Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

There is a souvenir shop with reindeer hides, traditional Lapp costumes, reindeer antlers, doilies, boat-shaped sleds, postcards of Technicolor Lapp families, bear skins. A stuffed polar bear stands guard by the door.

Everyone strokes its fur in passing, me too.

A father hoists his young son onto the bear and aims his camera.

The ironmonger is shut. Mustn’t forget where it is. I’ll come back in the morning for that measuring tape. It’s easy to locate — the shop is on a square that slopes down to the water.

In the middle of the square is a bronze statue on a rectangular base, a bluish figure in arctic clothing.

I’m looking at the statue from behind. Who is it? I walk up to it and read the name on the plinth:

ROALD AMUNDSEN

Facing the fjord, the conqueror of the South Pole looks over the water to the black mountains beyond, their peaks laced with white snow even at this time of year.

He stands with his feet wide apart, as though permanently braced against the storm. Bare-headed, though. His hood rests in ample folds around his neck. His anorak is as long as a nightshirt and the thick tubular trouser legs overlap the tops of his boots.

His forehead is high, the hair on his bony scalp cropped short. His moustache is bushy and dignified, and it is hard to visualise it encrusted with icicles, which would make the explorer look far less serene. Maybe not so hard, after all.

The stories about explorers I read as a boy come floating back to me in gory detail. Amundsen surviving by eating his own dogs. The dogs, in turn, eating each other. Shackleton eating ponies. He used ponies instead of dogs, which caused insurmountable food problems; the more ponies he took with him, the more insurmountable.

And then there was Scott.

Scott. Battling to reach the South Pole in his frozen thermal underwear, his toes frostbitten, but his heart pounding in his throat at the idea of treading on ground that had never been trodden by man … Ground? Snow then. And treading on snow heretofore untrodden by man is something anyone with a back garden can do in winter.

What else was new?

A gaze cast skywards to a zenith never before observed by man? What sight would meet those eyes? Not stars, because in January it never gets dark in Antarctica.

So what did Scott get to see at the South Pole? The Norwegian flag flying from a ski pole planted in the snow. Note attached: Greetings from Amundsen and good luck to you, sir .

So he turned back. His companions died one by one. Scott himself slowly froze to death in his tent, in his thermal underwear which hadn’t been dry for months. Unlike Amundsen, he didn’t have jerkins made of turned animal skins. Until the very end he continued to write up his diary. It was found afterwards and published in a special issue of The Earth and Its Peoples , which I read when I was fourteen.

‘For God’s sake look after our people.’

Scott’s words, written at death’s door. I wonder if it ever entered his mind that they might one day be published in a magazine. I expect it did. Maybe not, though, maybe he always wrote in that vein. Most people don’t write down what they’re really thinking. Not: my half-frozen thermal long johns stink to high heaven. Or: at fifty degrees below zero our urine freezes into reeds of yellow glass in the snow.

That is not the way they write. They keep the flag flying, even if they’re not the first to plant it at the South Pole.

Poor Scott. If aerial photographs had existed in those days … But they didn’t, not in 1911. They do now. But not everyone has them.

I stroll along the waterfront, past fishing boats with orange steel balls on deck and hulls painted in primary colours. Screaming gulls swoop over quays strewn with fish offal. It is a quarter to eleven and the sun has fitted me with long, dark shadow-skis.

Spanning the fjord is a bridge two kilometres long and so high that an ocean liner can easily pass underneath. I make my way up the ramp. It isn’t steep, but it’s a long way and quite tiring.

A large vessel draws near. Leaning over the side of the bridge, the sun on my face, I lose myself in the ship passing below. Standing at the rail is a figure wearing a hat, who looks remarkably like Arne. I give him a wave, you never know. He waves back, but that doesn’t mean anything, because people on ships always wave back. People using different modes of transport always wave at each other. Besides, it’s an American ship, and there’s no reason why Arne should be arriving by sea at all.

Reaching the other side I decide to take the cable car to the top of the cliff: fem kroner, takk, tur og retur . I soar right across the tree line, after which the slope is bare. The gondola is filled with peaceably drunk Norwegians. I wish I could tell them how congenial their company is.

The gondola slides under a projecting roof and shudders to a halt. Upper terminal. All the passengers get off, but they don’t stray far over the rugged surface of forbidding rock.

Tourists stand huddled together, lifting their faces to the sun. The rounded crags are bald, with here and there a patch of moss. Inky clouds in the distance are tipped with white, making them look like another stretch of mountains, immeasurably higher than where I’m standing now.

An American woman paces restlessly about, her head covered in a rigid auburn hairdo. Catching sight of me she comes over and starts talking to me as if we have met before.

‘I’m going to be stuck here until midnight! We can’t go back down before, because of the midnight sun. His dearest wish is to see the midnight sun in Norway. That’s all he cares about lately, even when it’s raining. Until now there’s always been a cloud sliding over the sun at the very last moment. I can’t understand what he sees in it. We’ve already been to Spitsbergen — hunting cruise, you know, ten days there and back. Arctic safari they call it, two and a half thousand dollars, all in. It was awful, believe you me! D’ you know what they do? There’s no need to leave the ship at all. You just stay on board. The ship goes up to the edge of the ice. The crew shoots a seal and makes a bonfire on the ice. They throw the seal into the fire. Then the polar bears show up, attracted by the smell of burning seal-fat. Those bears are very tame, they go up on their hind legs and paw the side of the ship. And then everyone starts shooting. They call that hunting! Jack wanted to shoot a bear with a bow and arrow! I told him: Jack, you’re crazy. You’re just like Fred Flintstone — you know the one, from the cartoon series on television? So I say to Fred, I mean Jack: You should’ve been born in the Stone Age. A bow and arrow, that’s crazy! But he says: It’s more sporting. More sporting indeed … what a dummy! He shot three arrows, but that didn’t kill the bear, of course. It looked almost human, a great big darling teddy. It sank down on its backside and tried to pull out the arrows with its teeth. I’ve never seen anything more horrible! Can you imagine? The red blood on that white fur. In the end the captain finished him off with a bullet. Crazy old Jack wanted to do it himself, but the captain said, very politely: Just leave it to me, sir. And right he was. You can be sure I won’t be using that bearskin back home. Not in my bedroom, anyway. Which reminds me. I’m forty-one and you, honey, are about twenty-three I guess, and I can see you’re not Italian, or I’d say let’s leave him right here to enjoy his midnight sun, while you and me go down in that cable car and find a hotel.’

She laughs. No, she wasn’t a beauty when she was young either, although she’s quite slim and shapely. If she hadn’t made that remark about me not being Italian, then I …

‘Is it twelve yet?’ she asks. ‘I haven’t got a watch.’