9

Primus-Pricker

We decided to camp for the night. Some hours later I woke up to hear a blizzard blowing outside, and to find Filippo fumbling amongst some gear at the head-end of the tent. From inside my bag I called out to inquire if there was anything wrong, and received a reply that he was looking for the primus-pricker. Then he slipped back into his sleeping-bag, and all became quiet, except for the snow beating against the tent … Revolving the incident in my mind, and dimly wondering what use he could have for a primus-pricker in the middle of the night, I again fell asleep … On inquiry I found that Filippo knew nothing of his midnight escapade. It was a touch of somnambulism.


The snow beating against the tent. Soft flakes piling up into hard, sculpted drifts, blown into aerodynamic contours – sastrugi. Snow is so soft and deep. And slushy-wet and burning-cold and diamond-hard. Snow is like sleep.

The day is stink of men and food and foul air, dogs barking, fingers pricked by needles which slip from the hands. It is the itch of an unwashed body, the rub of harness. It is longing for a hard steel hut, and desire for the wind to stop. Stop just once, just once long enough for us to stand clear and see – see that ethereal stillness so few feet above our heads – the silence of those infinite spaces.

This afternoon I found myself thinking about Melbourne, and that led me to the evening I met that girl. She was clean enough, I suppose, a scrubbed little thing – quite boyish as she minced along. I can’t remember what she said, what I said. We went back to her room (on my insistence), so I had to wait while she ran in to check that the coast was clear. That was strange, standing out in the alley thinking about what I was about to do, or rather trying not to think about it, smoking a cigarette and watching the shadows. She was back soon enough.

Once in her room I insisted she undress completely, although she was very reluctant. I could see why, afterwards. She had a long scar running down the length of her back – a long red curve of cicatrice. It must have been devilish deep at the time. A whip? Too clean for anything but a stock-whip at full stretch, I’d say. More likely a knife. I didn’t ask her about it. Felt ashamed to, I suppose. In any case, it didn’t make me any less interested in what I’d come to do.

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Afterwards she cuddled up to me a little and asked me if I wanted anything else. Funnily enough, what I wanted most then was a cup of tea. I wanted to ask her for one, and to watch her getting up and making it for me, like a good girl, a girl of good family. Like Effie, or one of the White girls in the old days. I knew she wouldn’t understand, though, and so I didn’t say anything at all. I just started to put my clothes on. She helped me with the boots, then started to pull on her own clothes. I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t dare. Funny, really, when you think that I’d just fucked her, but somehow that seemed less intimate than treating her as a person, a real girl, now, afterwards.

I just walked out of there, then got pissy drunk in a bar by the river.

I suppose it was thinking of the snow that did it – her body was very white, I remember, which made the long scar stand out that much better. God, it must have hurt! Though maybe not: a scar that deep might have a temporary anaesthetic effect. The blood would pump out, but you might just feel a pleasant warmth from it – a kind of narcolepsy, just as we all thought sleeping in the snow would create.

It’s bad thinking about girls. I got a stiffy right away, and even though no-one can see it in these baggy furs it makes you crazy. I could feel myself licking her along her scar, tongue touching every inch of it. Why didn’t I do that then? I could have talked to her more – told her to do any number of things I can think of now. She was a pretty girl, not that it matters. Not pretty like the girls at home, but like a sleek little animal, furry and dark as an otter. She would have done anything for a few more coins. She might even have liked it, to be able to stay in bed instead of going out on the cold street again. Perhaps she ended up with some sailor who belted her arse for her – or some paterfamilias who buggered her while dreaming of his own daughters. She would have been better off with me. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her.

I’m certain I could never have whipped her, but now I find I’m thinking of her when I strike the dogs, wondering what kind of a whip had been used on her. On consideration, I think it probably was a knife – like those long gutting knives we use on the seals. Not so long and sharp, of course, or else all her guts would have fallen out on the table and would have had to be stuffed back inside before she could be sewn up.

