Laura (8 page)

I was still standing there, petrified, before this horrible tableau, when I felt a hand take hold of me. It belonged
to Nasias who led me outside, and as if he could read my thoughts:

It is too late, he said with a snigger; they will not rebel against the end that saves them from a slow death a
hundred
times more cruel than this one. I served them up the wine of rage, and, as they fought against imaginary enemies, they were able to console themselves with the dream of a valiant death. All is well with them now: the Eskimos will give them a tomb beneath the ice, as befits bold explorers. Now then, all is ready, follow me. Whether you like it or not, you can no longer go back.

I shall not follow you! I cried. You no longer have me under your spell. The crime you have just committed delivers me from your hateful ascendancy. You are a
coward
, a murderer, a poisoner, and, if I did not regard you as a madman …

What would you do to Laura’s father? retorted my uncle. Would you then make her an orphan, and could you bring her back single-handedly from the depths of these desert wastes?

What do you mean? Is it possible that Laura …? No, no … You are insane!

Look! replied Nasias, who had led me on deck.

And I saw in an azure cloud the angelic figure of Laura standing on the top step of the companionway outside, preparing to leave the brig.

Laura, I cried, wait for me! Do not leave alone!

And I rushed towards her; but she placed a finger to her lips, and, showing me the sledges, she signalled to me to follow and disappeared before I was able to catch up with her.

Calm yourself, said my uncle, Laura will travel alone in a sledge which I brought along for her. It is she who henceforth will wear our pole star on her brow and who will lead our march to the north. We can only follow her at the distance it pleases her to place between her carriage and ours; but be sure that she will not abandon us, since she is our light and our life.

I followed my uncle mechanically, convinced that this time I was the plaything of a dream, and he made me get into the sledge reserved for me. I was alone in it, lying down in a sort of fur bed, and, although armed with a whip attached to my arm by a strap, I had no thoughts of using it. I was plunged into a strange torpor. I tried to turn over on my moving couch, as if to rid myself of an extravagant reverie: it was in vain; it seemed to me that I was bound hand and foot in my prison of fur. I tried to see the ghost of Laura again; all I could make out was a confused, far-off glow, and soon it became impossible for me to know if I was asleep or awake, if I had halted on the ice or on the earth, or had been borne away in a swift race by some unknown cause.

I do not know how much time I spent in that strange state. Since daylight did not appear and was not going to appear, and since mist hid the sky’s aspect, I no doubt awoke and fell asleep again several times, without taking stock of the hours that passed. Finally I felt fully awake, and my vision cleared. The fog had completely
disappeared
, and the sky was sparkling with constellations whose position enabled me to determine the time with reasonable accuracy. It must be around noon, and I had come a long way, or else I had been travelling for several weeks.

I travelled over the ice, packed hard like a slab of marble, borne along by my dogs, which, without being directed, followed exactly in the tracks of two other sledges that had sped off at top speed. Behind me came the line of other sledges carrying the Eskimos and the supplies.

We followed a narrow ice-channel that ran between two fearsome ice floes, sometimes several hundred,
sometimes
several thousand feet high. A bright sapphire light seemed to emanate from these terrible environs; I saw them at last as they truly were, delivered as I was from all forms of fear and all moral appreciation of my situation. I felt neither cold nor heat, nor sadness nor terror. The air seemed gentle and smooth, my fur bed soft, and the light running steps of my dogs on the admirably level ground gave me a childish feeling of well-being.

As we passed we made no more sound in that lonely place than a flight of ghosts. I believe that the entire caravan slept deeply or abandoned itself like me to a
nonchalant
reverie. From time to time, a dog would bite its neighbour to prevent it slowing down, and that dog bit a third, as is the custom with these draught animals, a cry of canine anger would revive the ardour of a team, and called me back to the feeling of locomotion and of life; but these dry, swift sounds, deadened by the effect of the snow, were suddenly lost, and the absolute silence of the polar winter resumed its reassuring and solemn eloquence. Not a single cracking sound in the expanses of ice, not one dazzle of snow, nothing that might have given a warning of the horrible cataclysms which the thaw brings to these floating masses.

