Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [27]
Brentford had found the chapter entitled “Was the North Pole discovered?” From what he read there, skimming though he was, it was evident that both explorers had stretched the truth by quite a length.
“Peary,” resumed Whale, “came back much too quickly to substantiate his claim. Forty miles a day on a sled that Peary himself admitted he (or his men, since he could barely walk) had to push like a plough is simply not possible. His bearings must have been rather sloppy, to say the least, especially in a place where you quite easily get lost, and he had not taken into account the drift of the ice sheet either. So to say that he was thirty miles off the mark is really a generous estimation. As for Cook, he was certainly heroic as well, as the end of his trip more than proved, but he himself admitted that ‘to touch that spot would be an accident,’ and his Eskimos let him down by saying they had never lost sight of the land. Henson was probably right when he said that Cook had just ‘half-hypnotized himself’ over the whole matter.”
“These men had certainly estimated that they had reached some North Pole inside of themselves,” said Brentford, handing back the book. “It is perhaps the one that counts.”
“Oh, yes, certainly. As Emerson said, ‘Character may be ranked as having its natural place in the north. It shares the magnetic currents of the system. The feeble souls are drawn to the south or negative pole.’ Who, really, would boast of reaching his inner South Pole? You know what Lorber said?” asked William, with a wicked little smile, while Brentford sniggered knowingly. It was usual, if not ritual, in New Venice that any mention of the solid, pedestrian Antarctic would trigger a connivance of contempt. Jakob Lorber’s crackpot theory that the North Pole was “the mouth of the earth” and the South Pole the “the eliminatory canal” was, in this respect, a perennial favourite.
“Seriously,” William insisted, “what you say has some truth, and we all wish we could reach that point, don’t we? But there are other ways to think of this failure. The first would be the disappointment. After all, the place is nothing if not nondescript. The North Pole and four hundred miles off it are just the same endless expanse of dreary faceless desert. The very place where you would plant your flag would drift away with the pack, so you couldn’t prove anything. Or to put it otherwise, the North Pole is Nothing. Just a name, an idea, that is not worth dying for, after all.”
“I would think that the pole being an idea as much as a real spot explains very well the drive to go there. I have never seen that futility ever got in the way of human endeavour. Quite the contrary.”
“I could very well agree with you on that. As you know, I am, first and foremost, a chess player, so I understand your argument even better than I would care to admit. Let us try something else, then. Maybe they did not really want to go there. Maybe they were, consciously or not, afraid or reluctant to face the fact that there was nothing there. Maybe they did not want to be the men who would disenchant the world, kill everyone’s dream of Eden or Hollow Earth, dry the fountain from which so many utopias were pouring forth—the very same reveries that, in some ways, had attracted them to the pole. They wanted, deep inside, to keep it a terra incognita.”
“I can sympathize with this idea,” said Brentford. “But it does not make me want to go there, even if I considered myself able to do it, which, I must add, is not the case at all.”
William looked at him with what was unmistakably benevolence.
“If I judge by the way you have been invited there, the risk of disenchantment is rather reduced. Maybe you will find the very thing that those explorers were afraid not to find.”
CHAPTER VIII
Hypnotized!!!
“I will not suffer myself to be hypnotized, or mesmerized, nor will I place myself in such a