The Ice Museum (23 page)

Nansen imagined Pytheas sailing up the coast, finding natives who showed him where the sun went to rest, and experiencing the long days of the summer months. Galvanized by their hospitality, by the strange sights they showed him, he sailed on. A thousand years before the great Norse era, Pytheas sailed through what would become the Viking heritage trail, a source of pride to Nansen. This was one of the regions King Harald Fairhair concentrated his force on, when he unified Norway and sent the rebellious and independent across the seas to Iceland. The ninth-century farmers left their lands, and set sail across the ocean, a trans-European migration of the ruined and hopeful. King Harald stayed, glowering in the west, sending out messages to the remaining landholders, asking why they had not come to see him. The Norwegians of the nineteenth century, examining this great Viking past, felt, a little like the Icelanders in the west, that things had been in perpetual decay since the early medieval era. Since the decline of the Viking Empire, Norway had been constantly under the control of foreign powers—joined with Denmark for centuries, and then with Sweden since 1815. Between Nansen's first voyage and his account of Norway as Thule the union between Norway and Sweden was dissolved, and Norway became an autonomous country. Northern myths became fodder for independence talk. Nansen proposed the antiquity of his nation, its claim to an old tale about the north. Pytheas might have sailed past the idyllic fjordland north of Bergen, the rocks piled in layers. A fertile land, covered now with farms and dense tree growth—horse chestnuts, maples, holly, linden and copper beech. Pytheas might have passed northwards through the long, serene day of Nordmøre and Romsdal, the mountains by night a retreating pattern of dark blue shadows.

The small wooden houses were reflected in the clear waters of the fjords; the rain fell softly onto the verdant plains.

 
 
And during the next day the boat moved slowly along the coast of Nordmøre, through archipelagoes of rocks coated with moss, layered with trees, everything shimmering under the heat haze. The boat passed into the clear waters of Trondheimsleia, with the rocks a brilliant blue under the fine silvery light. There were cornfields to starboard, bright against the deep green of the woodland. Stretching beyond were miles and miles of green and grey coastline: slender trees on stark rocks, brilliant patches of sunlight falling onto the dusty mountains. Pytheas, Nansen thought, would have sailed along the coast to the gentle plains of Trøndelag, the area around Trondheim, and towards the pallid clenched claws of the mountains further along the coast.

I was lulled by the motion of the ship. The landscape was grandiose, but its shifts were subtle and regular; changes in terrain were gradually realized, signalled from the south, as the trees dwindled on the slopes, and the forests gave way to rocks. The sky swelled, the sea darkened, the sun sank towards the horizon, and failed to disappear. A burnt glow fell across the waves; the long lines of the mountains receded into shadows.

In my early twenties, I had lived outside Trondheim for a few months, and I knew Nansen's Thule well. It was a place where I had watched the summer fall into a rust-coloured autumn, the trees slowly shedding their leaves. The trees lost their leaves to the slow creep towards winter, the light started to weaken, declining into a mid-afternoon dusk. The sun couldn't cling to the skies. I lived in a hut by a fjord and walked through the twilight mornings, across fields dusted with a light coating of snow, a coating which thickened as the winter became darker. The stillness was what most affected my mood; I had thought the long nights would drag me into inertia, but I found waking to a silent field of ice, the only motion the snow gliding onto the windowsill, created a mood of exhilaration. The snow shone, a white plain sharply distinguished from the darkness of the sky; everything was bold and uncomplicated. My hut was two miles from a small village, so some mornings I would walk there, across untouched snow, my feet denting the crisp surface, pushing through to the ground beneath. Everyone was quiet and friendly in this snow world; they waved from a distance, farmers walking in their fields, and people who by summer might try to fish in the fjords, waiting through the cold months. They waved and turned away, retreating from the ice-winds back to their houses. It was beautiful but it was impossible to walk for more than an hour in the cold air; it made my lungs ache, and my abiding memory of the time I spent outside Trondheim was the yearning for warmth in any form, an addiction to hot baths, saunas and open fires. I walked through the fields, thinking of where and how I would next become warm.

By the end I was almost acclimatized, I could walk through the winds as they blasted snow in my eyes, and in England for a while I was never cold.