Was it the effect of an eternal twilight, or the magic of
these limpid blocks’ reflections, or of some other
phenomenon
whose notion escaped me? I saw clearly, not as in the full light of day, but as if by an electric light, sometimes veiled in greenish-blue, sometimes enhanced with purple or golden yellow. I could make out the smallest details of the sublime setting we were crossing, and which, changing in shape and aspect at each step, presented a succession of marvellous tableaux. Sometimes the icebergs were cut up into angular blocks, projecting immense canopies above our heads, fringed with stalactites, sometimes their flanks parted, and we passed through a forest of stocky, flaring pillars, monstrous mushrooms surmounted by capitols in a cyclopean style. Elsewhere, they formed slender
columns
, prodigious arches, regular obelisks, or were heaped up on top of each other, as if they sought to scale the heavens, then there were caves of a shimmering,
ungraspable
depth, heavy pediments of native palaces guarded by formless monsters. All the ideas of architecture were there as though sketched out, then abandoned in an attack of boundless delirium, or suddenly halted by hilarious disasters.

These fantastic regions move the heart of man, because he does not confront the implacable menaces without having sacrificed his life, and because he feels shaken at all times by forces which his science, his courage and his industry have not yet been able to vanquish; but, in the exceptional situation in which I found myself, my body protected by an inexpressible well-being and my spirit drowned in a still more astonishing feeling of security, I saw only the grandiose, the curious, the intoxicating
elements
of the spectacle.

Little by little I grew accustomed to the charm of this vision of external things, and, returning to myself, I
wondered
if what my memory told me of recent events on my journey was indeed real. There was complete certainty in the present moment. I was indeed in a light bark sledge, lined with bear and seal skins, drawn by three dogs of admirable strength and ardour. There were indeed two other similar vehicles in front of me, one of which must contain my uncle Nasias, the other the caravan’s guide, and the caravan was indeed behind us, following in our tracks. At the head of this caravan a light of inexplicable brightness was indeed travelling; but was this not some scientific lighting technique whose secret Nasias had not deigned to reveal to me?

My gaze fixed on the light radiating from the leading sledge, and I found nothing extraordinary in the fact that it carried a powerful lantern fed by seal oil, which the natives knew how to use to such good effect. Was it not insane to believe that a diamond could shine in the night like a lighthouse, and as for the agreeable warmth I was experiencing despite the climate, was that not probably due to a particular physical disposition? The horrible scene on the ship, moreover, was quite beyond belief. Up to that point my uncle, although stern, had shown his crew as much equity as solicitude. Our companions might indeed have got drunk to celebrate the start of their over-wintering, I might have seen them sleeping below decks; but the horror of their deaths, my uncle’s insane and cruel words, his unbelievable agreements with the Eskimos, and, finally and most crucially, the
sudden
appearance of Laura on the
Tantalus
, deep in the
polar seas, all this bore the stamp of the most complete hallucination.

The thought that I was subject to attacks of madness threw me into great sorrow; I resolved to observe myself carefully and to make the greatest efforts to preserve myself from them.

An event of the most positive kind finally gave me back my sense of reality. We were making a stop on an islet, in the shelter of a magnificent rocky cave; we had just emerged from the floe’s frozen channel. My uncle got down from the sledge which was travelling in front of me; I hastened to look at the person who was emerging from the sledge in front of him, and, seeing the size and features of a frightful dwarf shaped like a truncated Hercules, I was unable to prevent myself laughing sadly at myself. I inwardly asked forgiveness from Laura for having seen her spectre in this grotesque Eskimo figure, and I waited for someone to come and untie me; for I was indeed truly bound hand and foot by sturdy thongs to my moving bed.

Well, my uncle said cheerily as our men were lighting the fire and preparing the meal, how do you feel now?

