Maybe jetlag’s impact on my IQ, both coming and going, had been more chronic than I’d realized, or maybe I’m not as smart as I’ve been led to believe. After being home for days, the connotations of Clairette’s reminiscence, as oracular as it was pithy, were still sinking in.
From blocks of furnace coal had emerged not one but two “profane” specimens. Why not premise a dormant third or more, waiting for the chisel? At the cost of another trip to Marseille, the honor of discovering
“quelque chose incroyable”
could be mine, with Hervé sharing in rightful credit, to be sure. Or else, like scorpions, the chimeras had traveled exclusively in pairs, and I’d have wasted weeks and self-respect pulverizing coal.
I did contact Clairette twice a month for any news of Hervé, then once a month, then bimonthly, and desisted once the effort of placing me seemed to annoy her. Neither a stitch nor hair of her old employer ever came to light, and about his “ugly little animal” I dared not inquire. So much for the elusive, essentially mythical beast of “closure.”
I also never dared bring up revisiting the coal bin. The possibility of courting Hervé’s kind of doom did stifle my initiative, and the landlord may already have packed his possessions off to next of kin and signed new tenants. And how would I justify all that hammering in the cellar to those newcomers?
No, I’d missed my opportunity, wasn’t even aware of it till weeks afterward, and could never have exploited it unless I’d added two and two while en route to the airport, and had I done so, Clairette would probably have refused to turn around, particularly for the business I had in mind.
I’d wager, though, that nobody has ousted her from the property, or ever could. She’s taciturnly cleaning and cooking for the occupants, whether they like it or not, and poised vigilant for a resurgent whiff of “profane animals.” Even if her new employers are as Provençal as Clairette, I’d also bet they find her no less insular and enigmatic than I did, as if she herself were some anomaly hatched from a lump of coal.
I
T WAS THE FINDING OF THEM FUNNY STAR-SHAPED STONES THAT
started the whole thing off. Up till then everything had gone swimmingly, as my missus used to say, God rest her. There was that accident on the pressure ridge—bad one, it was, we lost two dogs—but that was natural-like trouble, not like what happened later.
But I see that I’m getting ahead of myself. I never could tell a good story. Let me start again.
My name’s Jack Hobbs. I was born and raised near London, but for the past fourteen years I’ve been living in Arkham, Massachusetts, working at Miskatonic University. My job is listed as carpenter, but I mend the wiring, clear the drains when they get stopped up, fix the automobiles, and do just about anything that needs to get done to keep the university working smooth-like.
When word got around in the spring of 1930 that Professor Dyer and Professor Pabodie and some others was planning this here Miskatonic Expedition to Antarctica, and was looking for volunteers, I put my name in for an assistant. I can do just about any work I turn my hand to, but Dyer ended up making me one of the dog handlers, on account of I told him that I used to handle hounds back in England. I like all dogs—big, small, fierce, tame—and most all dogs like me.
About four months before we left Boston Harbor aboard them two old wooden whalers renamed
Arkham
and
Miskatonic
, the university bought fifty-five sled dogs from Alaska. They came by train from the West Coast, mostly Alaskan Malamutes and huskies, with a few mix breeds. They was good pups all of them, and they had already been taught to pull, so all we handlers had to do was split them up into teams and get them working together. We had the whole summer to work them, so we did pretty well getting them to tolerate each other.
Here’s something you may not know about sled dogs. They ain’t quite like the dogs you keep for your house pets. They still got a lot of wolf left in them, and are wild beasts what will kill each other if there ain’t a well-established pack order among them.
I had a fine time training my dogs. They was the best of the lot, on account of I sort of got there first when they came off the train at North Station and picked out the best for my seven-dog team. The very best of them all is my lead dog, Sergeant, a hulking big Malamute with a white mask and a thick black bar down the top of his muzzle. The little husky bitch named Private is almost as good a lead, but not near so strong.
