The Balloonist Read online

  I simply meet his glance and look back at him, politely but without any expression. After a moment he takes me by the elbow and we move toward the door of the shed; outside he draws me a little apart from the others.

  “Flesh has its limits, and different flesh has different limits. What you are concealing in this matter is more than an indiscretion, it is a crime. Besides I think you will find that this mischief you have made will defeat your own purposes.”

  “Are you sure you know my purposes?”

  “I would have thought they were fairly clear.”

  I smile and might have remarked that he knows more than I do, then. But I only say, “If I am a criminal you ought to have told the authorities.”

  “I have sworn to you to say nothing, and you know that I will not. But you are taking a life in your hands—three lives, although I hold you more greatly responsible for one of the three.”

  “I am grateful for your advice. Goodbye, Doctor.”

  To my surprise he doesn’t reject my hand and responds almost warmly, it seems to me, to the pressure of my fingers. But there is no smile of sympathy on his face, only an immobility—not of disapproval, one has the impression, but of indifference—that contrasts oddly with the cordiality of his grasp. He turns and without a word goes back toward the ship, not waiting to witness the crucial moment of this enterprise for which we have prepared for so many weeks.

  For the second time this morning I make my way down the shingled beach to the water. The great roundness at the water’s edge, stretched upward as though by the force of some mysterious and insubstantial gravity, curves at the bottom into a kind of dimple or extrusion resembling the mouth of a chemical flask. The net of light cord stretched over it is another geometry of reticulation imposed on this sphere. I am struck for the first time with the beauty of the form: the Prinzess strains upward, the ropes downward, and in their blind logic these forces have created an ellipsoid of exquisite feminine roundness. The alternate segments of red and white silk, tapering to points at the top and bottom, are each of them perfect shapes according to the laws of spherical geometry, yet when glanced at again they disappear as separate entities through a kind of optical trick and merge into this rounded whole to which nothing could be added and nothing taken away. The whole gives the impression of something ethereal in its substance and yet perfect in its concept, like the thought of a mathematician. As the breeze touches it, the shape trembles, dimples here and there, and then resumes its geometric curve. The red and white stripes, which are functional and intended to increase the visibility of the Prinzess at long distances, seem an intrusion, almost a frivolity in the barrenness of the surrounding landscape. Everything else is grey or brown, the sea is the colour of iron. The wind is holding constant at eight knots from the south.

  At the water’s edge a considerable crowd has collected: workmen, cooks, sailors from the Nordkapp, old Captain Nyblom, whom I have known from the time of the Greenland expedition. Alvarez is on top of the gondola checking the guide ropes and verifying the screw mechanism that detaches them in case of entanglement in the ice or for some other reason. My two companions stand by the gondola with their hands on the instrument ring, waiting for the word to mount. Theodor is elegant as usual in a fur-lined German officer’s greatcoat, a peaked cap, and boots which came from Foirot in rue Saint-Honoré. I glance at his face for a sign of emotion, but he seems completely self-assured, with the faint touch of arrogance or contempt that is part of his nature. He has trimmed his hair short and neatly cleaned his fingernails, I see, in preparation for the flight. Waldemer is wearing a thick padded shooting jacket and a hunting cap with flaps, and you sense rather than perceive that there is long woolen underwear beneath, the American kind with a door at the rear, a most practical arrangement. As for me, I am clad in the outfit made for me by the Greenland Eskimos in 1882; a coat of reindeer skin with a hood, breeches of the same material, and sealskin boots.

  Alvarez comes down from his inspection of the guide ropes; he has checked the manoeuvring valve carefully and verified the ballast. We haven’t bothered with breakfast; there is no time to lose if we are to take advantage of the favourable wind. The lines that hold the Prinzess to earth have been removed except for three stout ropes of Manila fixed to stakes. Three workmen are standing by these with knives we have been careful to sharpen the night before. There is a certain amount of conventional handshaking, which makes everyone concerned feel rather silly. Alvarez is the enemy of all sentiment and does not participate in this ceremony. Not looking directly at me, his eyes fixed on the lower part of the gondola, he merely says crisply, “Bonne chance, Commandant.” Captain Nyblom, for some reason, shakes his head slowly, without altering his wrinkled Norwegian smile.

