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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
The rediscovered classic memoir – the mesmerizingly beautiful account of one woman's year spent living in a remote hut in the Arctic 'Conjures the rasp of the ski runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights' Sara Wheeler '[An] astonishing, haunting memoir' Isabella Tree In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable home for a year with her husband on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. On arrival she is shocked to realise that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement. At first, Christiane is horrified by the freezing cold, the bleak landscape and the lack of supplies... But after encounters with bears and seals, long treks over the ice and months of perpetual night, she finds herself falling in love with the Arctic's harsh, otherworldly beauty. This luminous classic memoir tells of her inspiring journey to freedom and fulfilment in the adventure of a lifetime.
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‘If I only read one book each winter it would be this small slim volume. It’s an extraordinary true fable that sings the songs of the old Arctic and leaves your heart ringing with cold, wild delight’
GEOGRAPHICAL
‘Extraordinary… a radical, feminist text that speaks to the disconnection from the rest of nature we are experiencing at unprecedented levels today. It’s hard to believe it was written over 80 years ago’
INDEPENDENT
A WOMAN IN THE POLAR NIGHT
CHRISTIANE RITTER
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY JANE DEGRAS
WITH A FOREWORD BY SARA WHEELER
PUSHKIN PRESS CLASSICS
Contents
Foreword
In these pages, first published in 1938, Christiane Ritter conjures the rasp of the ski runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights. Her prose is as pared as Arctic ice. As her adopted country languishes “in bluish grey shadow”, the author discovers, with childlike delight, the uncluttered nature of life in the Norwegian Arctic, where “everything is concerned with simple being”.
Ritter’s husband Hermann had taken part in a scientific expedition in Spitsbergen and stayed on, fishing from his cutter in summer and in winter, when everything was frozen, hunting for furs. The Austrian Ritter, who was in her mid-thirties (she was born in 1897), did not follow at once, but when Hermann asked her to join him as “housewife” for a winter, she accepted. Before leaving home in 1933, she said that to her “the Arctic was just another word for freezing and forsaken solitude”.
The reader does not know why Hermann had chosen to be absent from the family home for so long. The couple had a teenage daughter who is not mentioned in the book.
They live in a small hut at Grey Hook on the north coast of Spitsbergen; an amiable Norwegian hunter called Karl 10Nicholaisen joins them there. Their nearest neighbour, an old Swede, is in another hut sixty miles away (so “it won’t be too lonely for you”, Hermann wrote to his wife apparently without irony). The trio have supplies, but the two men must hunt if they are to survive.
Svalbard, Ritter explains, “is the old Norwegian name for Spitsbergen”, and it means “Cold Coast”. In fact, the archipelago, of which Ritter’s island was the largest, had been renamed Svalbard a few years before the author’s occupancy. Spitsbergen remains the official name of that one island, one of the world’s northernmost inhabited places. Though it was barely inhabited in the author’s day: early peoples never got that far after trekking east across the strait now called Bering and beyond.
First impressions are bleak.
The scene is comfortless. Far and wide not a tree or shrub; everything grey and bare and stony. The boundlessly broad foreland, a sea of stone, stones stretching up to the crumbling mountains and down to the crumbling shore, an arid picture of death and decay.
“A beast of a stove” leaves the hut coated in soot at all times, a state of affairs Hermann, fastidious in lower latitudes, calmly accepts. “How Spitsbergen has changed him,” notes Ritter. She acknowledges “horror and dread”, though doesn’t tell her husband how she feels. When she arrives her eyes smart from unending daylight; then comes the long night, with its psychological challenges. She experiences rar, the Norwegian word for the strangeness that afflicts many who overwinter in the polar regions. All indigenous languages, such as Inuktitut, have 11a word for rar. Norwegian hunters apparently used to say ishavet kaller, or “the Arctic calls”, when one of their comrades hurled himself into the sea for no reason. But the author’s moments of despair are just that—momentary. Then she begins, maniacally, to sew, mend and polish.