The crisp coldness of the air made me think quickly; I wrote letters to everyone I knew, generating reams of paper which I stacked in a pile and tried not to use as firelighters. I read Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian Nobel laureate, who had loved the Nordland summer's endless day, the long light evenings, the rustling of the leaves in the forest, the darting of the light across the fjord. The skies of pale fire, the drift of the season into winter. Hamsun had started out in the 1890s as a crazy brilliant modernist, writing out the madness of the city and the desperation of the starving writer, in the reeling prose of
Hunger
. He had come from a small town north of Trondheim; he was from a poor family, and no one encouraged him to write; he passed his twenties as a mendicant, struggling to survive, emigrating to the States in search of something else, declining into a dozen piecemeal jobs.
Hunger
was the product of a raging and desperate frustration, his ravenous urge to succeed. Success began to ruin Hamsun; he became obsessed with his own rise from obscurity, his novels started to talk of nothing else. He became nostalgic and impatient; he lurched away from the city, writing nothing but rustic romances laced with sentimentality, tales of robust hunting men of few words, clumsy in elegant company, chasing the daughters of local merchants through the vibrant forests. They lived in huts like mine, they wore big boots, they knew nothing of manners and conventions; they were tormented brutes, aware that society judged them. They were good at whittling wood, and occasionally sheer frustration at their failure to ensnare a local beauty led them to a melodramatic act. One of the rustic hut-dwellers shot himself in the foot one morning because the beautiful daughter of the local businessman wouldn't talk to him.

I had sat in the hut, the snow stacked up outside the door, reading Hamsun's odes to rustic simplicity.

 
 
When the ship slips past the Arctic Circle, there is no fanfare, no signal from the shore. There is a terse announcement from the bridge at 7 A.M. The landscape stays the same; the same stark crags and tree-coated rocks lounging low in the fjord. Streaks of ice and snow glint on the tops of the mountains. There's an island ahead, coated in red firs. In the small Arctic town of Ørnes, the sound of the ship's horn echoes around the mountains. We have reached another defiant, isolated place: a few elegant old buildings by the quayside, smaller houses stretching up the hillside. A sand beach slides down to the ocean; it is deserted, though the sun shines across it. Anywhere here, I imagine Nansen muttering to himself, as he saw these sun-drenched rocks. Pytheas might have arrived anywhere around here, and called it Thule. Here, where a lone crag casts a long shadow over the water, or here, on this barren islet, a thin coating of moss clinging to the rock. Thule as Nansen saw it is a place of wooden houses, in red, yellow and green, topped with slanted roofs. Lines of
rorbuer
—fishermen's huts—along the water's edge. The crushed peaks of the mountains, severe slices of granite colliding into irregular shapes, perverse dodecahedrons, drawn by a hyperactive hand. Then there are places where the mountains lurk like squat rock beasts, behind the long flat islands. It's a staggering land, constantly inventive and showy, producing new wonders of scenery. It's a place where the people are silenced by the immensity of the rocks, left staring quietly at the sea. Purple mountains rise in the distance, and the only sounds are the cries of gulls, twirling in the boat's wake, and the relentless sluicing of water under the hull. The fjord absorbs the colours of the sky; the sun casts a low haze across the mountains; the mountains reflect their shapes across the fjord.

It's a hot afternoon; the sun is shining onto the waves. The ship stops at Bodø, a small Arctic outpost. The mountains are beautiful. The sea is serene and glitters in the sun. The town is a collapsed street, diggers slamming into the cracked concrete, military aircraft screaming across the skies. There's a shopping centre in a state of destruction, with wire fences everywhere. The area was ruined at the end of the Second World War, when the Germans retreated from the Russian forces moving from the east. Bodø is a town of concrete blocks, interspersed with neat wooden buildings, rebuilt when the inhabitants returned home after the war. A memorial stands outside Bodø Cathedral: ‘To the Memory of those from Bodø who gave their lives for Norway during the War and the Occupation 1940-45.' Cast adrift in Nansen's Thule, startled by the sun, I dive into the regional museum, and find a sketchy collection of junk and fishing tackle, distributed randomly across a couple of rooms. There's a large photograph of the town in 1939, before the destruction—rows of wooden houses, quaint and nondescript. And there's a shot of the town after the war—piled-up ash and debris, silence and thick smoke.

