Hammond Innes - Blue Ice

She seemed to understand, for she nodded slowly. ‘Everything had to be subordinated to that.’ She sighed. ‘Yes. You’re right. But if only I’d known. Then I-’ She stopped. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nothing would have made any difference. It was that singleness of purpose, that inward fire that attracted me.’ She sat for some time with her eyes closed. Her hand was relaxed and soft in mine. ‘What about you, Bill?’ she asked at length. ‘You say you’ve been in love — many times. What was it drove you on?’

I hesitated. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Excitement, I think. The excitement of running things, of always being faced with problems that were too big for me until I beat them. I’m a climber — in the industrial sense. I always had to get to the top of the next peak.’

‘And now?’ she asked.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Now I have had my fill — for the moment,’ I answered. ‘During the war I reached the top. I exhausted myself, satiated my urge for power. Now I’m content to lie and bask in the sunshine — or was.’

‘Or was?’ The slender line of her brows rose.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘All the time we have been sailing towards these mountains, that old sense of excitement has been rising inside me. If I can find out what Farnell discovered-’ I stopped then. It sounded ghoulish this search for a dead man’s plunder.

‘I see,’ she said and looked away to the mountains. And then suddenly with a violence I had not expected she said, ‘God! Why was I born a woman?’

She got up then and went below, and I sat on feeling suddenly alone. The mountains were not so bright and the sky seemed less blue. I knew then — and admitted it to myself for the first time — that I’d missed something in life. I had held its hand for a moment. That was all. It didn’t belong to me. I had borrowed from a dead man.

One of the motionless bodies laid out on the deck stirred. It was the diver. ‘Sunde,’ I called.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Then he got to his feet and came aft. ‘Where are we meeting your partner?’ I asked.

‘Fjaerland,’ he answered.

‘He’ll be coming up to Fjaerland in Einar Sandven’s boat?’

‘Ja.’

‘When?’

‘Dunno. Yer see, Oi only left a message fer ‘im.’

‘So he might be coming down the fjord right now?’

‘That’s roight.’ He shaded his eyes and gazed up the wide stretch of shimmering water. Then he picked up the glasses. But he shook his head. ‘Don’t see ‘im,’ he said.

I took the glasses from him and examined the wide sweep of the fjord. There were several boats in sight, but none small enough. I swung the glasses towards the mountains and the narrowing gap of Fjaerlandsfjord. Fir-clad slopes dropped steeply to water that was curiously different in colour — a cold green. On a tongue of land that was green and fertile the white facade of a big hotel gleamed in the sunlight. It was all very peaceful and serene. The tongue of land was Balestrand and a steamer was moving in to the quay. A white plume of steam showed for an instant above its red funnel. A moment later the mountains reverberated to the distant sound of the vessel’s siren.

‘It is beautiful, eh?’ I looked up. Dahler was standing beside me.

‘Balestrand, isn’t it?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘The sunniest place in all Sognefjord,’ he said. ‘The hotel you see is the Kviknes Hotel. It is very big, and all built of wood. The best hotel in Norway. I have many happy memories of that place. The Kaiser used to anchor his yacht here.’ He turned and nodded to a low headland over our starb’d quarter. ‘That is the Vangsnes. If you look there you will see a big bronze statue. Once I have climbed to the top of him.’ Through the glasses I could see it quite plainly, a colossal statue of a man on a pedestal of rock. ‘It is the statue of the legendary Frithjof placed there by the Kaiser. He wished so much to be remembered that man. He put another statue at Balholm. It is of King Bele, one of the Vikings. There is something Wagnerian about the Vikings. If Hitler had travelled more I think perhaps he also would have erected statues in this place.’

‘It all looks so peaceful,’ I said, gazing again at Balestrand and the white gables and balconies of the hotel.

‘You expected it to be wild and terrible, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘The Sogne is not wild and terrible. But the smaller fjords, yes.’

‘Wait till we get into Fjaerlandsfjord,’ Sunde said.

Dahler smiled. ‘Yes. Mr Sunde is right. Wait till we are in Fjaerlandsfjord. The water is like ice and the mountains are dark and terrible and at the end the Boya and Suphelle glaciers fall into the fjord. I do not think you will be disappointed when you see Fjaerland.’

He was right. Once past Balestrand the gloom of the mountains closed in around us, throwing back the sound of our engine. The sun still shone and the sky was blue. But the day ceased to be warm. In Fjaerlandsfjord the water was a translucent, ice-cold green. It took no colour from the sky. The fjord was nothing but a twenty mile crevice in the mountains. Sheer cliffs of rock hemmed us in. And where there was a slope, it was so steep that the pines that covered it seemed tumbling headlong towards the cold waters. Up frightening, boulder-strewn gullies deep snow pierced by grey, ice-worn rock glittered in the sunlight. In places there was snow right down to the water’s edge. The streams that cascaded like white lace down the gullies, burrowed under these patches of snow from fragile bridges. Small black and white birds with long orange beaks flew from crevice to crevice along the rocks. The gloom of the place was something that only Milton could have described. It closed in on us like the chill of fear and silenced all conversation.

For an hour we ran up that narrow fjord. There was no breath of wind. The ice-green water was flat like glass and in it was mirrored the gloom of sunless pines and sheer, dark rock. Then we rounded the last bend and saw the Jostedal. It stood high up at the end of the fjord, very white in contrast to the green of the water and still brighter green of the valley grass bathed in sunshine. It was like a beautiful, terrifying sight. A giant steeple of rock rose like a bastion, black against the blue sky. That alone seemed to hold back the vast deeps of snow behind it. And on either side the glaciers tumbled down to the fjord. To the right was the Suphelle — a piled-up mass of blue-green ice like a frozen wave breaking over the lip of the snow-field into the valley below. And on the left the narrow Boya glacier ribboned down a gully as though to swamp the little settlement below.

The colour of the fjord changed. The green of the water became more livid until it looked like some chemically-coloured liquid. It was the coldest colour I have ever seen. The gloom of the mountains on either side of us contrasted oddly with that colour. And even more odd was the sudden basking warmth of Fjaerland and the cold ice-green and white of the frozen snows behind it.

As we ran into the quay, Dahler gripped my arm. ‘Look,’ he said. They are building a boat. And they build him just the same as they build boats two thousand years ago.’

Just beyond the quay lay the yellow skeleton of a boat. Five men were working on it. ‘They are using nothing but axes?’ Jill said.

‘That is so,’ Dahler answered. ‘They use nothing but the axe. That is the way the Vikings build their boats. And up at Fjaerland they have always built their fishings boats that way. They can make carpets from local wool and stockings and jerseys — all by the method and in the pattern that they have always used. Nothing is new here — except the hotel and the steamers.’

We ran past a little wooden church, past the hotel, half-hidden in trees, and in to the wooden piles of the jetty. ‘Is that your partner’s boat?’ I asked Sunde, pointing to a small tock-a-tock lying just beyond the quay. But he shook his head. His partner hadn’t arrived and as though that were an omen, I suddenly had the feeling that things weren’t going to go well.