All the dogs in my team are named after ranks in the military. Foolishness, you may call it, but it was just a bit of fun I used to set my team apart from the other dogs. The main team is Sergeant in the lead, Private behind him, then Corporal, General, Colonel, Brigadier, and Major. It’s not proper military rank order, I know, but it’s the order my dogs pull best, so there it is.
There’s not much to write about the voyage from Massachusetts to Antarctica. All the dogs was put together in the barque
Miskatonic
, and the bulk of the other cargo for the expedition such as the drilling machines went in the hold of the brig
Arkham
. Naturally me and the other handlers went with the dogs. We left Boston Harbor the second day of September so that we could reach McMurdo Sound for the warm weather—I should mention for those who might not know that when it’s winter in New England, it’s summer down here in Antarctica.
What a fine morning it was when we pulled up the gangway and started away from Long Wharf! The mayor and his wife were there to see us off, along with the personal assistant to Congressman William J. Granfield. The students at the university came down by train with the marching band. I can still hear the sound of the trombones and the drums, and the cheers from the glee club, that rose above the thud-thud-thud of the steam engine.
We only used steam to get away from the docks and the crowded mouth of the harbor. Once we passed Deer Island the crews of both ships raised sails and the engines was shut off to conserve our coal. The winds favored us most of the way down the Atlantic coast. I got seasick for a time, but was better when we passed through the Panama Canal to the Pacific.
The dogs did better than me, although a few felt the rocking of the old wooden whaler for the first week or so and had trouble keeping their meat down. We fed the dogs mostly meat to keep them strong, good dried beef jerky and corned beef and canned salmon for the fish oil. Truth of it was, they ate better than we handlers did, but I never begrudged them a meal, because I knew we would need them fit when we hit the ice.
We spent most of our ship time down in the overcrowded hold of the
Miskatonic
with the dogs, me and Zack Evens and Stew Zulinski and Bill Mooney and young Henry Lake, who was Professor Lake’s son and only seventeen years old—he turned eighteen south of the Beardmore Glacier, and we joked that he didn’t have no beard yet to shave, may he rest in peace. The great oak beams that was set into place in the hold to reinforce the sides of the ship against the pack ice left precious little room for us to hang our hammocks among the dog crates.
We had all cut our own teams out and trained them back at Arkham, using sleds with wheels to roll along the dusty summer roads, but there were other dogs along for insurance, you might say, in case one of the team dogs got sick or came up lame or got tore up in a fight so bad it couldn’t pull.
There was still a lot of fights, even though by this time each dog knew its place in the pack. Sergeant put most of them down for us. He was top dog and when he bared his teeth and gave that rumbling snarl of his, the other dogs minded him, but we handlers still had to keep a sharp eye out for trouble. Them dogs was only half domestic and sometimes the wolf came out strong in them.
They had to be exercised regular on the deck of the ship every day or they would of gone raving mad in that dark hold. That’s when the fights happened—while we was taking them out of their crates and letting them stretch their legs. I’ve got a nasty scar on the back of my left hand as a reminder not to get careless. It’s almost healed now, just a crooked white line on my skin.
I was happy when the wind across the Pacific started to get cold and we saw our first iceberg. Big, flat table of ice, it was. My constitution is made for winter—I can’t stand the heat of July and August. What I wouldn’t give for some of that warmth now! Sometimes I can’t even remember what heat feels like.
That first view we had of the Great Barrier as we sailed into McMurdo Sound almost makes everything that happened later worthwhile. It was a sight worth dying for, and that’s the truth. The noon sun was low in a cloudless sky at our backs, and the barrier, all two hundred vertical feet of it, was lit up and glowing the most astonishing blues and greens and pinks you never did see in Massachusetts, not even in the middle of winter.
The ice was all transparent-like, so that the sunlight seemed to shine deep into it and light it up from the inside. The ice glowed mostly pale blue, and the clear water of the cold sea glowed a shade of green, and the sky such a clear deep blue without a puff of cloud. I could see birds soar above the towering ice, so small they looked like the specks of soot that came out of the stack when the steam engine was running.