Ritter has her own room in the hut (it is six feet by four, with an inch of ice on the walls), and sometimes moonlight filters green through the small snowed-up window. For a month the trio have a light cycle, during which they collect birch bark born on the tide for kindling, then darkness takes over: that chapter is called “The Earth Sinks into Shadow”. Arctic foxes change colour, ptarmigans lose their spots, and everything freezes. I was in the polar regions once during the onset of winter. Night rolls in like a tide: it is one of the greatest seasonal events on the planet, akin to the rising of sap. (The author uses the adjective “titanic” three times to describe it.) In the smoky hut the trio play cards, though the wretched stove has rendered the hearts and diamonds as black as the spades and clubs. And of course they tell one another stories—often the same ones many times over.
Anxieties over the availability of fresh meat run through the book like a Greek chorus, and Karl and Hermann set out again and again to find seal, bear, ptarmigan and duck. “It is grotesque how carefree they are”, the author writes early on, acutely aware of the perils of the situation, though she eventually gets into the rhythm of life, and begins to cherish the beauty and simplicity of the far north. This emotional transformation gives the book a shape beyond the practicalities of the story.
She goes hunting with the men both before and after the light vanishes, sometimes on a Nansen sledge with the 12temperature hovering at a sprightly minus 38 degrees Celsius. Out in their small motorboat one time, “we are seized by an over-brimming sense of happiness in our worldwide freedom, in the complete absence of any restraint”. At the same time Ritter appreciates the men’s prowess: “The lives of these hunters,” she writes, “are a series of performances that are almost inhuman.”
Astonishingly, she spends many days and nights alone in the sooty hut when the others are hunting, on one occasion during a nine-day storm. “If a bear comes near the hut,” the men say as they leave, “shoot him. It’s best to hit him in the breast, and even if he looks as though he is dead, shoot him again in the head.” And this to a young woman who had grown up with cooks and servants and drivers.
She tackles seal-blood pancakes, sews the long seams of the fur sleeping bags and listens to the frozen corpses of skinned foxes knocking on the roof where they have been tied down. She learns icecraft, even when she has to crawl on all fours outdoors on account of the murderous wind. The emotional climax of the book arrives when she is alone in this storm, battling the stove, battling everything.
I stayed in a hunter’s hut in Svalbard once. I didn’t have to shoot my own dinner though, and I had high-tech kit and a radio. I could have left at any time; when a ship dropped Ritter off, the captain said he would be back in a year to pick her up. Karl admitted later that he had thought Ritter wouldn’t cope, but after it was over he told another explorer that she was “one hell of a woman”.
They make Christmas gifts, including a pair of salad servers carved out of a mahogany table leg washed ashore, and 13celebrate New Year’s Eve with raspberry juice and surgical spirit. Cheers!
Just living takes a long time in the Arctic. Ritter skies down to a freshwater spring to rinse the laundry, a ski stick in one hand and a bucket of clothes in the other. “It is a slow job,” she notes nonchalantly, “to get along in the dark.” Small pleasures are attenuated in the polar regions. “To celebrate the return of the sunshine we have a whole spoonful of honey with our coffee and cold seal.” And as all polar hands note, a paucity of reading material renders old newspapers gripping. She quotes a “fascinating” advertising section, which includes, “Coffins, good, solid, cheap. Shrouds and wreaths also supplied. Hans Dahl, Storgt. 106.”
She has a gift for the telling phrase: a slaughtered seal is slit up and “laid open like a book”. (Should she bake the flippers, she wonders?) Ritter leavens the prose with yeasty direct speech, and the book is fluently translated by Jane Degras. The author went on to enjoy a career as a painter, and she has a visual imagination and an eye for colour. As twilight falls she writes of
scenes that remind us so strongly of the delicate, wonderful paintings of the Chinese painter-monks, in which the immense and mysterious effect is achieved entirely by gradations from light to dark grey, by forms indicated rather than outlines.
The sky lightens to “a tender cobalt” at the horizon, a “pale yellow brightness” spreads from the east, and the frozen sea “shines like an immense opal”. And of course, there are the Northern Lights: 14
their bright rays, shooting downward, look like gleaming rods of glass. They break out from a tremendous height and seem to be falling directly toward me, growing brighter and clearer, in radiant lilacs, greens, and pinks, swinging and whirling around their own axis in a wild dance.
