Dead Water (3 page)

The fire bankrupted the city and left Professor Jakob Dunfjeld in sole charge of its brand-new Meterological Institute. Lothar Eling is a Swede: a young physics graduate fresh from the meteorological laboratory in Trappes. He has spent the last couple of winters helping the professor turn his modest town house into the hub of an empire of the winds.

Together the professor and his protégé have clad the eaves of the attic with pine, and little by little the grandly named West Norway Weather Bureau’s scent of ink and industry has come to replace the old, sour smell of damp and gull droppings. Two rows of desks face each other along the length of the attic. New dormer windows add light for a staff of twelve to work by, and additional edges and corners on which to crack their heads. The headroom is so meagre, some promising students have been turned down for being too tall. It is Dunfjeld’s bitter joke that, having lifted meteorology out of the mire of folklore, he is having to staff his bureau with elves.

Meanwhile, in his few free moments, Eling entertains Vibeke, Jakob Dunfjeld’s daughter. At fifteen, she is hardly a child. Still, Eling feels sorry for the girl. It’s a lonely life she leads, with her mother dead and her father engaged so fiercely upon his work.

Christmases are especially hard. The professor has let slip, in unguarded moments, how much he dreads the Christmas season. Christmas reminds him of all the ways in which he must be both father and mother to his child. He fears – he
knows
– that the tree will never be colourful enough, the salted lamb ribs never browned to the right sweetness, the carols never hearty, the dances never boisterous enough. How can a family of two expect to form a ring around the tree? So Eling takes it upon himself to prance about the Dunfjeld household like a helpful but cheeky imp – the
fjosnisse
, or barn-elf, of the fairy tales – a bottomless source of sweets and riddles, practical jokes...

Eling looks up from the telescope. ‘Vibeke?’

The girl has wandered away.

Eling catches up with her a minute later, not far along the path, behind a rocky spur.

‘Vibeke.’

But Vibeke is as still as a statue, her attention riveted by something out of Jakob’s line of sight.

‘Vibeke –’

‘Shh!’
She waves him to silence.

The spell is broken. Her impatient gesture has disturbed the bird she has found. It rises like an angel in the air, terrible and huge and beautiful: a white eagle, breasting the wind that comes off the sea, funnelling between the spurs of Mount Fløyen: an inverted cascade, solid and unseen. The eagle does not move a muscle but simply rises on that escalator of air, cruciform, magnificent: ‘Oh, Lothar,’ Vibeke gasps.

‘Oh, Uncle Lothar –

Look!
’

Monday, 28 May 1928: eleven in the morning

Three days have passed since the crash of the
Italia
. The fog has lifted a little and with equipment scavenged from the crash site – a Britannia pattern sextant, Bessel’s refraction tables, a chronometer, a mercury artificial horizon – the survivors have established their position.

Now, against the white, hummocked horizon, a dot has risen. A pencil fleck. A rock. The men gather outside Nobile’s tent, staring south, trying to decide whether this apparition is a good thing or not. They’ve been up for hours, those who can still stand, unnerved by last night’s tremors and explosions. (Their floe has begun to fracture.) Their mittens, those who have them, drip red on to the snow as they stand and stare. They’ve been using dye from shattered altitude bombs to paint the walls of their tent, to make it more visible from the air. They look like hunters, caught cutting up a kill.

Inside the tent, crouched near the opening, Eling examines one of their two surviving charts. The rock is Foyn. The island of Foyn. Ninety-four miles from King Charles Land. North of Hope. He says: ‘We can walk off the ice.’

Bonfanti, one of the engineers, turns and hunkers down beside him.

‘Assume eight miles a day,’ Eling says. ‘Nearer land the ice will be more smooth, so reckon on twelve miles.’

Bonfanti shakes his head. Quietly: ‘The general will never agree to splitting the party.’

But Nobile is halfway to delirium with pain. Listening to Eling’s plan, he is halfway persuaded. In the gloom of the tent, its blue-tinted walls made muddy by the dye they’ve slathered over it, he strokes his little terrier, Titina, behind her ears and asks Biagi’s opinion.

The radio operator is crouched in his corner, disconsolate, nursing the unit’s dying batteries. He’s still to get a message through. It is clear enough by now that the support ship’s captain, Romagna, would sooner let them all perish on the ice, and no one else has managed to pick up Biagi’s transmissions. No one knows where they are. The airwaves are full of rescue plans and not one mission is heading in the right direction. The floe is carrying them towards the barren wilderness of Franz Josef Land...

‘Look,’ says Eling, pressing his advantage, and Nobile, his eyes swimming with pain, leans up on an elbow to peer at Eling’s calculations. Rates of progress. Currents. Forecasts. Supplies. Two pounds of butter. Three pounds of malted milk. Half a box of Liebig’s meat extract. A lump of Provolone cheese...

Wednesday, 14 September 1927: eight months before the
Italia
comes to grief on Arctic ice

Sprawled under the funnel, out of the wind, his ears ringing with the rattle of the engine (as the Svolvaer–Narvik ferry labours in vain to tear a passage through Arctic waters) Lothar Eling writes his last letter of the season to Vibeke Dunfjeld:

Nobile intends that his new ship (the
Italia
, naturally) should be able to anchor at the pole, allowing us to explore the surface. It is a risky business, as a sudden change in the force or direction of the wind could see us cast adrift on the ice while the
Italia
scurries for safety. For every man on the ice, supplies and equipment sufficient for several weeks’ survival must be lowered – an arduous carry-on.