That was the thing, of course. I can see it now, more real than the wind-flurries, the solid ice visible only a few yards ahead. There were no stitch marks

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on her scar, so it can’t have been sewn up. Amazing she wasn’t finished off by infection; more amazing that she didn’t bleed to death straight away.

I can see her dancing ahead of me, just ahead in the wind. She’s not naked, but in her furs, with her feet bare in the wind-furrows. How old is she? Fifteen? Fourteen? She’d been had many times, I could feel that, but was still narrow and tight, as only a young girl can be. That’s filthy talk, though. A filthy thing to think. I only want to see her dance, to beckon me on. Her skin is so white, her body so smooth and firm, her little tongue is red as she puts it out to catch a snow-flake.

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The Heart of the Snow

No-one was guilty of an elaborate toilet, water being a scarce commodity. There were adherents of the snow-wash theory, but these belonged to an earlier and warmer epoch of our history … Laurence tried an early morning bath which was the last voluntary dip attempted by anyone.


Their bodies look so white as they rub them down with snow. The faces, hands, rough, brown with weather, work – wrinkled as mummies; but their limbs are pure and smooth as alabaster. There is a little party of four or five who run out every week or so into the wind to cleanse their limbs with cold fingers of snow. Since my immersion in the bay, I have felt no temptation to join them.

It was necessary, of course – the packing case had to be recovered, and you cannot ask a man to do what you will not do yourself. I stripped off all my clothes (God knows that was hard enough in itself), and trod gingerly down to the shore. Then plunged in, as fast as I could.

The water burned like liquid fire. It was so cold I was almost beyond feeling – layers and layers of compression and pain. I had thought that I would be numb in an instant, but there is a numbing pain within the numbness, and a greater pain, an agony of the larger organs, within that. I was at full stretch to reach that wretched case, cursing as hard as I could to keep my brain alive, language the enemy of ice. Oh, and when I put my head under I thought it would explode, blood rushing to every corner of the skin to buoy it up against this unheard-of enemy. I reached the slippery bottom – a moment’s panic before I grasped the case (which I had located already with my feet), then a mighty pull up to the waiting hands above. Some of them seized hold of me and pulled me up. And then I was being rubbed down with rough towels, and brandy in the mouth, and I was putting my clothes on as fast as I ever have, faster than with that whore in Melbourne, faster than on the morning I woke up too late for my biology final.

It was the wrong packing case, of course.

Afterwards, my teeth rattled so that I thought they would never stop, that they would ricochet out of my head and keep chattering along the ground. My head felt swollen to bursting point, and ached for hours afterwards, while my

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breathing was as compacted as on a high mountain peak – Erebus, with the Prof. After that, every time I scratched myself and dreamed of a hot bath and clean towels, I thought of the slimy waters of the bay – that anti-creation of the cold – and contented myself with my warm bag.

Their limbs are so white, though, as they frolic and horseplay in the snow. Laurence is prancing about like a schoolboy – he practically is a schoolboy; a clean-limbed lad fresh out from England. The older Swiss, Filippo, tries to match him, such Alpine intensity in his determination to be merry and sportive. Can’t they see that it is too cold for that? They don’t seem to care, shrunken pricks bouncing around between their legs as they swing their arms to and fro, embracing the wind as a lover.

Funny, really, these pashes that grow up down here – as at a girl’s boarding school. Those two are friends beyond all expectation. One young, impetuous, the other gnarled and worldly wise. What do they find to talk about? Once I overheard Laurence trying out his Italian on the older man– something about la tua mano è gelida – and the other laughing that deep, troll-like guffaw of his, half-swallowed in the throat, a kind of ghostly chuckle echoing from caverns below. A crevasse laugh. Laurence was ashamed and took some time to come round after that. I notice these things, must do, for the good of the expedition.

I think that these should be the two who come with me on the inland run. The main reason is the fact that they know the dogs so much better than anyone else, having come out with them on the outward voyage, but it is also because there is something fascinating in their absorption with each other – a kind of strength which I think will buoy us up when we reach the plateau.