We passed slowly through a stretching shambles of islets and inlets, with the sun spreading across the sky. The light was gleaming across the pastel mountains, turning them purple. The sun shone like fire on the rock pillars. Small villages emerged out of the rock desert, and receded again, as the boat moved onwards into further miles of slab rocks lurking above the sea. There was the constant background hum of the engines and the gentle slap of water swirling around the bows. I sat on the deck watching the deckhands coil the ropes, and then I dozed for a few hours, curled in a sleeping bag, under the shelter of the ship's bridge.

After Thule, as Nansen defined it, the stark crags of the Lofoten Islands emerged ahead—an archipelago of barren crinkled rocks, emerging violently from the sea. Lashed by storms in winter, serene and mist-scaped in summer. An immense wall of rocks loomed ahead, a line of mountains in the ocean. Rocks in the gathering dusk, looking like a vast island. Before the sun set, the boat made a detour into Trollfjord—the gathering shadows playing across the blackened crags, snow glinting like mist in patches on the rocks. I was woken by the shuddering of the boat as it turned around at the end of the fjord. The enormous sheer sides had been crushed close together, leaving a gap barely wide enough for the ship between them. In the half-light, it seemed to me that the rock formations of Trollfjord resembled nothing so much as anguished faces, encased in stone: great simian ridges, deep sockets, gaping mouths, severe and strange.

In his Arctic history
In Northern Mists
, Nansen had written about a mythical ancient tribe of the far north, the Hyperboreans. The Hyperboreans were a people who knew neither war nor injustice, neither age nor disease; they supped with divinities, they invited Apollo over for a dance and dinner, they entertained heroes, Perseus among them. Only the divine and semi-divine knew where the Hyperboreans lived; the poet Pindar gave elusive descriptions: ‘travelling neither by ships nor on foot could you find/ the way to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.' They were an immortal race, living beyond the fierce north wind, in farthest northern Ocean, where the tired stars sank to rest, where the moon was so near that it was possible to see the imperfections on its surface. Some sources said there was a marvellous temple, shaped like a sphere, which floated freely in the air, borne by the winds. There were three giant brothers there, twelve feet high, who performed the service of priests to the sanctuary. When they offered the sacrifice and sang hymns to the sound of the cithara, whole clouds of swans surrounded the temple and settled upon it.

Though they lived in the northern zone, their land seemed to be quiet and perfect, a place free of the harshness of the north wind, of the sleet and snow, the driving rain. They were the only race living in the north-east who did not encroach continually on their neighbours, unlike the Scythians, Issedones and Arimaspians, who were cramped together in the north, and oppressed constantly by griffins and other bizarre creatures. The Hyperboreans were a musical tribe, passing the days playing the lyre and the pipes, listening to choirs. They had escaped Nemesis, and when they grew tired of life—of this song-filled, flower-strewn life—they threw themselves, with wreaths in their hair, from a cliff into the sea.

The myth of the Hyperboreans was gradually entwined with Thule, so the poets sometimes wrote about the Hyperborean waves crashing on the shores of Thule, or the Hyperborean peoples of Thule. They seemed the right sort of inhabitants for a mystery isle; their origins as uncertain as those of the land of Thule, any lurking truth clouded by anecdote and poetry. Nansen was a scholar of precision; he dismissed suggestions that the Hyperboreans might actually have been an early Germanic tribe. But when Nansen named Norway as Thule he knew the Hyperboreans were part of the mythical package. It flattered the people, the notion that their nation might have been visited by Pytheas, that it might have been the source of the idea of Thule. And it also flattered the people to link them imaginatively with the Hyperboreans, the grand old immortals of the north. It was a useful piece of national symbolism, for a nation finding its feet, struggling to emerge from centuries under the overall control of its neighbours, Denmark and Sweden. Nansen had a strong sense of ancestral pride; the Viking exploration of the far north received extensive coverage in
In Northern Mists
. His Thule bound the Norwegians up with the discovery of the far north, making them an ancient nation of Arctic people: first the local population welcoming the explorer Pytheas, and later the explorers themselves, pushing towards the North and South Poles.