  Somewhat impeded by our heavy clothing, we climb up into the gondola. Because of the bulky shooting jacket Waldemer has some difficulty crossing the instrument ring, and is immobilized for some time with one leg on one side of it and one on the other. No one shows even the faint trace of a smile at this (and again I think of condemned men who are being adjusted into some execution machine which malfunctions slightly so that there is a delay in the proceedings; it is with exactly that combination of detached silence and curiosity that the spectators watch us), and by unbuttoning his coat at the bottom I manage to help him across and in. “Thanks, Major.” He is puffing a little at this incident. But he is smiling; if he can climb so smartly over the instrument ring then surely he, and all of us, can do the rest! Theodor shows no sign that he has observed this little playlet. He has swung over the ring as though it were an exercise he has performed a thousand times, and now he stands quietly waiting for the next order, with his gloves resting on the wicker of the gondola. I notice that his earlobes are already grey, and I wonder if he will be able to endure the much greater cold we are soon to encounter.

  Now that we are aboard, the mechanic Eliassen and his helper attach a spring scale to the bottom of the gondola and pull it down a little to measure our buoyancy: eleven and a half kilos. Alvarez is waiting for a lull in the wind. The ropes creak, at my feet the pigeons supplied by a Stockholm newspaper coo softly in their wicker case. There is a faint and not unpleasant smell of kerosene to the south in the centre of the island, some round grey knobs of hills are watching us like a circle of spectators. Slightly to the east of north lies the larger mass of Spitsbergen, mountains we can’t hope to climb over and must skirt with the help of this wind which we hope won’t turn fickle. In the other direction, a quarter of a mile away, the Nordkapp with her tall narrow funnel and her squared foreyard rests docilely at anchor in the bay. It is too far away to see if the doctor is watching, but I’m sure he isn’t; he is no doubt in his cabin writing up the notes of the examination. The time, a minute or two after five. I can no longer see Alvarez because he is directly under the gondola, but I can hear his voice speaking French with its brisk consonants, asking for the last time if everything is ready, warning all hands to stand clear of the guide ropes. At the last moment Eliassen comes running across the gravel with something in his hand and I catch the word dagboken: I have forgotten the pocket diary bought only two weeks before on Drottninggatan in Stockholm in which I am to record my notes of the voyage. The diary is handed up amid jokes about absentmindedness. From under the gondola the telegraph-like voice continues to give orders.

  “Attendez un moment … calme … attendez.”

  There is a pause, so silent that we can hear the ticking of the two chronometers and the sound of the air in the rigging, and then the note of the wind drops a little.

  “Coupez! Coupez tout!”

  At the same instant I feel the gondola stir, lurch to one side, and rise slowly. The white faces below are a clump of strange flowers, damply pale against the brown of the beach, following our motions as sunflowers follow the sun. Everything below us, the sheds, the camp, the white faces looking upward, dwindles and shrinks as if pulled to a centre by invisible lines of force. I look over the side to be sure the g
uide ropes are trailing property. They slither over the beach and enter the sea, where they follow behind us leaving three snaky furrows on the water. Slowed by their drag, the Prinzess begins to tilt sideways. We begin to descend toward the sea, slowly at first, then dropping lower at an alarming rate. As the wave tops come up I see quite clearly, not more than two metres below us, something gleaming on the water: a piece of tinfoil or silver paper, probably a wrapping of a photographic plate from the pictures we took yesterday. Waldemer has his hand on the ballast string. But we must not release ballast too soon; if we do we will also have to release gas in order not to soar too high, and we will need the gas later. At the last moment he pulls the drawstring and a stream of fine lead shot slithers downward with a hiss. Almost at the same instant the gondola strikes the water with a heavy, almost metallic sound. We are thrown sideway against each other and keep our balance only with difficulty. Waldemer gropes for the ballast string again but I reach for his arm and restrain it. The gondola touches the sea once more, not quite so heavily this time, and this last contact with the terrestrial sphere seems to lend it force. The Prinzess lifts a little, hesitates and descends, and then begins to climb again. The guide ropes lift evenly up until only about a third of their length is still trailing in the water.

