Death in a High Latitude, page 18
Ruth was silent for some time. Then she said, ‘The trouble is that mathematical reality and practical reality are not always the same thing. I mean, Adrian Stowe may have satisfied himself that the Arctic Calorific Syndrome had a mathematical reality without necessarily showing that it was likely to be of any practical use. Whoever killed him presumably thought that he had discovered something, but it wouldn’t necessarily have any practical value.’
‘Think back to what seems like another lifetime, Ruth. Do you remember telling me that it didn’t much matter whether my theory was right or wrong as long as somebody else was prepared to act on believing it to be right?’
‘I do, vaguely. And I think that is really the point here. An open water North-West Passage may or may not exist – for myself I think that it probably doesn’t – but if rival groups both seriously believe in it then it’s going to influence their actions whether it actually exists or not.’
‘We’re here because we think it possible that a yacht has been able to sail as far north as the Robeson Channel,’ Keller said. ‘If a yacht really can get here, it certainly looks as if there’s something in the open water theory.’
‘I don’t think that quite follows,’ I said. ‘It has always been possible to navigate these waters in some states of the ice – given a good crew and patience it’s astonishing where a sailing vessel can get. The real question is whether there are geophysical factors making for favourable ice conditions in certain areas of the Arctic for all or most of the time. We’re assuming that some people think there are such factors, that they can be identified and located. But that’s all we’re assuming: we’re not assuming that they’re right.’
‘Well, maybe we shall find out one day, maybe not. For tonight we’re going to be comfortable, anyway. I’m going to take the next watch. I’m perfectly fit for it – indeed, after that dinner I feel fit for anything.’
*
The night passed uneventfully, and both Ruth and I were grateful for the extra sleep that Keller’s insistence on standing a watch allowed us. We were up at five, and with little to pack we were ready to start as soon as we had breakfasted.
The best walking was on the coal seam, but it didn’t last long. It was exposed for only about four hundred yards, after which it went underground again beneath a rubble of broken rock and scree. It was a tiny speck in relation to the thousands of square miles of wilderness and I marvelled at our luck in Ruth’s sharp eyes.
When the seam became broken rock we left it for slightly better ground a little lower in the valley. There were still scraps of that small heathery plant growing here and there, and an occasional bush like some sort of juniper, with sparse green berries on it. I wondered if the short Arctic summer would give them time to ripen: on the whole I hoped that we should not be around to see.
The valley narrowed as we descended it, and turned in a sharp dog-leg to get round a wall of cliffs to the north, or more probably north-east, of where we were. The valley bottom was now a ravine, enfolding a rock-strewn river bed. Here and there were frozen pools, but later in the summer there would probably be water. The spring by our cave must have drained into the river higher up. As we made our way down, the going became more and more difficult, with the sides of the ravine broken by deep miniature gorges, which doubtless channelled water from the high ground into the riverbed.
We were halted by coming to a sheer drop where the watercourse in the ravine plunged over a cliff-like shelf of rock festooned with icicles, a frozen waterfall. It wasn’t really very high, perhaps about thirty feet, but without ropes there seemed no way down it. And I wondered if there was any point in following the ravine any longer. We hoped that it would lead to the sea, and it still seemed possible that it did – it may have been imagination, but I thought that there was a feel of the sea in the air, and from time to time I seemed to sniff salt water. But if we were making for the coast this ravine-like valley did not seem a good approach. We knew from the pilot book that the Ellesmere Island shore of the Robeson Channel is often sheer cliff, and that where there are beaches they are mostly rough and broken. The increasing size of the watercourse in our ravine was a hopeful sign – it looked like the bed of a river not far from the sea. It did not follow that it reached the sea in some nice gende river mouth – it might simply cascade over a cliff. And since the pattern of the land, the varying strata making up the wilderness, seemed to be repeated it looked as if the waterfall we had now come to might recur on a larger scale on the coast.