Heavenly music indeed. Rare flashes of sentiment add dashes of another kind of colour. When she tries to take a photograph, Ritter says, “It seems to me a deadly sin to steal a piece of this supernatural scene and carry it away with me.” (As it turned out the camera jammed and froze, so no sinning was involved.) In a moment of spiritual awakening she says, “I divine the ultimate salvation before which all human reasoning dissolves into nothing.” But the author is too much of a natural writer to put much of this in: the book is mostly about ice and soot.
She comes to experience deep pleasure, and is immensely moved by the landscape, linking its shifts to human mutability. “Why has so little been written about the great transition stage in Arctic nature?” she wonders.
It is precisely at this time that a decisive change takes place in the human mood, when the reality of the phenomenal world dissolves, when men slowly lose all sense of fixed points, of impulses from the external world.
Ritter died in 2000 at the age of 103, never having written anything else. A Woman in the Polar Night was a bestseller throughout Europe and has never been out of print in German. It remains among my all-time favourite polar books, mixing 15the lightest touch of reflection with solid facts about how the trio ever survived. Ritter made me believe that the Big White really did change her—without any of the pyrotechnics of contemporary “transformation” memoirs, of which there are too many. Before Ritter’s departure Helmer Hansen had given her advice on gear (“get felt socks”): he had been to the South Pole with Amundsen. A pleasing example of historical context. A Woman in the Polar Night is a period piece.
As for the end of the volume—well, you’ll see what happens at the end when you get there. Women’s voices are seldom heard in the polar regions. Unlike most male accounts, this one is not about breaking records or beating the Arctic into submission like a mammoth outside a cave. A short while after Ritter’s return from the far north her husband’s family estate burned to the ground. But she had learned equanimity in Svalbard. “A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,” she would say regularly later in life. “Then you will come to realise what’s important in life and what isn’t.”
In these pages what Christiane Ritter calls “holy quiet” descends on the reader like a benediction.
—sara wheeler, 2019
1617
1
The Beckoning Arctic
To live in a hut in the Arctic had always been my husband’s wish-dream. Whenever anything went wrong in our European home, a short circuit, a burst pipe, or even if the rent was raised, he would always say that nothing like that could happen in a hut in the Arctic.
After taking part in a scientific expedition, my husband remained in Spitsbergen, fishing in the Arctic from his cutter, and in winter, when everything was frozen over, hunting for furs on the mainland. Letters and telegrams used to come from the far north: “Leave everything as it is and follow me to the Arctic.”
But for me at that time, as for all central Europeans, the Arctic was just another word for freezing and forsaken solitude. I did not follow at once.
Then gradually the diaries that arrived in summer from the far north began to fascinate me. They told of journeys by water and over ice, of the animals and the fascination of the wilderness, of the strange light over the landscape, of the strange illumination of one’s own self in the remoteness of the 20polar night. In his descriptions there was practically never any mention of cold or darkness, of storms or hardships.
The little winter hut appeared to me in a more and more friendly light. As housewife I would not have to accompany him on the dangerous winter excursions. I could stay by the warm stove in the hut, knit socks, paint from the window, read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart’s content.
The decision to hazard a winter’s stay ripened in my mind. I made careful preparations, for I wanted to set foot in the Arctic well protected, as though I were sitting in a warm comfortable seat in the cinema, with all the events and the unfamiliar beauty of the polar night unrolling before me. Mothers, grandmothers, and aunts knitted warm wraps; fathers, uncles, and brothers presented me with the latest heating equipment. Just the same, they kept telling me that it was hare-brained idiocy for a woman to go to the Arctic.
The latest letter arrived from my husband:
I hope you’re going to keep your promise and come up here this year. I’ve taken over for next winter a little hut on the north coast of Spitsbergen. It’s supposed to be well and strongly built. It won’t be too lonely for you because at the northeast corner of the coast, about sixty miles from here, there is another hunter living, an old Swede. We can visit him in the spring when it’s light again and the sea and fjords are frozen over.
