you. You can see some way into it. Between it and those immediately above and behind it are cavities full of a steady blue light; put your head in and bathe your face in the cold glow. The glacier itself is shrouded in dull white drifts where its outer layers have been rotted by the sun’s rays, but great edges and angles of clear ice
thrust up here and there, and you are
close enough to see that every fault or tear in the ice
is brimming with the same unwavering radiance. This is
daylight, filtered through layers of transparent blue ice,
repeatedly reflected within it and accumulating its tint in each passage. That the deepest crevasses seem to be more intensely illuminated by it than is the opaque crust by the waning light of the afternoon, is
an illusion due to the
dark-adaptation
of the eye.

This is
the hour of illusions, though. You tell yourself that you should be turning back while the light holds, forgetting how
interminable
the twilight is
in these latitudes. It is the blue light that has made you uneasy. The people of this region find something uncanny about it too; they speak of it as the blood of the glacier. Indirectly it does reveal something of the glacier’s slow, intense metabolism, for the very transparent blue ice
from which it acquires its colour is the purest and most highly ordered of the solid forms taken up by water in its passage through the glacier. This degree of crystalline perfection is
the result of stresses and dislocations in the ice
as it is driven down from the mountain-tops under forces it oppresses you to imagine. You are called upon, now, to feel them in your own being. The process begins, is now and always beginning, with the crushing together of snow’s uncountable geometries wrecked on the icefields. Each year adds a weight of snow, each layer is fused
together
under the weight of later years. By stages a rough ice
is formed, white with clouds of tiny bubbles of the air caught down and trapped by the snowflakes. In its movement outwards through the depth of the ice-cap and then down the outlet glaciers, it is
muddied
with rock-fragments ground off the rock floor and valley walls.

This vast body of ice can only spread under the force of its own weight down the valleys by being torn apart and welded together again and again. Faults develop along which separate masses slip past each other, and where two layers moving at different speeds are crushed together under immense pressure the heat of friction melts
a thickness of ice
on each of the opposed faces, the trapped air is released and the rock-dust settles out. When the movement ceases, the water recrystallizes to form a band of very pure and highly transparent blue ice.
The movement will recommence, further spasms tear the fault open again, and at each healing the vein of blue ice
will be thicker. At the foot of the glacier it emerges at last, and its perfected crystal structure is slowly broken down by melting. These are the metamorphoses of ice,
the history that confronts you in this narrow valley, silent, glimmering, motionless.

You bring a history to this place too. Question the glacier. Put your hand against the boulder of ice
beside you, feel the perfection of its surface; press hard, push with all your strength – for this piece is welded by nights of cold to those around it, and so back to the glacier itself, and indeed, if you push, the whole gives. You have an effect, though it is immeasurably small. All you can feel is the cold, flowing down from the pulseless heart of the icefield.

Now turn your back on the glacier; this place will soon let you go. But first look along the lake and out of the stony mouth of this corrie, at the opposite wall of the main valley where it towers up to a jagged black skyline. There is a waterfall up there, dropping from the lip of a hanging valley in which you can glimpse a white dome, another part of the glacier. You can just make out the downward glide of the water in the slim white column, and now that you are facing towards it, its deep murmuring note seems to fill the valley. This moment of your standing here has been long in the
preparation
; do not let it be blurred by the flux of your own life. Consider the building of the route of your ascent. This valley and its
tributaries
, like the other flutings of the watershed convergent upon the fjord below, and indeed the fjord itself, was excavated by a glacier. Today’s glacier is a shrunken remnant of the force that tore open these mountains. Nowadays it ebbs and flows a little; under the weight of exceptional snows the ice
may be extruded a hundred
yards or so farther down this and a dozen other valleys. But these are minor fluctuations. It may be some tens of thousands of years before it returns, erasing the farms and villages temporarily
established
in its course, to discharge its mountainous superfluity directly into an Atlantic become arctic.

Heavy cloud has darkened the sky while you have been standing here; it is
suddenly cold, and the wind is rising. In a moment you will start back down the valley. Do you understand your experience of this place? You were evoked out of the abstract idea of the
summer
visitor and led upwards by a solitude that held a delusive
mirror
before you, showing you as the enquiring traveller free to direct an idle curiosity at will. Lured into this valley, you met an age and an hour that imposed themselves upon you, that summoned you into a particular existence, that now release you into a future
subjected
to unforeseen imperatives.

The first drops of rain are about to strike you. Turn up your coat collar, and hurry away.

An ‘optional excursion’, that’s what this is.
Through the mists of poetical exaggeration anyone who’s been on one of these tours will recognize it. The cruise ship anchors in the fjord; I forget the name of the place now, but I remember when we went ashore the
head-waiter
and two sailors cycled up and down the road gathering
oxeye
daisies and armfuls of feathery grasses, which appeared on our tables at dinner that evening. This piece of writing has no time for such matters, however.

The tone of this document changes from that of a geological textbook or a travel guide, to something rather minatory. I enjoyed the restrained onomatopoeia of ‘the reverberations of their
numerous 
thunderings’ – a phrase that holds a certain balance. If the range of voice were stretched a little, the piece could start off with
statistical
tables of precipitation and end with the curses of the Thunder God himself. The legend of the felicitous marriage (not that I remember any such pair of waterfalls) is obviously intended to warn us against expecting domestic happiness in the cosmic order. But at least the Thunder God did hear or overhear the young fools. Nowadays, as this account makes clear, you could shout your heart out and the God will not snatch you up onto the precipices. You can stick your head into a pore of the glacier’s skin and if you are crushed it will only be by accident (a danger which is
rather
overstated
here, in the pursuit of literary or philosophical effect; the tourist board is too well organized to let day-trippers be smashed to pieces by chunks of ice).