Peter Høeg - Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

"You're guessing."

"No," I say, "I know where we're going."

His body is still relaxed. But now he's on guard. "Tell me."

"If I do, you have to tell me why we're docked here." His complexion doesn't look robust. It's quite pale and chapped in the relatively dry air. He licks his lips. He's been counting on me as a form of insurance. Now he's confronted with a new, risky contract. It demands a trust in me that he doesn't feel.

Without a word he walks past me. I follow him inside the bridge. I shut the door behind us. He goes over to the slightly raised navigational table.

"Show me," he says.

It's a map of Davis Strait on a scale of 1:1,000,000. Toward the west it shows the outermost point of Cumberland Peninsula. To the northwest it includes the coast along Great Halibut Banks.

On the table, next to the sea chart, is the Ice Center's map of ice formations.

"Since November the field ice has stretched 100 sea miles out and no farther north than Nuuk," I say. "The ice forced farther north by the West Greenland current has moved out to sea and melted because Davis Strait has had three mild winters and is relatively warmer than normal. The current, now free of ice, continues up along the coast. Disko Bay has the world's highest concentration of icebergs. During the last two winters the glacier at Jakobshavn has moved 130 feet a day. That produces the largest icebergs outside of Antarctica."

I point to the map of ice formations.

"This winter the icebergs were forced out of the bay as carly as October and directed out along the coast with a ridge of turbulence between the West Greenland current and the Baffin current. Even in sheltered water there are icebergs. When we leave here, Tørk will set a northwesterly course until we're free of this belt."

His face is expressionless. But there is the same air of concentration about him that I saw at the roulette table. "Since December the Baffin current has carried western ice down to the 67th parallel. It has frozen together with the new ice somewhere between 200 and 400 sea miles out in Davis Strait. Tork wants us somewhere in the vicinity of that edge. From there we'll be given a course due north."

"You've sailed here before, Jaspersen?"

"I have hydrophobia. But I know something about ice."

He bends over the map. "No one has ever sailed farther north than Holsteinsborg this time of year. Not even in sheltered waters. The current packs field ice and western ice into a floor of cement. We might be able to sail north for two days. What does he want us to do at the edge of the ice?"

I straighten up. "You can't play without chips, Captain."

For a moment I think that I've lost him. Then he nods. "It's like you said," he replies slowly. "We're waiting here. That's what they've told me. We're waiting for a fourth passenger."

Five hours earlier the Kronos shifted course. Outside the mess a dull sun hung low in the sky; by its position I could tell we had changed course, but I had already noticed.

In the dining hall of the boarding schools, students seemed to take root in their chairs. In any unstable situation, the few fixed points take on special meaning. In the mess of the Kronos, we sit glued to our chairs. At the other table Jakkelsen is eating, introspective and wan, his head bowed over his plate. Fernanda and Maria try to avoid looking at me.

Maurice is eating with his back to me. He's only using his right hand. His left hand is in a sling around his neck that partially covers a thick bandage on his shoulder. He's wearing a work shirt with one sleeve cut off to make room for the bandage.

My mouth is dry with a fear that won't let up as long as I'm on board this ship.

On my way out the door, Jakkelsen comes up behind me. "We've changed course! We're on our way to Godthåb."

I decide to clean the officers' mess. If Verlaine follows me, he'll have to pass the bridge. If we're on our way to Nuuk, he'll have to come. They can't permit me to go ashore in a large port.

I stay in the mess for four hours. I clean the windows and polish the brass trim and finally rub the wooden paneling with teak oil.

At one point Kützow comes by. When he sees me, he hurries off.

Sonne appears. He stands there for a while, rocking hack and forth on the balls of his feet. I'm wearing a short blue dress. Maybe he takes that as an invitation to stay. I Ie has misread me. I've put on the dress so I'll be able to rtin as fast as possible. When he gets no encouragement, he leaves. He's too young to make a move, and not old enough to be pushy.

At four o'clock we drop anchor behind the red wall. I lalf an hour later I'm called to the bridge.

"At this time of year," says Lukas, "there's only one way ra get farther north. Unless you have an icebreaker along. And even then it might not be possible. What you have to do is go farther out to sea. Otherwise you'll get caught in a bay, and suddenly the ice will close around you, and there you'll sit."

I could lie to him. But he's just about the only straw I have left to cling to. He's a man on his way down. Maybe sometime in the near future, he'll end up down there where our paths could cross.

"At 54 degrees west longitude," I say, "the ocean floor drops off. That's where a branch of the western current turns away from the coast. There it meets the relatively colder northern current. West of the great fishing banks there is an area of unstable weather."

" `The Sea of Fog.' Never been there."

"A place where the largest chunks of ice from the east coast are carried and can't escape. Similar to the Iceberg Cemetery north of Upernavik."

With the corner of the ruler I find a dark area on the ice map. "Too small to be clearly marked. It often takes the form of a long bay, like a fjord in the pack ice-maybe it looks like that now. Risky but navigable. If the journey is important enough. Even the small Danish inspection cutters occasionally went in there, chasing British or Icelandic trawlers."

"Why sail a 4,000-ton coaster with a couple of dozen men up toward Baffin Bay to enter a dangerous opening in the pack ice?"

I close my eyes and call up an image of a magnified plant embryo, a little shape curved around its own center. The same images that were superimposed on the sea chart on the boat deck.

"Because there's an island. The only island that far from the coast before you reach Ellesmere Island." Under my ruler it's a dot so small that it's almost invisible.

"Isla Gela Alta. Discovered by Portuguese whalers during the last century."

"I've heard of it," he says thoughtfully. "A bird refuge. The weather is too bad even for the birds. It's forbidden to go ashore. Impossible to drop anchor. No reason in the world to go there."

"I'll still bet that's where we're headed."

"I'm not sure that you're in a position to make any bets," he says.

While I'm still on my way down from the bridge I think that the world may have lost a nice person in Sigmund Lukas. It's a phenomenon that I've often observed without understanding it. Inside someone another person can exist, a fully formed, generous, and trustworthy individual who never comes to light except in glimpses, because he is surrounded by a corrupt, dyed-in-the-wool, repeat offender.

Out on deck, dusk has fallen. A cigarette is glowing in the dark.

Jakkelsen is leaning against the railing. "This is incredible, fucking incredible!"

The complex below us is lit up by lights on poles lining both sides of the piers. Even now, bathed in this yellow light, painted grass green, with lights on in the distant buildings, and little electric cars and white traffic markings, the Greenland Star looks like nothing more than several thousand square meters of steel plunked down in the Atlantic Ocean.

To me it seems so obviously a mistake. To Jakkelsen it's a magnificent union of high technology and the sea. "Yes," I say, "and the best part about it is that the whole thing can be taken apart and packed up in twelve hours."