Apart from your ski boots, you don’t need to bring anything. There are skis and equipment here left over from a previous travelling companion. I’ll see about provisions and everything else needed for the winter. 21
Don’t bring anything more than you can yourself comfortably carry in a rucksack. There’s a very good opportunity for us to make the journey. We shall row straight across the Ice Fjord from Advent Anchorage with the hunter Nois. Then he will take us on in his dog sleigh over the glacier, and from there we’ll go on alone, across the Wijde Fjord straight on. At the most we’ll have to cross a few glacier streams. We can get to our house on the north coast in about fourteen days.
Telegraph me at once what ship you’ll be coming on. I will radio-telegraph you later onboard ship instructions about where to disembark.
P.S. If you still have room in your rucksack, bring enough toothpaste for two people for a year, and also sewing needles.
A few hours after receiving this letter I had bought my sailing ticket and telegraphed my husband the name of the ship and the date of its sailing. Only then did I give way to the disgust I felt because I was to take no luggage with me. The things I had got ready! Apart from equipment, a feather bed, and hot-water bottles, there were books to read and books to write in, paint boxes and films, baking powder and spices, wool for knitting and wool for darning. What wouldn’t be needed for a whole year in the Arctic wilderness, with a man who for all I knew had himself grown wild in the last few years…
And why, of all places, must he choose the north coast to winter on? Why choose a coast that, as far as I knew, was besieged by drift ice practically the whole year round, difficult for ships to get at, and two hundred and fifty miles away from the nearest human settlement, the other side of the glaciers and fjords? 22
Despondently I packed the most essential things into a rucksack. The rest—piles of it—I packed into old trunks and sea chests and took them with me. They would have to be left on a lonely Spitsbergen shore unless a happy accident brought my goods and chattels to their destination.
It was a burning hot day in July when, dressed in my ski outfit, wearing hobnailed boots and carrying on my back a towering rucksack, I waited at our little station, surrounded by relatives who had come to bid me farewell, as well as the cook, the gardener, and the laundry woman. They were still shaking their heads in disapproval, but at the same time pressing on me little packages, things that were, they said, “indispensable” for the Arctic; I must take them with me and not look at them until I got on board.
“If the stove doesn’t work properly, come back on the last autumn ship,” my mother called out anxiously as the train drew out.
2
Outward Bound
Rather indifferently, I watch the bustle as our ship starts to move out of the harbour at Hamburg. Before my inner eye the broad calm of the far north rises already, but around me a thousand people are waving and blowing their noses as the ship’s orchestra plays a sentimental farewell song. The passengers are hiring deck chairs, invading the coffee lounge, storming the currency exchange booth—people from the big city, with the haste of the big city, at the beginning of a four-weeks polar cruise.
I flee to my cabin and inspect the gifts from my family. I am touched. The Bible, printed on thin paper, from Papa; some camel-hair clothes from Mama; an unbreakable mirror from my sisters; dried parsley from the gardener; kitchen spoons and a whisk from the cook, and from the laundry woman a medieval Tobias amulet to keep me safe against all evil spirits.
The passengers who share my cabin come in and look with disapproval at my suspicious-looking luggage. But to avoid notice, as I do not want my plans for the winter to get around the ship, I cannot solve the puzzle for them. 24
The next day the hubbub onboard ship dies down. The fourteen hundred restless passengers lie sleeping on their fourteen hundred deck chairs, with a relaxed holiday air, and I go to find out if my big luggage has been put safely onboard. From a corner of the large, empty, dimly lit baggage room a rather clumsy figure rises.
“Oho, little miss, so you’re the lady who wants to go to Spitsbergen?”
“But how do you know?”
“But it’s written on your luggage. Tell me, why do you want to go to that godforsaken island?” The fat old baggage master looks at me sympathetically over his spectacles as he fills out a freight sheet.
“No special reason… to see the polar lights.”
“For the university?”
“No, just for me.”
“Well, you c’n get that outer your head. You’ll freeze to death on that there island. You won’t fit in there at all. An’ you c’n get scurvy there too. They say that if you sleep well twice runnin’, it’s a sign you’ll get the scurvy. I c’n tell you a thing or two. I used to be in the health service.”