‘I don’t think it’s worth going on here,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’ve got to make a detour of some sort. I’m quite hopeful of the cliffside to our left. It’s not sheer, it looks climbable, and if we can get up it and over the ridge we shall by-pass the end of the ravine. If we’re really near the sea we shall be going something like parallel to the coast, and not out of our way.’
‘You’re the navigator,’ Ruth said. ‘We certainly can’t go down here.’
‘What do you think, Rolf?’ I asked.
‘Well, you’ve made far more study of the charts than I have. It seems to me a choice of climbing the ridge, or going back. I hate going back.’
‘That’s settled, then. You’re a better climber than I am, Rolf. Do you feel fit to lead?’
‘Sure.’
It was hard work, but relatively straightforward, and only once did we have any serious rock-climbing to do. Keller had done a good deal of climbing, and he had a sort of natural instinct for rock, with a fine eye for a route. Whenever it seemed that we had come to an impassable place there was always a little shelf or gully that enabled us to get round it. The worst bit was a huge slab of rock about twelve feet high that blocked everything. To the left was a more or less vertical wall, and to the right a sheer drop. There seemed no way round the barrier, and the maddening thing was that from the top of it the cliffside rose quite gently, and it looked good going.
Keller stopped to consider, his eyes ‘reading’ the rock. The corner between the slab and the wall offered what looked like a secure hold, but it was about eight feet up. ‘If you could stand against the wall and I could climb on your shoulders, I could just about do it,’ he said.
One of the legacies of my wounds and operations is that I am not able to lift anything heavy. Ruth knew this and I could see her eyes cloud with worry, but I put my finger to my lips, and shook my head slightly. I didn’t think that Ruth could bear Keller’s weight, and there was nothing else for it but for me to have a go. I found as secure a stand as I could. ‘OK,’ I said.
I could not have climbed on Keller, but with one hand on my shoulder and the other on the rock face he hauled himself up successfully. He could now reach the hold quite easily, and the rest – for him – was child’s play. His weight sent a sharp pain down my side, but he was up, and for the moment that was all that mattered.
But how could Ruth and I follow? Keller was already considering this. ‘It’s quite good above the hold. If we had a rope there’d be no problem,’ he said.
‘Lifejackets,’ I suggested.
‘Possibly, but we may not need them. If Ruth can get on your shoulders as I did, I can reach her.’
Ruth didn’t want to climb on me, but she is much lighter than Keller and I could lift her to where with a knee on the rough rock she could scramble on to ray shoulders. Keller is immensely strong. He took Ruth’s hands and seemed just to swing her up.
Then it was my turn. ‘I think we’ll have to use the lifejackets now,’ Keller said. ‘I’ll knot mine and Ruth’s together, and send one end down to you. Use it as a hold, with your feet on the rock. It’s quite rough, and you’ll be able to manage.’
His confidence was more than mine, and without him I certainly could not have done it. Ruth sat on the top of the slab holding on to the lifejacket tapes. Keller stayed where he was when he had pulled up Ruth, wedged somehow on the narrow ledge that had given him a hold for getting up. He didn’t leave my weight to Ruth, but took the middle of our lifejacket line.
It took two or three goes before I could get started. At first it seemed impossible to co-ordinate a hold on the lifejacket tape with footwork on the rock, but by using my knees instead of my feet I succeeded in crawling upwards a few inches.
‘Fine,’ Keller said. ‘Just keep going.’ He helped by hauling, and at last he was able to grip my hands. He held me for a moment’s rest. Then an indication of the tension with which he braced himself came in his return to German. ‘Jetzt,’ he said. Next minute, and how he did it I don’t know, he swung me up as he had swung Ruth. She gave me a hand over the edge of the slab, and I lay there, sobbing with exhaustion and relief.
Keller joined us and patted my back. ‘You did well,’ he said. I couldn’t say anything, but I held out my hand and he took it.
