The Rope Eater Page 9

  After their frenzy, the dogs lounged, their bellies distended. The crew sat on deck, waiting for Dr. Architeuthis, who was analyzing the samples he had collected. Soon, Griffin came up from the officers’ quarters.

  “Hume, take four men ashore with picks and shovels. The rest of you will go in the other boat with the doctor.”

  “Gold, sir?” called out Adney.

  Griffin snorted.

  “Coal, gentlemen. Just coal.”

  Pago sagged, as did Hume. We went ashore and tromped through the snow to a ravine where dark veins of coal ran diagonally upward, like the shadow of flames. We set into mining and had half filled the empty sacks when we heard the welcome sound of Hunt’s bell. Rather than keep us from our work, the captain had Hunt bring the dinner ashore. Two watches filled the scuttles and we were away.

  It was a low, gray morning as we moved north, the sky mimicking a range of low, gray-brown hills, the wind from the southwest carrying a hint of rain. I ached from the mining and longed for my berth. The boat moved sluggishly, and the sails, heavy and stiff with frost, opened reluctantly. At least there was no ice.

  In the afternoon we rounded a long cape and saw a remarkable range of cliffs to the north. They were still covered with snow, but the snow was tinged with long, broad streaks of red, like the up-welling of faint rivers of blood beneath the surface. Griffin had moved up to the rail beside me and he spoke softly, almost under his breath: “And the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein but by the blood of him that shed it.”

  He stood gazing for long moments, his jaw clenched tightly, then turned and returned to the deckhouse. We moved slowly past the red cliffs. They seemed clearly to be a sign, but whether it was a crying out of past wrong, or an augury of the future, I could not tell. I was happy when they disappeared to the south, though I remained troubled by them that evening in my berth.

  As we moved through Lancaster Sound under a quick breeze and flashes of sun, I was ordered to leave Aziz and assist the doctor again. Architeuthis ran endless strings of tiny red bottles out behind the boat, and sent me out to sound, or up the mast to read gauges. He lit fires of different materials on the platforms of small balloons and we mapped the dispersion of the smoke at different altitudes. I dropped brightly colored fleets of wood in the water and mapped them as they were borne away. The crew’s only work was shifting the ship as he caught some new breeze or current. First we sailed north, then east, then west and south again. We doubled, and circled, and anchored in the middle of nowhere, then left again abruptly. The doctor seemed not to sleep at all but to be constantly prowling; I did my best to keep up, but was soon stumbling, my eyes red-rimmed. Dr. Architeuthis dismissed me and continued to work.

  We sighted land to the north on the eighteenth—low, unremarkable gravel islands. This part of the sound was more barren— we saw only a few birds and no seals. The islands were identical heaps of brown and black rocks and dirty gray ice. After passing several of them, we turned into a small bay and dropped anchor. Dr. Architeuthis and West went ashore, rowing the boat themselves, as we sat and smoked and stomped to stay warm. I perched beside Creely, whose fingers ceaselessly knotted and unknotted a length of rope. After several long hours, they returned without a word. We weighed anchor and continued along the coast. This went on for several days—nosing into bays and going ashore, then moving on again. Once we sailed into a bay or strait for two days, before retreating again. The most remarkable feature of the landscape throughout was its drab sameness; Adney joked that it was a gravel mine we were starting.

  On the afternoon of the twenty-third, after a day of circling and testing, we were gathered on the deck as usual. We moored in a channel perhaps four miles across. Dr. Architeuthis had been running his tests all day, but now he stood calmly behind West, the traces of a smile clinging to his lips. West looked out over us imperiously for a moment, then spoke:

  “Gentlemen, we have come to our point of turning. We move now into unexplored and uninhabited territory, where we will remain, with luck, until the end of our voyage. Tomorrow we will build a cairn on that headland”—he pointed to the east—“and there deposit a record of our plans and any such letters and notices that you would like to leave behind. You may occupy yourselves tonight in that endeavor. Tomorrow night I will reveal to you the purpose and nature of our voyage and detail to you your stake in it. You are entering the arena of your trials. If there are any of you who do not wish to go, we will put you ashore here with such supplies as you need to survive. In a week, these waters will be teeming with whalers and you will have no problem being picked up and returned to New Bedford. None of you will be compelled to come, but neither can you turn back after tomorrow. From here we go only forward.” He looked over us, smiled his cold, officious smile, and returned to his cabin.

  Dinner that evening was surprisingly somber. There was little speculation about our fortunes, about mines or whales. Men sat and ate in silence. Even Adney was subdued; he volunteered to write a letter for those who could not.

  I retired to my bunk early with a scrap of paper and a pen and set out to compose a leter. I began several times and crossed out my words. I had no one to write to—my baffled parents, I supposed, because they were obligated to care whether I lived or died, because they should care how I met my end, if end I was to meet. I had no substantial friends from the tavern, from the war. I had passed away from them now; I had begun a new life on board the Narthex, one only faintly connected to my previous one.

  Writing to no one, I struggled to find something to say—was I writing a will? A testament? A philosophy? I had none; I understood nothing. There was nothing I could venture that did not seem at once ludicrous or trite, that was not the vague and false regurgitation of some other, better mind, the reflection, no doubt, of some other, better life.