On the horizon rose a huge mountain like a big, dark cone. I asked Captain Thorfinnssen what the name of it was, and he called it the Erebus. A trail of black smoke came up out of the crown of it. It’s a volcano, if you can believe such a thing—a volcano amid all that ice. There was another big mountain in the background that Thorfinnssen called the Terror. Nice name for a mountain, but it ain’t near as impressive as the Erebus to my way of thinking, even if it is taller.
The dogs could smell the land. You should have heard them bark to get out of that hold. We handlers were no less eager to set foot on land, or I should say on ice, because you couldn’t see no land except for a few ridges of rock. The leader of the expedition, Professor William Dyer, didn’t waste any time. He held a conference with Douglas, who was captain of the
Arkham
, and along with Thorfinnssen they decided how they was to get all the dogs and machines and food and other supplies from the ships up on the top of the ice.
First they unloaded everything onto Ross Island and took an inventory of how well the drills and planes and dogs had made it through the voyage. When all the men and cargo was out of the whalers, they set about getting it up on top of the Great Barrier.
There’s no equal to Yankee seamen for moving cargo, even if it is an Englishman what says it. They did the work with ropes and pulleys, and it was almost like magic to see crate after crate winched up to the top of that greenly glowing cliff. The dogs howled in their harnesses like damned souls as they hung near two hundred feet, all four legs dangling and kicking in the frozen air, but we didn’t lose even one of them.
The biggest challenge was the parts for the five planes that had to be fitted together once they was on top of the Barrier. Some of those, such as the engines, weighed tons. Without the planes we could never have pressed so far south so quick—the dog sleds was for what you might call local transportation, but it was the planes that took us from camp to camp.
The organization of the Barrier Camp, as it came to be called, would have done the army proud. The mechanics put them planes together so neat, you’d never have knowed they was ever in pieces. Huge things they was, each with four great engines and props taller than a man.
They was rigged with special heaters to keep the engines and fuel lines from freezing. As Professor Pabodie said to me, it was more important to keep the engines from freezing than to keep the members of the expedition from freezing. He was always joking to try and keep up everyone’s spirits, but he didn’t even smile when he said it. I’m sorry I won’t never see him again, he was a good man.
I found time to walk some way apart from the camp and look around. There was nothing but ice as far as the eye could see to east and west, and here and there a few black ridges of rock, and in the distance to the south the mountains we had to fly across to get to the interior of the continent.
The wind cut me to the bone. It wasn’t the chill of it—the temperature was no lower than twenty degrees or so, and we was all dressed in these Eskimo rigs what were made of sealskins—it was where it come from, and what it crossed to get there. Not a tree, not a plant, not a blade of grass, not a patch of moss, nothing but ice and more ice, and some puny bits of rock that looked as though they was drowning in ice.
And don’t think the ice was like the ice on the surface of a frozen lake back in Arkham. Nothing of it—the ice was all broken and slanted and tumbled together. Some patches was covered with drifted snow, and they was flat enough for the sleds to run on, even if they was treacherous with voids underneath, but some of it was so rough it was all we could do to drag the steel runners of the sleds over it by hand even with the dogs straining along with us.
We had them in harness and practicing that first day to get them into shape after their long sea voyage. How they loved pulling across that ice! They didn’t care that it was Antarctica, they only knew that they was free to run again, and did they ever run.
When I put Sergeant into harness for the first time, he was so excited and happy, his entire body shook with it. He turned back his brown eyes to me in gratitude and let out a long howl that was enough to chill your blood, and all the other dogs took it up after him, so that they sounded like a pack of wolves. Maybe it was childish of us, but we handlers let out hoots and howls ourselves, we was so glad to be off that ship.
The greater part of the expedition set up tents on top of the Barrier, and the crews of the whalers stayed with the ships, which was anchored at the base of the ice. Professor Lake, who taught biology back at Miskatonic, had a wireless set up in the camp, and there was another on each of the planes. The
Arkham
had a great antenna strung from its mainmast that was big enough to send messages all the way back to the university. In this way the expedition was never out of contact with New England, though scant good that did us when the trouble started.