I have never felt better, I replied, and I believe I am going to eat most heartily.

Then that will be the first time in the two months since we left the ship, he replied, feeling my pulse; for, if I had not fed you with good broth in tablet form and piping hot tea, you would have died of hunger, so completely had the fever removed your sense of self-preservation. I was right to tie you on firmly and to attach your dogs’ reins to my sledge, you would have been mislaid on the way like a parcel. At last you are well once more, and you will not
speak to me again, I hope, of the abandoned ship, the crew destroyed by a frenetic poison, nor of my daughter hidden on board in a trunk and condemned to act as our guide towards the arctic pole.

I asked forgiveness from my uncle for the stupid things I must have said during the fever, and I thanked him for the care he had given me without my knowing.

We ate a copious meal, and I was no longer
astonished
to see our provisions so abundant and fresh when I learned that they had been renewed several times
en route
by fortunate encounters with animals caught unawares in the snow, and night-birds attracted by the bright light of our lantern. I learned also that we had been constantly favoured by the brilliant phenomena of the pole’s
electrical
light, and, emerging from the cave, I was able to convince myself with my own eyes of the splendour of that natural form of lighting.

My uncle smiled at the chimeras I had harboured and the fact that I wished to confess to him in order to deliver myself from them once and for all.

Man is indeed a child, he told me. The study and
examination
of nature are not enough for him. His imagination must furnish him with puerile legends and fictions, while the miraculous rains down on him from the sky without any magician having anything to do with it.

At that moment, my Uncle Nasias seemed to me to be a perfectly right-minded, rational man.

While we were conversing, our men were building us a house. The roof of the cave was covered with a layer of ice thick enough to protect us from the winds getting in, they closed its entrance with a wall of snow-blocks, cut
with remarkable speed and skill. Thus sheltered and
well-warmed
, we stretched out in our nice dry sledges, in the midst of our well-fed dogs, and rested as completely and as restoratively as marmots in their burrow.

I think back over that night of warmth, well-being and security in the polar ice fields as one of the most
astonishing
of my journey. I had the strangest dreams that night. I saw myself at my Uncle Tungstenius’s home. He talked to me of botany and reproached me for not sufficiently studying the fossil flora of the coalmines.

Now that you are travelling through lands that have been so little explored, he told me, you may find plants that are as yet unknown, and it would be indeed curious to compare them with those whose carboniferous schists have preserved their imprint for us. Come now, leave that sledge that madly wrecks our garden paths for a while; tie up those aggressive dogs that lay waste our borders. Try to find the
oppositifolia saxifrage
in those polar lichens; you shall make a bouquet of it for your cousin Laura, who is to marry on Sunday.

I tried to show my Uncle Tungstenius again that I could not be simultaneously in the realm of the polar saxifrages and in our botanical garden at Fischausen, that my dogs, who were sleeping on an islet in the Kennedy Strait, were no threat at all to our borders, and that Laura could not marry in the absence of her father; but he appeared to be in a most bizarre state of mind and in no way
encumbered
by the problem of ubiquity.

Just then Walter came, and entered so completely into my Uncle Tungstenius’s opinions on this matter, that I allowed myself to be convinced and consented to show
them how the Eskimos beat the snow to make a sort of stone which withstands the intense heat of their dwellings, since this sort of artificial gemstone is the only kind of bed they have. In order to try it out at home, all we had to do was obtain some snow in high summer in our garden at Fischausen; for in my dream, time was also ubiquitous, and the June roses were in full bloom in the flowerbed.

We were engrossed in seeking this unlikely snow, when Laura brought us a great armful of eider
feathers
, assuring us that one could satisfactorily beat and solidify this material; to which we made no objection, and, when we had succeeded in turning it into a tablet fifteen feet square, the wind penetrated the opening of the cave which had crumbled away, and dispersed all the eider feathers to great peals of laughter from my cousin, who collected them in handfuls and threw the flakes in my face.