  Waldemer catches my eye and shakes his head, smiling now, but still panting a little from the excitement.

  “The vixen! She almost gave us a bath before we were decently off!”

  Theodor says nothing. The camp behind us and the semicircle of watchers are almost invisible now. On the beach we can make out the sheds and, barely detectable in front of them, some pinpoints and variegated spots, our last glimpse of human beings. The ship in the harbour is a toy. To the northeast I see land I have previously known only from the chart: the end of the Vasa Peninsula, Vogelsang and the other outlying islands. Waldemer suddenly remembers something. He opens the leather portmanteau and unlimbers his photographic apparatus: a large oaken box with a goggle on the front of it, the tripod, and a number of plates with their holders. He unwraps the tinfoil from a plate and throws it overboard, and it sinks downward with an odd slowness like a silver bird. The plate snaps in and out of the slot. Like all specialists he grumbles at his tools. “At that range of course … And from a moving platform.” What will show on the plate are some flyspecks. But his journalist’s instinct is satisfied and our departure is recorded for posterity, insofar as posterity reads the Aftonbladet and the New York Herald. Theodor has mounted the theodolite and is taking a final bearing of the camp to verify our course. He inclines the tube downward, adjusts it to align exactly on the camp, reads the bearing of the azimuth ring, and makes an entry in his notebook. It seems incredible that we are off at last. I open my own pocket diary, find the page “12 juli,” and write, “0501 GMT. Ascent from Dane Island. Wind S. 8kt., sky clear.”

  My emotions are complicated and not readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is simultaneously a pleasure and a pain, like a desire for a woman. I am certain of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t know yet what form it will take, since I do not understand quite what it is that the yearning desires. For the first time there is borne in upon me the full truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this moment, its clockwork has moved exactly toward this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am carried helplessly toward an uninhabited and hostile, or at best indifferent, part of the earth, littered with the bones of explorers and the wrecks of ships, frozen supply caches, messages scrawled with chilled fingers and hidden in cairns that no eye will ever see. Nobody has succeeded in this thing and many have died. Yet in freely willing this enterprise, in choosing this moment and no other when the south wind will carry me exactly northward at a velocity of eight knots, I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will. All this I understand, as I understand each detail of the technique by which this is carried out. What I don’t understand is why I am so intent on going to this particular place. Who wants the North Pole! What good is it! Can you eat it? Will it carry you from Gothenburg to Malmö like a railway? The Danish ministers have declared from their pulpits that participation in polar expeditions is beneficial to the soul’s eternal well-being, or so I read in a newspaper. It isn’t clear how this doctrine is to be interpreted, except that the Pole is something difficult or impossible to attain which must nevertheless be sought for, because man is condemned to seek out and know everything whether or not the knowing gives him pleasure. In short, it is that same unthinking lust for knowledge that drove our First Parents out of the garden.

  And suppose you were to find it in spite of all, this wonderful place that everybody is so anxious to stand on! What would you find? Exactly nothing. A point precisely identical to all the others in a completely featureless wasteland stretching around it for hundreds of miles. It is an abstraction, a mathematical fiction. No one but a Swedish madman could take the slightest interest in it. Here I am. The wind is still from the south, bearing us steadily northward at the speed of a trotting dog. Behind us, perhaps forever, lie the Cities of Men with their teacups and their brass bedsteads. I am going forth of my own volition to join the ghosts of Bering and poor Franklin, of frozen De Long and his men. What I am on the brink of knowing, I now see, is not an ephemeral mathematical spot but myself. The doctor was right, even though I dislike him. Fundamentally I am a dangerous madman, and what I do is both a challenge to my egotism and a surrender to it. To the doctor then I am a criminal, to the Danish ministers some kind of prophet or saint. Or I will be if I succeed. Succeed in what? I had forgotten my own arguments on the pointlessness of my goal.

