The North Water(50)
After a few more hours, the storm appears to have steadied itself, to have reached an equilibrium which may presage its end, when, with a fearsome crash, the floe itself, the very surface they are sleeping on, jolts upwards. One pole of the tent collapses and the iron stove topples over, sending red-hot coals spilling out and setting blankets and peacoats alight. Sumner, bewildered, chest tight with alarm, pulls on his boots and dashes outside into the gloom. Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg is moving at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house-size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe. The floe shudders beneath Sumner’s feet; twenty yards away a jagged crack appears, and he wonders for a moment if the entire plateau might crumble under the strain and everything, tents, whaleboats, men, be pitched into the sea. No one now remains in the second tent. The men that were inside it are either standing transfixed like Sumner or are busy pushing and dragging the whaleboats farther away from the edge in a desperate effort to keep them safe. Sumner feels, as he watches, that he is seeing something he shouldn’t rightly see, that he is being made an unwilling party to a horrifying but elemental truth-telling.
As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind and the oaths and curses of the men. Sumner notices for the first time that snow is pelting against the left side of his face and gathering in his beard. He feels for a moment wrapped up, cocooned, made strangely private, by the fierceness of the weather, as if the world beyond, the real world, is separate and forgettable, and he alone inside the whirl of snow exists. Someone tugs his arm and points him backwards. He sees that the second tent is now ablaze. Mattresses, rugs, and sea chests are burning fiercely; what remains of the canvas is whipping about in the high wind and flaming like a tar barrel. The rump of the crew stare aghast, their helpless faces brightened by the high dancing flames. Cavendish, after kicking at the embers and bewailing his ill luck, yells for them to take refuge in the remaining whaleboats. Working rapidly but without method, they empty out the two boats, pack themselves inside like cargo, then pull the tarpaulins taut across the top. The resultant spaces are fetid and coffin-like. The air inside is sparse and pungent, and there is no light at all. Sumner is lying on bare, cold timbers, and the men arrayed around him are talking loudly and bitterly about the incompetence of Cavendish, the astonishing ill luck of Brownlee, and their desire above all and despite everything to get home alive. Exhausted but sleepless, his muscles and inner organs beginning to itch and agitate with the unmet need for opium, he tries again to forget where he is, to imagine he is somewhere better, happier, but he can’t succeed.
*
In the morning, the storm has abated. The day is cool and damp with gray clouds overhead and flat bands of fog concealing the floe edge and lying like layered quartz across the dark faces of the distant mountains behind. They pull back the snow-laden tarpaulins and climb out of the whaleboats. The burned and blackened fragments of the second tent and most of what it contained are strewn untidily across the ice in front of them. Some of the spars, half sunk in pools of meltwater, are still smoldering. While the cook boils water and cobbles together a rough version of breakfast, the men pick and poke through the lukewarm embers for anything still usable and worth preserving. Cavendish strolls around amongst them, whistling and making ribald jokes. He carries an enameled mug of steaming beef tea in his left hand. Every now and then, he bends down like a gentleman fossil hunter to pick up a still-warm knife blade or a solitary boot heel. For a man who has just seen his ship crushed, and narrowly survived an iceberg and then a fire in the night, he appears, Sumner thinks, unusually good-humored and carefree.
After eating, they repack the whaleboats, then raise up the one surviving tent, weigh down its edges with provision casks, and settle inside with playing cards and pipe tobacco to wait for Black, Jones, and the others to return from the Hastings. After an hour or so, as the fog lifts, Cavendish goes outside with his telescope to check for signs of the returning party. After a while, he calls out for Otto, and, after a while longer, Otto calls out for Sumner.
Cavendish hands Sumner the telescope and points east without speaking. Sumner extends the telescope and looks through it. He is expecting to see, off in the distance, Black, Jones, and the rest of the crew tugging the four empty whaleboats across the ice towards them, but in fact he sees nothing at all. He lowers the telescope, squints into the distant emptiness, then raises the telescope to his eye and looks again.
“So where are they?”
Cavendish shakes his head, curses, and starts angrily rubbing the nape of his neck. His previous calmness and good humor has disappeared. He is pale-faced and tight-lipped. His eyes are wide open and he is breathing hard through his nose.
“The Hastings is gone,” Otto says.
“Gone where?”
“Most likely, she ventured out into the pack last night to escape from the bergs,” Cavendish says sharply. “That’s all there is to it. She will find her way back to the floe edge soon enough. Campbell knows just where we are. All we need to do is wait for him here. Show a bit of faith and a bit of fucking patience.”
Sumner looks through the telescope again, sees, again, nothing but sky and ice, then looks at Otto.