Hammond Innes - The Land God gave to Cain

It was odd, but now that he’d put it to me so bluntly, I no longer felt out of my depth. I was suddenly sure of myself and what I should do, and without any hesitation I heard myself say, ‘If you can fix it, I’d like to come with you tomorrow.’

‘Okay, boy. If that’s what you’d like.’ He hesitated. ‘You really are sure about this?’

In a sudden mental flash I saw my father as he had been last Christmas when I had been home, sitting up there in his room with the headphones on and his long, thin fingers with the burn marks playing so sensitively over the tuning dials. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m quite sure about it.’

He nodded his head slowly. ‘Queer business,’ he murmured. A perplexed look had come over his face and I wondered whether, now that I had agreed to go — wanted to go — he was going to back down on his offer. But all he said was, ‘Meet me down at our freight office — that’s the end of the block, next to Number One hangar — say, about a quarter before six tomorrow morning. Have your passport with you and an overnight bag. Better pack some warm clothes. You may be cold back in the fuselage. Okay?’

I nodded. ‘But what about the other end?’ I murmured. ‘Surely it isn’t as easy as that to fly somebody into another country?’ It was an automatic reaction. Now that I’d said I’d go the difficulties seemed insuperable.

He laughed and patted my shoulder. ‘Canada isn’t the States, you know. It’s still a Dominion — no fingerprints, no visa. I’ll just have to clear you with Immigration and Customs, that’s all.’ He stared at me a moment as though weighing me up and then he said, ‘Don’t forget about the warm clothes.’ He turned then with a quick nod and walked slowly back to join his group at the other end of the bar.

I stood there, the drink I hadn’t even started clutched in my hand, and a feeling of intense loneliness crept over me.

I didn’t sleep much that night and I was down at the Charter Company’s freight office by five-thirty. Farrow wasn’t there, of course, and I walked up and down in the grey morning light, feeling cold and empty inside. The office was locked, the tarmac deserted. I lit a cigarette and wondered, as I had done all night, whether I was making a fool of myself. A plane took off with a thunderous roar and I watched it disappear into the low overcast, thinking that in little more than an hour, if Farrow kept his word, I should be up there, headed west out into the Atlantic. I was shivering slightly. Nerves!

It was almost six when Farrow drove up in a battered sports car. ‘Jump in,’ he shouted. ‘Got to get you vaccinated. Otherwise it’s all fixed.’

We woke up a doctor friend of his and half an hour later I had got my certificate of vaccination, had cleared Customs and Immigration and was back at the freight office. I signed the ‘blood-chit’ that absolved the Company of responsibility for my death in the event of a crash, and then Farrow left me there and I hung about for another twenty minutes, waiting for take-off. There was no turning back now. I was committed to the flight and because of that I no longer felt nervous.

Shortly before seven the crew assembled and I walked with them across the tarmac to a big four-engined plane parked on the apron opposite the office. Inside, it was a dim-lit steel shell with the freight piled down the centre, strapped down to ring bolts in the floor. ‘Not very comfortable, I’m afraid,’ Farrow said, ‘but we don’t cater for passengers.’ He gave my shoulder a friendly squeeze. ‘Toilet’s aft if you want it.’ The door of the fuselage slammed shut and he followed his crew for’ard to the flight deck. I was alone then.

We took off just after seven, and though I had never flown before I could sense what was happening — the sound of the engines being run up one by one on test at the runway-end and then the solid roar of all four together and the drag of the airscrews as we began to move, the dim-lit fuselage rocking and vibrating around me. Suddenly it was quieter and I knew we had left the ground.

The exhilaration of the take-off gradually faded into the monotony of the flight as we drove smoothly on, hour after hour. I dozed a little and now and then Farrow or one of his crew came aft. Shortly after ten the navigator brought me sandwiches and hot coffee. An hour and a half later we landed at Keflavik in Iceland and I clambered stiffly out, blinking my eyes in the cold sunlight.

The airport was a featureless expanse, the buildings modern utilitarian blocks without character. The whole place had the crisp, cold, lifeless air of outer space. But the cafeteria in the main building yielded eggs and bacon and hot coffee, and the echoing hall was full of transit passengers passing the time by sending postcards and buying Icelandic souvenirs from counters gay with northern colours. We had over an hour there in the warmth whilst the plane was refuelled and a quick check made on one of the engines which was running rough. They found nothing wrong with the engine and by twelve-thirty I was back in the hollow roar of the fuselage and we were taking off on the last lap.

We flew high to clear a storm belt off the Greenland coast and it was cold. I dozed fitfully, the monotony only broken by an occasional cup of coffee, the lunch pack and brief talks with the crew as they came aft. It was nine-twenty by my watch when the flight engineer finally roused me. ‘Skipper says if you want to take a look at Labrador from the air you’d better come up for’ard right away. We’ll be landing in fifteen minutes.’

I followed him through the door to the flight deck. To my surprise it was daylight and, because I could see out, the long, cold hours spent huddled amongst the freight in the fuselage were suddenly forgotten. Not that there was anything to see… just the grey of cloud through the windshield and Farrow’s head outlined against it. The wireless operator gripped my arm as I passed, pulling me down towards him. ‘I’ve radioed the Tower to have Ledder meet you,’ he shouted in my ear. ‘Okay?’

‘Thanks.’

Farrow half turned his head and indicated the flight engineer’s seat beside him. ‘Going down now.’ He jerked his thumb downwards. The engines were already throttled back. ‘We’ll come out of the cloud at eight thousand.’ He tapped the altimeter dial where the pointer was dropping slowly. And he added, ‘You’ll have plenty of time to talk to Ledder. Another engine check. Port outer packed up a while back.’ He nodded towards the left-hand wing-tip where it wavered gently in the turbulent cloud mist. The outboard engine was lifeless, the propeller feathering slowly. ‘We’ll be there the night. Get away sometime tomorrow — I hope.’

I wanted to ask him whether we’d get down all right, but nobody seemed worried that we were flying on only three engines and I sat down and said nothing, staring ahead through the windshield, waiting for the moment when I should get my first glimpse of Labrador. And because there was nothing to see, I found myself thinking of my father. Had his flying duties ever taken him to Labrador or was I now doing the thing he’d wanted to do all his life? I was thinking of the books and the map, wondering what it was that had fascinated him about this country; and then abruptly the veil was swept away from in front of my eyes and there was Labrador.

The grimness of it was the thing that struck me — the grimness and the lostness and the emptiness of it. Below us was a great sheet of water running in through a desolate, flat waste, with pale glimpses of sand and a sort of barren, glacier-dredged look about it. But what held my attention was the land ahead where it rose to meet the sky. There were no hills there, no mountain peaks. It rose up from the coastal plain in one black, ruler-straight line, utterly featureless — a remote, bitter plateau that by its very uniformity gave an impression of vastness, of being on the verge of land that stretched away to the Pole.