The Balloonist (20 page)

It was not really she, I knew now in a kind of prescience, but those two witches in Quai d'Orléans who had spun this spell about me in their war against an enemy who was not even properly aware he was being attacked. It would be necessary to oppose them with all the power of my own being. The trouble was that such a defence required technique and skill, and my understanding of woman, I now began to see, was imperfect. My vanity of a healthy male had led me to the delusion that, from a dozen
or so adventures in my native city, I was adept enough at dealing with a sex which (I believed) was either hopelessly disarmed by its innocence or rendered accessible by its very lack of this quality. But those well-bred Ingrids and Kristins whose hands one clasped in their wealthy fathers' orangeries, those ineptly rouged wenches in dockside taverns, were mechanisms of a misleading simplicity. With sighs to one, and small sums of money to the other, one might do as he wished. What one wished to do, of course, was not the same with the one as with the other. But with the one and the other, from time to time, it passed the hours when one was not busy in the library. Then in recent years my scientific investigations had demanded more and more of my attention. For months at a time I forgot to visit the dockside, and the maidens gave up and married law students. I had reached the age when one's illusions are at least partly behind one, and my prickly short hair, my mustache with its wiry points, and the tuft under my lip were grey at the edges. Now, in my full and ironic manhood, I had somehow fallen into the clutches of this pack of maenads who had begun by clouding my wits and would end by destroying me as they had destroyed Orpheus. I was an autumn crocus, a subject for satire. “Crispin in Love,” or better “Crispin Furioso,” mad for ardour. This belle sauvage—and I had expected to entertain her with my superior wisdom! And it was not only she, the long-lipped, pale, and faintly contemptuous focus of this delirium that periled me (it was still a mystery how on the one hand she could resemble a llama and on the other hand exert such a powerful spell of desire, when llamas were not considered beautiful and conventional beauty was arranged along quite other lines) but the aunt and mother as well, the wistful Stockholm virgins and the waterfront strumpets, the whole race of cloven tetrapods who inspired man to his most powerful and exalted dreams and then stifled him to earth when he attempted to carry them out. Beware, Crispin! It is your five limbs they envy, and they will not rest until they have made you like themselves.

And yet how cunningly this peril was made! These pale fragilities and corals, these darknesses that drew one's being like a magnet, were the creation of gods who were powerful even though malevolent and must be sacrificed to, else they would destroy. Tomorrow I will leave; no, tomorrow and tomorrow. Wednesday, Thursday. The climate still being mild,
and we better acquainted now, the brocaded gown had given way to a mauve peignoir fastened in the front only with a pair of ribbons. Luisa in the baroque doorway, the mimosa in the background, was Delphic against the marble balustrade. The knee appearing in the garment's opening as she turned, leading the eye inevitably upward to the shadow faintly visible in its translucence, was probably only an accident. It was time for tea, the sibyl pronounced. So it was.

“On peut le prendre dans la chambre jaune. Tu veux?”

I wanted. Why tell foolish and unconvincing lies? On the ochre wall the late sun from the lake shimmered imperceptibly. In the distance a voice called in Italian, the evening's first cicada vibrated in the vines. Dear Luisa, why does the peignoir slip from your shoulder when you have not even poured the tea? Soft darkness of hair falling; that Empire bed, with its lilac-flavored linen, is a magnet and a tomb. The tea things are scattered on the bed, the teapot overturned, her faint voice supplicates in my ear, “Oh sweetest one, my love, my cruel Viking,
now.
” Slightly moving my foot, I brushed the teacup to the floor and it broke with a tiny tinkle.