  For a moment I wondered where that life was being led and who led it, wondered if the air might taste different, or the light of the morning pass brighter through those eyes. I looked out at the crew in their berths and back among the men in my battalion—dusty, sunburned faces—back to the sailors in the tavern, to my poor bewildered parents. I thought of all of them stumbling into their days, and wondered who might see differently—if the doctor, with his instruments, or Aziz in the darkness—if the world shaped itself around them. I had the vague hope that whatever West had promised was true—that it could be worth his health and fortunes, that it could make mine. I tried to ask what it was I wanted, what I might hope for.

  Perhaps I should suck rocks. Then at least I would have something to crack my teeth on, and feel the bits of teeth in my mouth, feel the unnatural jaggedness of broken teeth, taste the salt of real blood. Then at least I should taste something real, the weight of a real answer to no question, but an answer nonetheless, and the accompanying taste of salt and tooth and stone.

  You hold back in your heart the secret hope that there is actually glory to be had, that there will be a day when a choice is presented to you and in that choice the hope for a new world that this one so badly needs. If you seek madly, if you flee and ask and blunder, batter your way against the world, the days pass the same, each with its pain, its build and crest, each with its slide into darkness, and you amid them are revealed the same: you stand naked, compromised, barren.

  And thus I lay there for long minutes as that blank face accused and indicted me, blank page for my blank mind, blank my history. I thought for a moment of Seaman Brommer, of his chest with its neat, careful folds, and his grim-faced parents. Surely it was not love that made him keep their picture; surely it was habit or guilt; surely it was fear of being exposed as alone, a last insulation. Surely love is not such a weak thing, such a twisted and lost, such a distorted, compromised thing, surely that is not love. I knew not. I had none. I crumpled my paper and I slept.

  The deck was cold and the light weak; it did not feel like a day to be seeking fortunes, but a day for hiding out, for licking wounds, for waiting again, and perh
aps tomorrow would be brighter, fresher, would open to work more readily. West stood on the deck and looked out at the headland. He heard my footsteps and dropped his head to one side.

  “Kane, morning. Are you ready?”

  “For what, sir?”

  “To meet your fate, son.”

  “I don’t know, sir. Hard to say. I need some sleep.”

  He chuckled.

  “Some sleep indeed.” We stood awhile in silence and looked out at the barren headland. Other men made their way to the deck and we all stood in silence. Griffin emerged and stood in respectful silence, then Dr. Architeuthis, then Aziz. It was as if West were waiting for some signal, some clarion call to blast out from the headlands to send us charging into battle. The wind whipped at the sails and the gravelly headland stood dumb. He turned to me at last.

  “Well, Kane? Let’s go.”

  We lowered the boats and made our way to the beach. West charged up the scree slope while we plodded behind. He had already begun to gather a circle of stones when we reached him. He stopped as we arrived and let us take over, brushing his hands on his coat to restore some of his dignity. His eyes glowed behind his glasses.

  Once we had gathered a substantial pile of stones, he motioned for us to stop. With great care, he placed a small silver cylinder in the center of the circle he had made. Griffin produced a clean meat tin and offered it around for letters. Men added their scraps and ends to the tin and Griffin sealed it with a wax stopper. Then, still silent, he motioned us forward and we buried them beneath the rocks. We built a tower about seven feet high and filled the gaps between the rocks with sand. Over this we poured water and let the whole thing freeze solid. We stood a moment with out heads hung, and so buried our last records, so marked the boundary between known and unknown. I trembled a little to see our pitiful assertion when what we needed was a shriek of terror. We made our way down to the boats without looking back and began to launch them when Adney took a spare oar from beneath the thwarts and rushed back up the hill. He jammed the oar in the top of the cairn and, stripping to the waist, tied his red undershirt to the top. He gave a wild yell of defiance and joy and raced back down to us.

  As we pulled away I was glad to see the shirt snapping smartly in the wind. It was the one spot of color in the whole of the dreary horizon, the one spot of man in that whole world of rock and ice.

  part two

  Brute Province

  seven

  We dropped anchor in the twilight, unremarkable miles stretching behind us. We had dragged along the dreary gray-brown gravel coast all day. Black water rippled lifelessly under a northerly breeze. I was even relieved to see the return of bobbing floes flashing in the distance. Color was draining out of the land, leaching into the black sea; there were no seals and a few stray, desolate birds.

  After dinner, we were summoned to the doctor’s cabin for a meeting— the meeting—and yet, for our months of talk, we were oddly subdued. Aziz, I noticed, was not among us. We shuffled in and arrayed ourselves on crates that had been placed in a semicircle around the low white laboratory table. The table was made of unblemished white marble, with a small groove cut around the edge that ran into a hole in one corner. The laboratory was large, filling nearly all of the aft quarter starboard, and had no bed or any sign of personal effects; I suppose the doctor slept on the slab. Arrayed around the crates was his careful architecture of instrumentation—globes and beakers brimming with colored oils, spinning governors, glass tubes running into heated copper coils and out again into balloons that aspirated like living creatures. Crystals slowly formed in delicate glass cages and slowly dissolved in others; heavy drops fell from suspended tanks into tiny vials; hidden generators clicked, and the steam hissed, and there was the sharp, acrid smell of chemicals eating through metal. A row of glass terrariums held large balls of vine along the windows, each the size of a man. The lower part of the walls was covered by racks of bottles and beakers; each was labeled by his tiny, precise hand. They were organized by both color—all in shades of red, from a light, whitish pink to a dark, black red in order—and size, ranked like tiny soldiers ready to head off to the slaughter.