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As usual the food ration was reduced. This caused us to have more than ordinarily vivid dreams. I happened to be awake one night when Laurence was sledging in imagination, vociferously shouting, “Hike, hike,” to the dogs.


Last night I had the strangest dream so far. The last crevasse Laurence fell into was the deepest to date. He was roped to the sledge, but it took us quite some time to get him up onto the surface, and by then he was chilled to the bone. Even out in the wind on the lip of the precipice we were better off – constant activity does that for you. Down there, though, he suffered that death of the extremities that comes from inanition.

We put up the tent and stripped him off, and Filippo climbed into his bag with him. The two bodies were as close as lovers, and all of a sudden I felt jealous. I wanted to be in there with him, holding his white limbs close; the Swiss seemed to me to be an interloper. Of course I said nothing. What was there to say? There is no beastliness between the two of them, I feel sure of that – else they would be more guarded, less open in their affection. The beastliness is all in my head.

I lay awake for some time, listening to the wind, which is unusual for me, for any of us. Normally we are asleep as soon as the bags become truly warm. I lay there, as I say, and after a time I thought I heard a voice outside the tent. I looked over at the other two, but they were fast asleep in each other’s arms.

I could not distinguish words, but it sounded like a woman’s voice. Still in my bag, I crawled over to the flap. We lace it very firm, so it took me a little time to get the knots disentangled. I looked out – it was light, but I could see nothing: just the whistling arrows of wind polishing the snow-scales.

The next thing, I was outside the tent. The voice was no longer audible, but I was walking through the drifts, somehow unaffected by the wind. By now I knew it was a dream, but my curiosity had begun to grow; I felt there was something to discover there about our expedition. Something of the greatest importance. I looked down to see that I was dressed only in trousers and shirt, but I felt no cold. I was as free and natural as on a summer’s day at home.

On and on I walked in the bright slanted sunlight, the visibility better than I have ever seen it on this godforsaken stretch of coast, until I saw a black mark appear in the distance. Shackleton, I thought. He’s made it at last. I could

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almost see the Boss in front of me, but then the mist blew in and I was cut off from view.

I stopped, for I know how futile it is to walk in the fog, and saw without surprise that there were little flowers around my feet, little yellow flowers; and there was a naked girl lying among them. It was she, again, of course – but now the long red scar was gone, replaced by unblemished skin.

“Do you know me?” she asked, and it was the voice I had been hearing, the voice which had summoned me from the tent. “Yes, I know you,” I replied; and at that moment it was true. I knew who she was, and what she was doing there, though I seem to have forgotten it again now. “Come and join me,” she said, and I was kissing her, kissing her beautiful red lips, pale with cold, holding her lissom body in my arms. I was fucking her, fucking her long and hard – not like in Melbourne, but with a perfection of pleasure.

And then I realised it was Laurence I was holding so hard, whose smooth young boy’s body I was caressing, whose lips were fixed to mine. It seemed perfect to me. For that moment I was an animal, not a man: we were two seals, swimming in the translucent cathedral of the ice; we were terns, spiralling above the ice-floes. I drove in and out of him as the girl’s voice kept whispering in my ear, “This is the Heart of the Snow; this is the home you have been seeking.”

And I was back again.

It didn’t seem like a dream, but real. When I woke up back in my bag, I was convinced that I had been outside, and in fact got up to check that the ties were really closed. The other two were sleeping just as I had left them, and there were no voices.

Such visions are natural enough. We never speak of it, but quite often during the day I am sure that there is someone else with us, usually the girl, but sometimes a more shadowy figure. I had not been consciously thinking of Shackleton, but of course he is always more or less in my mind.

As for the transformation of the girl into young Laurence, I think it would be wrong to place too much stock in it. So far from women, it is natural that I should feel strange. The same has happened with me on the sporting field before, but it means no more than that – rough comradeship, mutual esteem and affection. I refuse to see it as more than that.

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Dark Depths

Filippo on the rear sledge could just make out Laurence walking alongside the front sledge seen dimly through the fog-like drift. He says it reminds him of a foggy day in London and pictures to himself great buildings just without the range of view.