“Thank you, I’d rather you didn’t. But you will be kind enough to see that my luggage is taken off, won’t you?”
“Where are you going to land in Spitsbergen?”
“I wish I knew. I haven’t the least idea.”
“You see. Why don’t you come back home all nice with us? Our captain won’t let you off the ship. You don’t know him. He won’t allow anything like that!”
This frightens me a little. “Where can I find the captain?” I ask the baggage master. 25
“Up there.” With his index finger he points straight up, as though to the sky. “Up there, on the captain’s bridge.”
Quickly making up my mind, I climb the endless steps, past the fourteen hundred passengers sleeping in the sun and gently whispering wind, across the captain’s bridge with its long, broad window looking out onto the far horizon.
“Captain, I only wanted to ask you if you can land me somewhere in Spitsbergen, some time, somehow.”
The captain gravely shakes his head; no, it is quite out of the question. He will, on the contrary, do his best to bring all his passengers back home safe and sound. Besides, you have to get permission from the Norwegian government to stay there over the winter.
“But my husband’s expecting me there.”
As we continue talking it transpires that the captain knows my husband, has in fact put him off three years before at Kings Bay.
“Of course we won’t do anything to prevent your landing,” he says. “Let us know when you get your telegram.”
With a lighter heart I leave the captain’s bridge, hire a deck chair, and enjoy the rest of the journey as free of cares as the other passengers.
We come to the fjords, the typical fjords of the north, glacier-green water out of which grow sharp dark rocks, waterfalls fluttering down the mountains like white banners. Every morning, my bed and toothbrush are lying in a different fjord. The passengers leave the ship, are taken by car to the most romantic spots, jump from stone to stone across the small 26glacier streams, tease the wild mountain goats, eat their packed lunches, take snaps, write letters, and buy souvenirs.
In the evening we return to the giant ship, vibrating with machinery, the bustle of the kitchens, and comfort. We are fed, bedded down, and carried further. Dancing, flirting, eating, and drinking, we make our way along the famously beautiful coast, until one day we notice that northward the world is growing lighter and lighter, more bleak and more lonely.
The nights do not darken. Bare and craggy mountaintops jut out of the livid light of the water. A strange cool wind blows to me out of this primeval landscape. It might be the world in the last days of the Flood.
Behind the glass doors of the promenade deck, in the illuminated coffee lounge, the people sit around. They smoke, drink, and dance, thinking and talking exactly as they do in the evening in their neighbourhood local in the big city. They do not seem to take much notice of this strange world from which in a week or two they will return, having eaten and slept their fill.
We are in Tromsø. Fishing trawlers and polar ships lie in the harbour, quiet and modest. They smell of tar and fish oil, and they are encompassed by an atmosphere of adventure, of ice and storm and distance.
Today the people of Tromsø have eyes only for the German giant of the ocean; they stroll around the streets and the harbour; there is a tremendous bustle. All the shops are open, although it is ten in the evening.
Asking the way with the address in my hand, I call on a Tromsø family to whom I have an introduction. The road crosses 27open country, birches and fields and wasteland. Everything here is gigantic and beautiful. The hemlock, nearly ten feet tall, has magnificent flowers, and leaves of tropical luxuriance. The doubled summer light yields double growth. I come to a white-painted wooden villa set in a piece of fenced-in nature. There do not seem to be gardens and parks here. Luxuriant nature is park enough.
The family receive me with open arms. They are the first people who know the object of my journey. Since I cannot speak a word of Norwegian, the daughter-in-law acts as interpreter.
“Papa thinks that if he were you he wouldn’t go to the icy wastes of Spitsbergen.”
“I’m not afraid,” I reply. “My husband thinks it’s not very different up there from central Europe, so long as you’re warmly enough dressed.”
“Your husband is used to the winter,” says a son of the house, shaking his head.
They ask if they can be of any help.
“Helmer Hansen knows what I have to get. My husband wrote to him about everything. I must buy what I still need today.”
Helmer Hansen is sent for. I imagine him to be a giant. He accompanied Amundsen in the discovery of the South Pole, and was his companion on the northwest passage in the Gjøa and on the northeast passage in the Maud.