You ask whether Amundsen’s absence this time around concerns me. My answer is, with all respect to the old man, no. The people I have spoken to did not see him so much as lift a sextant or take a bearing aboard last year’s flight on the Norge: he left all that to Riiser-Larsen. General Nobile himself I set no great store by as an explorer, but he is a peculiar and contradictory figure and I cannot help liking him. He is the future – much as it hurts my national pride to admit it. He would design away all the hardship and heroism of our voyage if he could, and if this delivers a blow to my idea of myself as an outdoorsman, the sting is much salved by the thought that, alone of all the machines of the earth, only his extraordinary ship can possibly bring us home alive from such an overweening enterprise.

Eling is returning to Bergen now. Soon he’ll be on the mainland, and aboard the evening train. He’ll be chasing his own letter home. He pauses to study the rock needles as they emerge from the sea, sharp as the hatchings of a mapping pen: island peaks of Landegode and Moskenes. The Blue Mountains are the colour, this evening, of the vivid purple saxifrage that splashes the rocks beneath the vast, canted bulk of Stetind.

All summer long, eager, puppyish and hopelessly unfit, he has been spluttering through the Arctic waters in woollen swimwear, trying to position Professor Dunfjeld’s heavy, hydrological apparatus in the complex, treacherous currents of Norway’s Lofoten archipelago. Nose held shut with a wooden peg, arms wrapped around whatever weight comes to hand – a stone, a link of chain, a brick – he has been jumping feet-first through the banded cold into a world of corals, sponges and scuttling things.

In Norwegian waters the difference between water layers is so marked, as regards their temperature, salinity, and density, that it is a simple matter to determine their boundaries, as well as their respective movements.

Each evening, wrapped in blankets before the hearth, and plied with egg-nog by their host, the region’s
nessekøng
, Eric Moyse, Eling has taken it in turns with the professor to write to Vibeke. She has visited these Arctic islands before, and misses them. This year, school studies have stranded her in Bergen. Thinking of her, looked after by a nurse she has long since outgrown, Eling has tried to amuse her.

Everything here boils down to fish except the fish which boil down to glue. Roast cod, poached cod, cod in batter, milk, beer, batter, breadcrumbs, salt cod, minced cod, cod pie, cod’s head, morning, noon and night, oh for a loaded gun.

More successful are the caricatures: Professor Dunfjeld sunbathing naked on the deck of Eric Moyse’s yacht, swaddled and made decent in the wrapper of his own prodigious beard. Their host Eric Moyse (over the caption ‘His mind turneth more slowly and more coldly than the gyre’) wresting coins with menaces from the fishermen who rent his
rorbu
cabins. Eling himself, tangled up in climbing gear, suspended by one foot like the Hanged Man in Vibeke’s tarot deck.

Now Eling and the professor are returning to the mainland. The professor’s in his cabin; Eling’s stayed on deck, despite the cold. He smokes, sprawled under the ferry’s funnel, hidden as far as possible from the wind. Vibrations from the engine room have put the muscles of his back into spasm, so when the engine’s labour turns, with a change of gear, from a felt thing to a heard thing, his relief is immediate. It feels as though constricting chains have snapped from around his chest. His backbone, no longer a conducting rod for the engine’s vibrations, ripples and flexes: free at last. He writes some more:

Are there bears at the pole? A wizard? A Christmas elf? They tell me that last year, the
Norge
dropped its little flags – Italian, Norwegian – in an unutterably dull place. A flat waste of jumbled ice. Seriously, the discovery that there is no lost continent at the North Pole is bad news for your father and me. If everything we thought might flow from such a land mass flows instead from a dynamic system, then our whole model of the weather in these latitudes must acquire a whole other level of complexity.

This is too disappointing. They are hiding something. I believe in a lost continent peopled by malign and frigid elves
and so should you.

Lothar Eling stretches. His summer in the Lofotens with Professor Jakob Dunfjeld, studying winds and currents, has rooted him strongly in his body. As each day has passed, and his fitness has improved, he has felt ever more the explorer, the sailor, the mountain man. That the balance can never be struck in him, that intellect and exertion must collide and roil around each other constantly, suggests, at least in his own case, a psychical application for Professor Dunfjeld’s work about the weather.

THE DUNFJELD CIRCULATION THEOREM

If it is unbounded – wrapped, say, round a globe, where every forward impulse is also a return – then perturbations will disrupt even an ideal, frictionless fluid.

This is why the weather will not die. This is 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!

Stiff now, freezing cold, hidden from the wind under the ferry’s funnel, Eling finds that his spine is once again stuck in its channel, as the hull of the ferry is stuck fast in the water, held there not by bone and glue and linkage but by the peculiar boundary conditions that pertain between iron and water, flesh and ice, and fluids of variable density. Eling and Eling’s spine and the icy deck and the ferry’s hull and the waters of Svolvaer: all are bonded together like the layers of a fancy French pastry by forces that Eling (explorer, hydrographer) understands only now, after years of study, and too late.

Tuesday, 12 June 1928

Eighteen days have passed since the
Italia
foundered, spilling half its crew on to the polar icecap. Lothar Eling and Giovanni Bonfanti, the
Italia
’s chief engineer, have decided to try and walk off the ice. The airship crashed on pack ice north of the island of Foyn. If they can make it on foot to Foyn, they can wait there in reasonable safety for the first rescuers to arrive, then return to camp with help.