Алистер Маклин - Bear Island

There followed a long and for me highly uninteresting account of the island’s history which seemed to consist mainly of interminable squabbles between Norwegians, Germans and Russians over whaling and mining rights – although I was mildly intrigued to learn that as recently as the twenties there had been as many as a hundred and eighty Norwegians working the coal mines at Tunheim in the north-east of the island – I would have imagined that even the polar bears, after whom the island was named, would have given this desolation as wide a berth as possible. The mines, it seemed, had been closed down following a geological survey which showed that the purity and thickness of the seams were not sufficient to make it a profitable proposition. The island, however, was not entirely uninhabited even today: it appeared that the Norwegian Government maintained a meteorological and radio station at Tunheim.

Then came articles on the natural resources, vegetation and animal life, all of which I took as read. The references to the climate, however, which might be expected to concern us all, I found much more intriguing and highly discouraging. ‘The meeting of the Gulf Stream and the Polar Drift,’ it read, ‘makes for extremely poor weather conditions, with large rainfall and dense fogs. The average summer temperature rises to not more than five degrees above freezing. Not until mid-July do the lakes become ice-free and the snow melts. The midnight sun lasts for 106 days from April 30th to August 13th: the sun remains below the horizon from November 7th to February 4th.’ This last item made our presence there, this late in the year, very odd indeed as Otto couldn’t expect more than a few hours of daylight at the most: perhaps the script called for the whole story to be shot in darkness.

‘Physically and geologically,’ it went on, ‘Bear Island is triangular in shape with its apex to the south, being approximately twelve miles long on its north-south axis, in width varying from ten miles in the north to two miles in the south at the point where the southernmost peninsula begins. Generally speaking the north and west consist of a fairly flat plateau at an elevation of about a hundred feet, while the south and east are mountainous, the two main complexes being the Misery Fell group in the east and the Antarcticfjell and its associated mountains, the Alfredfjell, Harbergfjell and Fuglefjell in the extreme south- east.

‘There are no glaciers. The entire area is covered with a network of shallow lakes, none more than a few yards in depth: those account for about one-tenth of the total area of the island: the remainder of the interior of the island consists largely of icy swamps and loose scree which makes it extremely difficult to traverse.

‘The coastline of Bear Island is regarded as perhaps the most inhospitably bleak in the world. This is especially true in the south where the island ends in vertical cliffs, the streams entering the sea by waterfalls. A characteristic feature of this area is the detached pillars of rock that stand in the sea close to the foot of the cliffs, remnants from that distant period when the island was considerably larger than it is now. The melting of the snows and ice in June/July, the powerful tidal streams and the massive erosion undermine those coastal hills so that large masses of rock are constantly falling into the sea. The great polomite cliffs of Hambergfjell drop sheer for over 1400 feet: at their base, projecting from the seas are sharp needles of rock as much as 250 feet high, while the Fuglefjell (Bird Fell) cliffs are almost as high and have at their most southerly point a remarkable series of high stacks, pinnacles and arches. To the east of this point, between Kapp Bull and Kapp Kolthoff, is a bay surrounded on three sides by vertical cliffs which are nowhere less than 1000 feet high.

‘Those cliffs are the finest bird breeding grounds in the Northern Hemisphere.’

It was all very fine for the birds, I supposed. That was the end of the Geographical Society’s report – or as much of it as the writer had chosen to include – and I was bracing myself for a return to Heissman’s limpid prose when the lee door opened and John Halliday staggered in. Halliday, the unit’s highly competent stills photographer, was a dark, swarthy, taciturn and unsmiling American. Even by his normal cheerless standards Halliday looked uncommonly glum. He caught sight of us and stood there uncertainly, holding the door open.

‘I’m sorry.’ He made as if to go. ‘I didn’t know–’

‘Enter, enter,’ I said. ‘Things are not as they seem. What you see before you is a strictly doctor-patient relationship.’ He closed the door and sat down morosely on the settee that Mary Stuart had so lately occupied. ‘Insomnia?’ I asked. ‘A touch of the mal de mer ?’

‘Insomnia.’ He chewed dispiritedly on the wad of black tobacco that never seemed to leave his mouth. ‘The mal de mer’s all Sandy’s.’ Sandy, I knew, was his cabin-mate. True, Sandy hadn’t been looking very bright when last I’d seen him in the galley but I’d attributed this to Haggerty’s yearning to eviscerate him: at least it explained why he hadn’t called in to see the Duke after he’d left us.

‘Bit under the weather, is he?’

‘Very much under the weather. Kind of a funny green colour and sick all over the damned carpet.’ Halliday wrinkled his nose. ‘The smell–’

‘Mary.’ I shook her gently and she opened sleep-dulled eyes. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go for a moment.’ She said nothing as I half helped her to a sitting position, just glanced incuriously at Halliday and closed her eyes again.

‘I don’t think he’s all that bad,’ Halliday said. ‘Not poisoning or anything like that, I mean. I’m sure of it.’

‘No harm to take a look,’ I said. Halliday was probably right: on the other hand Sandy had had the freedom of the galley before Haggerty had caught him and with Sandy’s prehensile and sticky fingers anything was conceivable, including the possibility that his appetite was not quite as bird-like as he claimed. I picked up my medical bag and left.

As Halliday had said, Sandy was of a rather peculiar greenish shade and he’d obviously been very sick indeed. He was sitting propped up in his bunk, with both forearms wrapped round his middle: he glared at me balefully as I entered.

‘Christ, I’m dying,’ he wheezed. He swore briefly, pungently and indiscriminately at life in general and Otto in particular. ‘Why that crazy bastard wants to drag us aboard this bloody old stinking hell-ship–’

I gave him some sleeping-sedatives and left. I was beginning to find Sandy a rather less than sympathetic character: more importantly, sufferers from aconitine poisoning couldn’t speak, far less indulge in the fluent Billingsgate in which Sandy was clearly so proficient.

Swaying from side to side and again with her arms stretched out to support herself, Mary Stuart still had her eyes shut: Halliday, dejectedly chewing his wad of tobacco, looked up at me in lackadaisical half-inquiry as if he didn’t much care whether Sandy was alive or dead.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Just the weather.’ I sat down a little way from Mary Stuart and not as much as by a flicker of a closed eyelid did she acknowledge my presence. I shivered involuntarily and drew the steamer rug around me. I said: ‘It’s getting a bit nippy in this saloon. Why don’t you take one of these and kip down here?’

‘No thanks. I’d no idea it would be so damn cold here. My blankets and pillow and it’s me for the lounge.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Just as long as Lonnie doesn’t trample all over me with his hobnailed boots in the middle watch.’ It was apparently common knowledge that the liquor in the lounge drew Lonnie like a lodestone. Halliday chewed some more, then nodded at the bottle in Captain Imrie’s wrought-iron stand. ‘You’re a whisky man, Doc. That’s the stuff to warm you up.’