Helmer Hansen is a strikingly well-built, quiet man, with large kind blue eyes. He shakes my hand again and again and says: “Captain Ritter will be glad that his fruen is coming.” Then he becomes business-like. “Fruen must buy komaga. You don’t need waders, but get felt socks.” 28
These are brought from the town, in all sizes for me to choose from.
Komaga are hand-sewn boots, as broad as punts and made of the softest leather. The tips of the toes stick up, and the uppers come halfway up the calf. I tried the smallest pair: they were much too large.
“Too small,” says Helmer Hansen emphatically. He advises me to take the largest pair. A lot of grass is put into your boots; the bigger they are, the better.
At midnight I am brought back to the quay. The white ocean giant lies out at sea as though on a molten sunset. All the lights on deck are burning. It is an impressive sight. The passengers buzz around the deck like moths in the lamplight. They seem to be intoxicated by the twilight, the bright red of the sky and the water, the timeless dazzling sunset that turns soon after midnight into a still brighter dawn. Nobody thinks of sleeping, not till the ship continues its voyage and it grows cool over the sea. The air gradually turns harsh and cold.
The next day there is no land to be seen. The little flag that plots our course on the map is moved north to the waters between Norway and Bear Island. For the first time the ship’s orchestra plays during the day, indeed at every meal in the dining room, perhaps to cheer the people up, to keep them from dread of the great lonely island in the northern polar sea.
I am rather restless since I have not yet heard anything from my husband about where to land.
The next day we pass the southerly tip of Spitsbergen. On the eastern horizon, between the shimmering grey sea and a low-hanging curtain of mist, a remarkable strip of land gleams, 29a strip of blue mountains cut by white glacier streams glittering in the sun: the coast of Spitsbergen.
“Over there lies Longyear Valley, the last outpost of civilisation; it’s a Norwegian coal mine,” says someone on deck.
Then comes unpeopled land. The whole day through, mountains, glaciers, blue rocks, white ice. At night the land is covered in mist; we see nothing of the north coast, as I had hoped. Early in the morning the ship is due to reach the limit of the pack ice.
Many passengers dance through the night. All the others are wakened at four in the morning by the call of trumpets. Today it sounds different, extraordinarily fresh, quite sparkling, and it brings all the sleepers to their feet. Everybody rushes up to the promenade deck.
Hmm. So that’s pack ice. A few timid, dirty-yellow ice floes are lying idly between mist and water. Everybody is freezing. Only the ladies in their elegant fur coats, feeling themselves observed, are in an elevated mood. Disappointed, they all creep back to bed.
The next day everybody sleeps late. The world is wrapped in a thick mist. The foghorn blows unceasingly. The ship is on its journey southward again.
I have made up my mind that if I get no news from my husband I will in any case land at the Ice Fjord. Somebody at the coal mine is sure to know how, where, and when I can find him. But the radio-telegram arrives that morning. “Awaiting you at Kings Bay.” It is at once a deliverance from and a cause for anxiety. Will the ship make Kings Bay in the mist? The foghorn is frightful. From the bow of the ship it is impossible to see the stern. 30
“Purser, will the ship put in at Kings Bay?” He shrugs his shoulders.
“Baggage master, will the ship put in at Kings Bay?”
“You come back home all nice with us,” he says.
Anyhow, I get ready and settle the last formalities on the ship. Bored, the passengers stroll up and down in the mist; many of them think of food, but most of them are already in their minds back in their offices at home. I am at least as nervous as the entire crew in the grey impenetrability of the mist. The ship stops. We are at Kings Bay. I jump into the first boat going ashore.
A wooden bridge looms up out of the mist. A handful of men, among whom I recognise my husband. He is the tallest and thinnest among them.
“There you are then,” he says, and laughs quietly. He is burnt dark brown and is wearing a badly patched wind jacket, bleached white, and boots leached by seawater.
He tells me we’re in luck. A small Norwegian passenger steamer is making its first journey, calling at Wood Bay, and will put us down at our winter quarters. That will save us the troublesome journey by foot across the interior.
