The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna Read Free Book Online Page B

imagination to understand their accounts. I accepted their diaries as literary works, creating a world with its own rules. I absorbed the set paragraphs about preparation, fund-raising, skis, sledges, dogs, ponies, tents and supplies of pemmican. I made up polar vistas in the garden: a ragged tent became shelter from an Arctic storm, domestic objects could be transformed entirely. It was a turning-in of the senses, as if sensory signals came most forcefully from the imagination. The idea of the strange, as distinct from the everyday, was unintelligible to me, as a child; the two worlds constantly coincided. There was nothing unusual about my childhood fascination. I recall days with friends, spent in a sort of collective hallucination, entirely absorbed in a polar world we had created. We would imagine we were on a ship in a storm, sitting in a playground with a few swings. Or I would wake in a pensive mood, thinking of snow plains and rocks, and drag my brother into the garden to perform a chaotic series of imaginary expeditions.
    There was a formulaic element to the explorers’ accounts that made them understandable, and they were written in a simple pared-down prose easy enough for a child to read. Only Nansen was aloof and baffling, a little cranky, given to floating phrases, phrases which took off into something I had no knowledge of at all, references to remote places, to strange people: Pliny, Seneca, Geminus of Rhodes, Pomponius Mela.
    But the descriptions of colours, of the myriad colours of the ice, were clear—the pack ice, the play of light against frozen water, the vivid rainbows, the ice crystals shining in the mist, like a halo. Knowing nothing of the places the explorers went to, I responded to the force of their words—to Scott’s poetic soliloquy, one man in an icy tent, writing notes with a trembling hand, hoping they might be found later. I responded to Nansen’s endlessly floral prose, to Bjaaland’s caustic diary entries, to Amundsen’s brisk phrases. The explorers did not know exactly what they would find at the extremities of the earth, though there were dozens of theories—from the fashionable to the dismissed—most of them inaccurate. When Nansen sailed it was still a matter of debate whether he would emerge onto ice or land. They saw the world in a different way from us—their maps were incomplete, furnished at their edges with question marks and hypotheses. As I grew up, I wondered what exploration meant at this time, when vast areas were still truly unknown, untouched by humans. It must have been disorienting, I thought, to live in the world when its edges were vague, falling into shadows. When nothing was known, imagination was the only option—and this made the experts like children, creating fictional worlds to compensate for ignorance; lacking experience, they dreamed of what might lie in the silent wastes. The nineteenth-century theories of treasures at the Pole, of an ancient island blanketed with ice and gold, were eventually as discredited as the fantastical outpourings of medieval clerics, or classical geographers who claimed that the far north was inhabited by unipeds and immortals.

NOSTALGIA
    FATHOMS DEEP BENEATH THE WAVE
STRINGING BEADS OF GLISTERING PEARL
 
SINGING THE ACHIEVEMENTS BRAVE
 
OF MANY AN OLD NORWEGIAN EARL;
DWELLING WHERE THE TEMPEST’S RAVING
FALLS AS LIGHT UPON OUR EAR
 
AS THE SIGH OF LOVER, CRAVING
PITY FROM HIS LADY DEAR,
CHILDREN OF WILD THULE, WE
FROM THE DEEP CAVES OF THE SEA
AS THE LARK SPRINGS FROM THE LEA
 
HITHER COME, TO SHARE YOUR GLEE
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“SONG OF THE MERMAIDS AND MERMEN,” SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
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In the quiet hotel room in Rosenkrantz Gate, the pallid morning light began to drift across the room. I heard atonal bells striking eight outside. There were soft sounds from the corridors; people were beginning to walk up and down the stairs. As it grew lighter and lighter I