I
f the wind gods are aware
of us at all they must be amused at these efforts we have made to bore a peephole into their secrets. Three overgrown infants swinging in our crib full of toys: popguns, coils of wire, tubes with flat beans of glass in them which we stick to our eyes. The gale, which is only now beginning to weaken, has been pushing us along before it for thirty hours. In which direction? More or less north, I think. The blowing snow almost obscures the surface five hundred metres or so below us, and without a fixed point on the pack to sight in the theodolite we can only roughly estimate the direction of our drift. That magic and not-existent point can't be far now. A red sun full of blood manages to appear fuzzily through the clouds again, and with quick work I am able to take a sight. Theodor has written down the times, I read the altitudes from my instrument and enter them. My cold fingers in the mitten manipulate the pencil clumsily, making the large figures of a child in which the nines and the zeros do not quite close. Have I made a mistake in my calculations? Several no doubt. This frozen piece of paper that I am covering with chicken scratches should be preserved for posterity as an example of human fallibility. Trusting in myself, and in the conviction that five eighths of the way from .10012 to .10048 is .10036, I determine that our latitude is 89° 54' north. And the longitude? What on earth difference does it make only six minutes of arc from the Pole?

I sight back rather carelessly along the compass and see that in the dying wind we are still floating along more or less to the north. A sky full of tattered clouds, the pack below only partly visible through a veil of whitish mist. The drift I estimate at six knots. This wind that has made its last confession and is breathing only feebly must hang on for another hour. Then it must die, and even turn and blow the other way, but only then. The sight was taken at 0118 Greenwich. What's the time now? The time! Time is everything now, there will be no more sights taken and time is our only distance. First I take off my mitten, then without unfastening the toggles of my reindeer-skin coat I reach upward inside it, downward to the trousers pocket, and grope around for the watch. The instrument is finally after a certain fumbling brought to light. One forty-seven Greenwich. Of the six miles to the Pole, I guess roughly, we have covered half. Waldemer, to the maneouvring valve!

“I say
now, Major, are you sure of those figures? A fellow wouldn't want to make a mistake, you know.”

One fellow wouldn't, perhaps, but the next one might not be so concerned. “Leave the higher calculations to me, and stand by the maneouvring valve!” And if you pull the wrong rope, you lovable blockhead, we are dead.

We sink. Imperceptibly that crinkled and fractured plain of ice comes up through the mist. Damnation! I have forgotten to put my mitten back on. The hand is turning the colour of a granite church in Oslo. My face is probably the same, but I form it into an icy imitation of a smile and remark to Theodor, “Facilis descensus Averni-you know your Virgil?”

“Easy is the descent to Avernus,” he finishes for me, “through every day and night the gate of Dis stands open, but to retrace the steps, to return to the upper air, that is the task and the trouble.”

“You can see that a classical education, even in a Militärische Hochschule, is of some practical use in the world. It gives advice on handling a balloon. Look sharp now, Waldemer, that stuff below is coming up fast. Leave off spilling gas and spill a little ballast instead!”

A grey rivulet of lead streams down; the ice below is only a hundred metres away now. We are descending far too fast! With a pocket knife I cut away a bag of shot entirely. After a delay of only a few seconds we hear a faint thump from the ice below. Our plummeting has been slowed by the dropped ballast, but now I am concerned about sideways drift. I turn and look north in the direction of our motion, where clumps and uneven blocks of ice are streaming toward us and passing underneath at an alarming rate. Five knots at least! Thunder and tarnation. Unfortunately, we can't pull the bursting valve as we land, because we have a use for the balloon later. At an altitude of ten metres we race over a ridge made of jaggy hillocks. An extraordinary phenomenon—that this lazy drifting, as it seemed when we were higher in the air, has turned into the violence of a charging buffalo as we settle toward the ice.

It would
be nice if one could think over in a leisurely manner the best way to handle this maneouvre. But since no human being before us has ever done what we are doing now, we will have to grit our teeth and trust to our instincts. Attention! Achtung! The guide ropes behind us are slithering over those jagged teeth we just missed, slowing us a little. The bottom of the gondola makes contact with snow or soft ice, lifts free again, then strikes more heavily. The gondola tilts sideways with a lurch and the enormous spherical shape over our heads moves on, away from us, with the wind. Is the Prinzess going to go off and leave us? She sways, strains, drags the gondola another bumping metre or two, but Theodor with great presence of mind has dropped to the ice, run back to the guide ropes, seized them in his gloved hands, and pulled backward, digging his boot heels into the soft and crystalline surface under him. The bulk of the gas bag overhead still wishes to travel on but seems content to stop for the moment, straining only slightly.