  The area above the bottles held a single chart that stretched the length of the cabin. It was covered with marks—astronomical, navigational, geographic, geological, hydrographical. There were notations of time, temperature, current strengths and water temperature at various depths, salinity, wind strength and air temperature at ascending heights, cloud shapes and colors, rock formations, elevations, depths, light strengths and angles of refraction, measures of humidity, rates of ice formation and dissolution, strengths, thicknesses, and, of course, wave heights and frequency—each in the same tiny hand as the bottles. I could see at last the fruit of my long labors—my own small observations translated into the doctor’s hand. The notations were cut through with a webwork of lines of dense complexity—arcs intersected over measured angles marked out on overlapping grids of the same reds that distinguished the bottles. Peering closely, I discerned that the arcs were not smooth curves but in fact themselves composed of a smaller webbing of rigidly straight lines, each angled slightly beyond the last; beneath these lines were others, fainter, infinitesimally small, with their own sets of notations and shadowy calculations. As I stared, the surface of the map receded before me, each set of lines giving way to another and another beneath, cut into grids upon grids and hinting at grids beyond, each spot of clarity shattering silently into its component trajectories and their tangents and sub-tangents. The effect on the color of the overlapping lines was painfully refined up close, but at a distance resolved into dark crimson gashes butchering the wall into blocks.

  The door shut and I sat quickly on my crate as West and the doctor took their places at the slab. West waited until we were silent, then pulled out a small tattered notebook. He placed it with elaborate ceremony in the center of the table and paused.

  “Here, gentlemen,” he said finally, “is our mine, our well of whales.” He looked around at us and smiled his heatless smile. We leaned in. His thumbs were pressed white against the edges of the drab cover, as if it threatened to explode and he was struggling to contain it.

  “This is the journal of a man—a Dr. Felix Strabo—a scientific dabbler and eccentric who happens to have been my great-uncle. A peculiar man from birth, according to my grandfather—obsessed with insects. He dedicated his life to the study of the frost-resistant genitalia of beetles. Apparently he was always compiling a master study of his investigations, the magnum opus that would reveal to the rest of us what these genitalia had told him. Unfortunately that will remain lost to us, as his work was cut short by his disappearance some fifty-seven years ago. This notebook drifted up in a cod net and was sent to my grandfather four years later; the water destroyed much of it, but what remains is intriguing.

  “The journal itself was nearly thrown out by my grandfather, its markings indecipherable and assumed to have been ruined by the immersion. But a colleague of my great-uncle’s was struck by the uniformity of the degradation to the text and worked to find some patterns in it. What he found was the remarkable first mystery of the journal.

  “My great-uncle had spent many years in the Amazon as a part of his studies, owing to the great profusion of beetles and to the deep knowledge of their variety, habits, and characteristics possessed by the savages there.

  “He spent many years with one tribe in particular, the Nemoami. They were a sort of beetle-worshiping group; a great part of their medicine and the bulk of their cuisine was based on beetles. They had their own language, which fascinated my great-uncle nearly as much as the teeming masses of beetles. It drew from them a whole vocalization based on the clicking and skittering of the beetles. They had no written language, of course, being savage—in fact they were very angry when old Strabo proposed to help them create one, and resisted it mightily.

  “Their language was remarkably unstable—it had few words that ever remained the same. Most of thei
r communications consisted of entirely new words, made up by the speaker in the process of communicating. Even when relating the speech of another person, these confused people used different words, or made up their own, or changed them around entirely. Part of the problem lay in the structure of the language itself; it had few nouns; thus they had no way to fix things, to hold them steady and define them in order to communicate clearly. Instead, they relied on a string of verbs, of descriptions of states and transitions between states. They had a great terror of time, you see, and refused to attempt to override it by fixing definitions onto things. Their world was a fluid outpouring of constant newness, where a tree in one minute was no longer a tree in the next, though it may return to being a tree, or at least treelike, in the future. Their role as speakers and observers was one of reporting, not of establishing, and their notion of identity was not one of definition, but one of revelation.

  “As you can imagine, this made them nearly incomprehensible to each other and an utter mystery to strangers—even if you managed to effectively translate a word or thought once, it had already changed once you had repeated it. In order to keep up with the stream of new words, it was necessary to be in conversation without interruption so that you could carry along the meaning to the new words as they emerged. This was not a problem for them— they were a small and gregarious tribe, and were used to understanding this endless flow of new meanings.”

  “What do we care?” said Reinhold. “Are we needing to talk to the beetles?” West regarded him evenly, then continued as if no question had been raised.