  I don’t note any of this in the diary, of course, nor do I confide it to my companions. I have already come to realise that this little book only a few centimeters square, with its prim calendar in Swedish and its toylike printed phases of the moon, will be totally inadequate for transcribing the true record of what is to come. For what is to happen can only happen inside our three minds, and will be recorded there in the infinitely complicated system of fibers and electrical charges that we call the memory, without understanding very clearly what we are talking about. The outward events become instantly nonexistent except insofar as they are fixed by this mysterious organ. The important events that happen to me in the next few days will therefore be those that take place inside my own mind. I hardly propose to communicate these complicated cerebral events to my companions and even less to the world at large, even if it were possible to do so, which it is not. The contents of the mind are infinite in their convolutions and at any given instant couldn’t be encompassed by a hundred encyclopedias, let alone by a small pigskin booklet costing two kronor. So it is clear that like Columbus I must keep two diaries, the pigskin booklet devoted to what are crassly called facts, and the other a Mental Diary in which the true events of the next few days are recorded. The log that Columbus showed to his crew was a lie; all the positions in it were false and designed to allay their fears that they were about to fall off the edge of the world. And the pigskin book too is destined to lie, although not quite in the same way. It is destined to lie because the outward events of our lives bear little or no relation to what is really happening to us. The pleasures and pains that come to the body from the outside are pinpricks; the intelligent mail regards them with contempt. It is not the body but the mind—this monster, this tyrant—that must be tricked and deluded into thinking that its lot is a happy one. The outer world exists only in my perception of it, and this perception is bent always by the shimmering lens of my consciousness. So it is clear that the Mental Diary must concern itself both with inward and outward events. And it is clear too that in this odd document the past and present must mingle, like layers of warmer and colder water merging gradually in a sea. Each sensation,
in the instant it is perceived, becomes a recollection. And between near and far recollections there is little to choose. Luisa in the drawing room in Quai d’Orléans, Theodor only a metre away from me in the gondola—one is real and the other only a kind of ephemeral Magic Lantern projected on those brain fibers crawling with electricity. But which? I have only to close my eyes and they blur and merge, the profile at certain angles of the head is the same, his contempt is her pale chastity, his courage her quickness to anger. Do I know for a certainty—I ask myself—that this feel of the instrument ring under my gloved hand is a fact, and that the smell of a sun-warmed cab horse, the clop of hoofs on an avenue in the Bois, are memories? For the feel of the instrument ring too becomes a memory, in the very instant that I seek to grasp and comprehend it.

  Probably not everybody shares these little difficulties. It is my strength and my weakness—I have finally come to realise—that I have a strong sense of the presence of the invisible, that forces unseen by others are quite real and present to me. Certainly Waldemer has no difficulty dealing with the external world. He himself is a part of it, solidly three-dimensional against the whitish background of the horizon. There is no question whether he is in Paris or here in the gondola. Just now he is developing the plate from the photograph he took at the time of our departure. Although he is only a recent initiate to the mysteries of photography, he is already adept at it and speaks knowledgeably of its chemistry, preferring for development the recently discovered alkaline process using pyrogallic acid, which permits exposures of a fifth of a second or less. Just now he, or at least his head and shoulders, are underneath a little tent of black cloth which he has erected over the opened portmanteau and its contents. Inside, he is carefully sloshing the plate in a tray of pyrogallol with potassium bromide, then fixing it in a solution of hyposulphite of soda, then meticulously washing it for several minutes in fresh water. Now he emerges into the daylight with the plate gripped carefully by the corners, holding it between himself and the sun in order to look through it: but the pose, a hieratic one, suggests that he is holding it up to this solar deity for inspection or perhaps for commendation.