The fat old baggage master himself rows my luggage across to the Norwegian ship. It fills the entire boat. My husband laughs. In Europe he would have got angry if I had taken too much luggage on a journey. He has changed in the Arctic. His beaming serenity makes a strange impression. Certainly he is quite different from me and all the other passengers.
He shows me round Kings Bay. With a certain touching solemnity he tells me about everything, but with the best will in the world I can find it neither beautiful nor gripping. The coast is comfortless, bleak, and stony. 31
“This is the Norwegian coal mine that went bankrupt, and here is the airship hangar of the unlucky Nobile expedition, and over there—you can’t see it in the mist—is the little hut where I spent my first winter three years ago.”
The passengers stamp around between the deserted wooden houses of the mine and heaps of rusted iron. They are not quite sure what they ought to do here. It is raining, and they feel the cold. In flocks they troop back to the ship; the lights in its warm lounge have a friendly look.
My husband takes me to one of the wooden houses, inhabited by a Spitsbergen hunter who acts as a watchman during the winter. He is lying in bed asleep, with his boots on. A half-empty bottle of brandy is on the table. He wants, I am told, to sleep through the hours of the European invasion. He prefers being alone on his island. Awakened by my husband, he jumps joyfully out of bed, fills a tumbler with brandy to drink to the health of the fruen who is going to stay a year on the island. Unfortunately, I cannot understand a single word of his Norwegian speech of welcome.
We board the Norwegian steamer, which arrived in the harbour at the same time as the German ship, and in which we are to continue our voyage. All the crew are on deck. Everybody, from the captain to the cabin boy, shakes hands with me, with a wonderfully frank air of camaraderie. Suddenly I seem to have become one of a large family, admitted among the seamen and the winter residents.
For a day and a night we travel through mist. Occasionally we catch glimpses of mottled ice floes in the water. I am told we are making for the Grey Hook coast, where our hut is, but I have not the least idea in what direction we are travelling nor where we are. 32
My husband then reveals that there is to be another man with us for the winter. “I don’t really know how you’ll like the Arctic. Anyway, I don’t want to leave you alone in the hut too long, and my hunting ground this year is very big. I’ve known Karl for a long time. Last year he was stationed at Bangen Hook. He’s a fine, decent fellow. He comes from Tromsø and is really a polar seaman, a harpooner by trade. This summer he was already on the way home when I asked him if he wanted to stay on another year up there. He didn’t pause for a second, and said yes. He’s a fool for Spitsbergen.”
“Hallo, Karl,” my husband calls out across the ship. Karl comes over. A clean, fair young man, with merry blue eyes. He seems to me about twenty years old. We shake hands and smile at each other. We cannot do any more because Karl does not speak German and I do not speak Norwegian. We are all three in the gayest mood, but each of us for a different reason. My husband is glad that he is going to have a proper household, I because I am looking forward to the fascination of the wilderness, and Karl (he admitted it to me much later) for a very special reason. He is quite sure that in the storms and the loneliness of the long night “the lady from central Europe” will go off her head.
We go on in the thick mist. Grey sea gulls fly quite low. They are quite different from the gulls I have seen until now. They fly with short, powerful beats of the wing. Their blunt, grim heads suggest struggle and tenacity. Their appearance gives me the first glimmering of the relentless nature of the Arctic.
The few passengers on the small ship are of every nationality, but closer acquaintance reveals them all as Spitsbergen enthusiasts. There is a middle-aged English millionaire, burnt brown and 33scantily clothed. His legs are bare; he wears sandals and shorts and a thin raincoat, which is even shorter than the shorts. He has hardened himself for Spitsbergen. He loves Spitsbergen and has been there again and again in the summer, travelling with the fishermen in their small cutters, studying the land and the people. He intends going there again several times.
My neighbour at table, an Englishman, gives me an enthusiastic account of his cross-country expedition in the spring, which ended with him and his companions losing all their equipment in a rushing glacier stream in the Wijde Bay. But next year he will come again and spend the winter on the northeast coast. “Perhaps you’ll stay right on now,” my husband teases him. Mr. Glen was already on the way home when he heard of the Lyngen’s journey and turned back. He cannot tear himself away from the island.
