Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [95]
He did not go as fast as he had expected to, but it was the number one rule of any arctic trip that expectations were worthless and that everything that could go wrong would eventually do so. He had now about five days to get to the pole, which could be done, depending on the ice, and provided he lost no time. A full day of sailing, if it could be called that, had taken him only fifty miles closer to his target, but these had been, he hoped, the hardest miles.
He tried to sleep for a few hours, but he could not find the switch to turn off the lamp in his head that was called Sybil. He remained seated and shivering in the cabin, with only his breath for company, making out through the thick blurry windshield the rough unfinished shapes of angry, growling, roaring ice sculptures mutely howling at the moon. This was pure Phobetor territory, here, a nightmarish wilderness with none of Phantasus’ creatures to animate it, the true kingdom of Icelus, as Phobetor was known among the Gods. If Brentford peered into the landscape long enough, he could see, like many explorers before him, something like the outlines of a city emerging from the icy pandemonium: buildings out of ice blocks, domelike hillocks, razor-sharp spires of crystal, the dark canals of water leads. It occurred to him that the icescape tried to imitate New Venice, unless New Venice, in its moonlit marble whiteness, was but one more dream mirage from the mind of Icelus. Maybe there was a message in this metamorphosis about how useless or impossible it was to go away, or about how badly he already missed the place. For a while, he was tempted to go back, but somehow that demanded even more fuss than continuing on. He knew well that he was, quite literally, pursuing a dream, but this did not make it any easier to call it quits, when everything else seemed to be lost.
He was half asleep when the dawn caught him by surprise, a drowned pale sun that rolled slowly on the horizon like a coin about to fall. Mumbling about losing precious time, he shook off sleep and went out to do the chores, defrosting the windshield, scrubbing the runners and greasing the cast-iron shoes with a mixture of tar, tallow, and stearine, checking that the hulls and the rudder-skate had not suffered any damage beyond a few scrapes and minor blows. The air was so clear that he could see for miles a landscape as precise as a painted miniature, with distant sheets of ice flashing like planted mirror shards, and breathing it turned his lungs inside out. But that felt good, somehow.
He took out the sextant and theodolite to try to take his bearings, because the constant search for a passage and the effect of the drift were likely to have made him stray off course. Under these latitudes, the compass indicated a stubborn southwestern direction, and even travelling at night, the stars could not be depended upon with Polaris too high overhead to be seen. If he was right, he had been carried away to the east, but not to an extent that rendered his trip more absurd that it already was. So he kept on.
On this second day, the going was getting somehow smoother, with less steering around and more sastruga snow. At some point, the Kinngait even picked up speed, and the landscape jolted past in a blur of blue. Under the whirr of the fan blades, Brentford could hear the crackling and ringing of the runners, the spraying of crushed gems they spurted in their wake. In front of him, under the bow, the faint shadow of the ship, the rows and rows of swallowed rollers, the complicated lines of cracks quickly tangling and unravelling themselves wove a moving web