There was still about half a mile to go to the ridge, but the slope seemed relatively gentle, and the ground mostly exposed slabs of rock, slippery with snow, but good to walk on if one took care. I felt done in, with a pain in my side, and eager as we all were to get to the top I suggested that it might be sensible to halt for lunch. I must have looked in need of a rest, for the others agreed at once, and would not let me do anything. Keller collected snow to serve for a drink, an unappetising mush served neat, but there was nothing to melt it with. We still had some soup, but wanted to keep that for emergencies. Unpalatable as it was, the snow at least served to keep up our fluid intake. We were better off for food. Using the machete as a carving knife Ruth cut me a chunk of cold bear meat which although distinctly tough had all the virtues of fresh food.
After lunch I went off a little way by myself, partly to answer a call of nature, partly because I wanted to have a look at my wound. When I got down to it through my layers of clothing it was as I feared; it had opened, and was bleeding. There was little I could do about it. In my haversack I had some lint and plaster, and I stuck a pad of lint over the wound, hoping to stop or at least to check the bleeding, to prevent it from getting all over my clothes. I said nothing about it for the moment, and as the others were ready we started at once on our final climb to the ridge.
Even in known countryside there is always a lift of the heart in coming to a view, and in our condition in unknown territory we were almost breathless with excitement as we covered the last few yards to the ridge. What we expected I don’t really know. Our immediate goal was the sea, and we all hoped for something that would indicate the coast. What we did see was the remotely possible in theory suddenly become real. Below us, and about half a mile away, anchored off a stony beach in a little bay of open water, was a yacht.
XI
In the Robeson Channel
AS WHEN I had shot the bear I had no sense of triumph. With the bear I had aimed, pressed the trigger of a rifle, and the rest had happened with mechanical inevitability. Now, the intense thought that had gone into the case of the Baffin Map seemed equally to have led to an inevitable conclusion. But it was not concluded. I could not doubt that the yacht in the little bay was Apfel, but who was on board her we did not know. I might have been right in some things, but gravely wrong in others. Our present condition was certainly not what we had planned.
The others, who did not yet know of my damage, were more cheerful. Ruth put her arms round me and kissed me. ‘Well done, Peter,’ she said.
‘One is brought up to believe in reason but this seems more like magic,’ Keller said. ‘Yet it has been done by reasoning – your reasoning, Herr Colonel. I congratulate you.’
‘Come off it, Rolf – English for save the compliments until they’ve been earned. And I could have done nothing without you and Ruth. The question is, what do we do next?’
‘We’re rather on the sky line. Do you suppose they can see us from the yacht?’ Keller asked.
‘If they were looking, perhaps. But who would they expect to come out of this wilderness? Still, you’re right. We don’t know what we’re up against, and it’s silly to take needless risks. Let’s get down among those rocks and have a talk.’
The side of the ridge we were on now was steeper than the one we had climbed. It was also more broken, and it looked as if it turned into cliffs between us and the beach. We took shelter in a pile of jagged rocks a few yards from where we were standing. We could look down on the yacht, but no one on the yacht could possibly see us. The instinct of hunters and hunted was strong in us, and we began by talking in whispers until I said, ‘This is ridiculous. She’s at least half a mile away, and several hundred feet below us.’
Keller laughed. This broke the sense of high drama, and we all felt better for it. ‘Back to assumptions,’ I said. ‘We can assume that the yacht is Apfel, and that Dr Braunschweig is on board. If our earlier assumptions are anywhere near right we must assume that he is a captive, or subject to some restraint. We must also assume that he has played his part in whatever he was forced or persuaded to come here to do, and that the deadline for his liquidation is getting near. Therefore we can’t just go away and leave the yacht while we try to make our way along the coast to Gould Bay to get help.’
There was a sign of movement on the yacht. A figure – we were too far away to make out whether it was a man or woman – came into the cockpit and went on deck. I longed for glasses, but we had none, and that was that.
‘How many people do you reckon to be on board?’ Keller asked.