We can breathe easier.

I pass Theodor the ice anchor and he digs a hole for it and sets it firmly. The only trouble is that the Prinzess, deprived of the weight of both Theodor and the ice anchor, now wants to go up again as well as sideways. Theodor, bending his knees, pulls down at the ropes. He can't keep that up very long. The Prinzess is sixty kilos light. In all my calculations I never anticipated this very obvious problem. We have come safely down on the ice but we can't get out to stand on it, since the weight of a handful of lead shot is enough to make the balloon go up or down. Should we step out of the gondola, the Prinzess would fly off and leave us. And yet that is precisely what we have come here for, to step out. Theodor, his boot jammed down onto the ice anchor, stands waiting.

For a while, a minute or more, the situation seems an impasse. We don't even discuss it since no one can think of anything to say. Valve off more gas? Impossible. We will never leave here unless we conserve every handful. Subtracting our weight from the gondola, in order to get out and take some steps toward mooring the Prinzess more securely, would undoubtedly result in the anchor tearing out of the ice. We are two metres from our goal but have no means of reaching it. Except for Theodor who—it occurs to me only at this moment—is the first to stand on this long-sought-for mathematical point.

In the
end it is Waldemer who thinks of the solution. Theodor is brought back into the gondola, giving the ice anchor a final jam with his foot before he leaves it. Then Waldemer gets out onto the ice with certain implements of iron, including a saw and a long-handled axe. He is almost as skillful with these as he is with a rifle or a cook stove. In only a few minutes he has cut out of the ice a squarish lump two metres long and the width and thickness, approximately, of a man. Since it is blockier than a man it probably weighs even more. We struggle to get this thing into the gondola with our mittened hands. The Prinzess very slowly rises and falls, threatening to pull the anchor out of this rotten July ice at any moment. The block of ice falls once onto Waldemer's foot, but we manage to wrest it upward over the instrument ring and into the gondola.

“Ha.” His panting makes him steam, coating his mustache with rime. “Another two like that should do it.”

In half an hour the three Ice Men have taken our place in the gondola and we are able to get down onto the stiff, very faintly heaving surface of the pack. Waldemer is exultant. Theodor is still breathing a little hard from our struggle with the blocks of ice and if he has any emotions he doesn't bother to indicate them. The air is oddly still now, only a faint breeze on our faces. A thin but curiously opaque frozen mist hangs over the ice. Horizontally we can scarcely see farther than we could throw a stone; vertically the view is clearer and we can see clouds overhead, the sun appearing occasionally in some fracture in the white blanket. The temperature is minus twenty centigrade, the barometer low but steady. I might take another sight to confirm our position, but to what end? It would be impossible to move now that we have come down where we are. And so this place is the place we have set out to come to, I so declare as commander of the expedition.

Although I have
controlled my excitement externally, it has had its usual physiological effect on me. I wander unobtrusively around to the other side of the gondola and perform a much-desired discharge of bladder contents. There is a good deal of steam. Some of the golden droplets solidify before striking the ice and roll across it like tiny amber pearls. When I come back around the gondola I see that Waldemer has set up his photographic apparatus on the tripod fifty metres or so away from the Prinzess. Theodor and I are obliged to stand in negligently heroic attitudes by the gondola while he slips several plates in and out and reaches around to trip the shutter by hand. (The rubber air bulb is frozen and breaks at the first touch.) Then a shot in trio; the apparatus has a delayed-exposure device that enables him to trot over and take his place by our side before it clicks. He folds everything up, the tripod over his shoulder and the oaken box clasped in his arms like a baby, and carries it back to the gondola.