‘Hard to guess. Going back to our original theory you remember that I doubted, and I think you agreed, whether the kidnapping was a forcible seizure of Dr Braunschweig. Such evidence as there was suggested that he had stopped his car for someone he knew, and that he had left the car voluntarily. He may have gone on board the yacht voluntarily – that would have made things easier for the kidnappers. Once on board they showed their hand, and forced him to stay on board, because they wanted him to take them to the Arctic in Apfel. She’s made good time in getting here, so there must have been enough for an adequate crew – I’d say at least three plus Braunschweig himself. Of course there may be more, but I think they’d try to keep numbers down because they wouldn’t want to put in anywhere for food. They could pick up water at some uninhabited fjord on the Greenland coast, but they would have had to make port somewhere for food.’
Keller reflected on this. ‘Three presumably tough people, and we are three, so at least we’re equal there,’ he said. ‘But we don’t know whose side Braunschweig is on – he may be here for reasons of his own, and have left a false trail of kidnapping to disguise what he was really up to.’
‘It’s possible, of course. But from what we know of him it seems unlikely. As far as we know he is genuinely devoted to his wife and children, and a clever man could have found some way of going off without exposing them to the agony of thinking he’d been kidnapped. If Braunschweig wants to be rescued he’s an ally. And we have the advantage of surprise.’
‘How do we use it?’
‘To get on board. They don’t know that we’re looking for Braunschweig, and if we turn up as shipwrecked mariners they can scarcely shoot us out of hand.’
‘I’m not so sure about that. If they’re planning to kill Braunschweig they won’t want any stray witnesses. And if we’ve been wrecked we’ve disappeared anyway, and they’ve nothing to worry about if they want to shoot us.’
‘That’s a good point. But I don’t think they’d shoot us at once – sheer curiosity about us would make them let us come on board. And once aboard we can see what the situation is. We’ve got pistols, and if necessary we can shoot first. They can’t see the pistols under these anoraks. I suggest we transfer them from our belts to our pockets.’
‘I don’t much like it. But I can’t think of anything else.’
‘I don’t like being shipwrecked,’ Ruth said. ‘It will strike them as wildly improbable. What on earth were we doing in a boat in this part of the world?’
‘Sound reasoning – I was thinking too much of getting on board. It’s always easier to tell the truth, so let’s nearly tell the truth and be survivors from an air crash.’
‘There are several airlines flying polar routes, but I think we’d better not be a big passenger aircraft,’ Keller said. ‘We can assume they have got radio, and any passenger plane lost in this part of the world would be a big story on the radio news. We’d better be survivors from a small private plane.’
‘Difficult to explain what a small private plane was doing here.’
‘Advancing knowledge,’ Ruth said. ‘I’m a genuine professor, and it’s my job to advance knowledge. We’re part of the Oxford North Greenland Expedition and we were flying back to our base – you’ll have to think up a good base for us, Peter – when we lost our way in fog and crashed. The pilot and navigator were killed, and we’ve made our way to the coast.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Yesterday, I think. We don’t want questions about where we’ve been and how we got here.’
‘We’re a bit old for undergraduates. You might pass, Ruth, but Rolf and I wouldn’t.’
‘We don’t have to be undergraduates. Somebody’s got to look after the young. I’m a professor, Rolf is a fellow of Balliol – Modern Languages – and an experienced mountaineer. As for you, Peter, I think you’d better be a bursar – out for the ride.’
‘Am I permitted to be married to you?’
‘I hadn’t thought of that. Probably not. I don’t think tough, exploring women professors are likely to cart husbands around. Sorry. But if we’re going in for make-believe it might as well be believable.’
‘All right. Where’s our base? Somewhere on Disco Island, but we can be rather vague about it. The plane was a six-seater executive job, borrowed from – who shall we borrow it from? Oh, yes, lent to the expedition by one of our sponsors. We needn’t go into it, but if it seems necessary it can be Allied International Foods. They’re always sponsoring expeditions, and we’re testing out their new nutritious breakfast cereal – you know, “Work all day on three tablespoons”.’