Un soir de demi-brume à Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait à
Mon amour …

One night of spindrift fog in London
a boyo who was the dead spit …

To die in the dark depths. I was playing with that thought, that strangely voluptuous thought, as we marched along. Anything – death, deeps, darkness – to get out of this wind. Sometimes I think I’ll walk with a stoop for the rest of my life, so accustomed have I become to that constant drag, that violence, like a body-buffet, every step of the way.

The dogs began to bark as they sensed a crevasse ahead. It was shortly after taking my noon sights, and I thought little of it, merely turning the runners sideways to present the longest transverse angle. I shouted back to Laurence to watch out, then headed on over the wind-impacted ice, that polished rink of randomness which has been collecting here since the age of the dinosaurs. Strange, really, to think that these ice-caves have been here, unchanged in all essentials, since before man walked upright on the surface of the earth. Unchanged, unseen – waiting. For what? We cannot but be the first to walk here.

Mon amour vint à mon rencontre
Et le regard qu’il me jeta
Me fit …

… of my lost leader Shackleton
came up and took a look at it

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At what? My prick?

I heard a shout from Filippo, the rear-runner, and turned my head to look. Nothing appeared amiss, but he was waving his arms and shouting. Laurence was nowhere in sight, but that was scarcely unusual. Then I bethought me of the crevasse.

Running back, having taken the precaution of quickly tethering the dogs, I found Filippo bending over a great hole in the snow. Looking down, I could see nothing save blackness, but Filippo claimed to be able to make out one of the dogs hanging from a ledge far below. The extent of the catastrophe was too great to be grasped at once, as we shouted like madmen into the dark depths.

There were echoes, but no reply. After a bit I went back to my sledge and got some rope, with which we attempted to sound the hole. There was an impediment 150 feet down, possibly the ledge which Filippo claimed to have seen. After that – nothing. The rope was not long enough to reach the bottom. Nor could we span the hole with our one remaining sledge.

Even if he had struck the ledge rather than plunging straight into the depths, Laurence could hardly have survived. We both had visions at first of our friend hanging miraculously unhurt (winded, perhaps, half-stunned) from some icy impediment, but as the minutes ticked by, we realised how unlikely it was. After an hour of shouting and sounding we paused and began to take stock.

Almost all the food was gone – our spare clothes, the main tent, the sailing tackle for the sledge, knives , spoons, cups. We were left with our sleeping-bags, the spare tent without poles, and (God be praised!) the kerosene cooker.

In one fell stroke our trip had been transformed from a surveying expedition to a desperate race for survival. I scarcely felt up to it at first, but I could see that Filippo was looking to me for direction, so I decided that after a brief reading from the burial service we should at once turn back. There was indeed no reason to linger.

As I read I fancied I heard a dog whining deep down in the black hole beneath my feet, but from first to last we heard no sound which might have been interpreted as human. So far as I can see, Laurence, young, light-footed Laurence has been literally eaten by the earth. Pluto and Persephone. He was the youngest of us, and the best. What perilous pomegranate seeds did he swallow, without thinking, to be swallowed up in his turn?

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We were struck with the singular fact that, even in the height of some of these hurricanes, the sky remained serene and the sun shone brightly … The wind coming to us from the south was dry.


Filippo is getting weaker, day by day. It’s hard to describe the anxiety I feel as I watch him lacing his boots each morning, the clumsy fingers stabbing at each separate eyelet. Something has gone out of him, some virtue; some will to survive went with Laurence. He’s given up hope of return, I know.

Even when the wind is with us he stumbles blindly along in it, a calf to the shambles. Today I called an early halt, unable to bear his unsteady, shuffling progress any longer. The tent cannot be put up properly without poles, but we have devised a simple frame of ski and surveying equipment. The drill for putting it up is simple enough, but three times he let his rope fall as I crawled around fixing the pegs. I was tempted to curse him, but then I saw his face: bitter-white, as cold as winter, purple round the lips.

Inside, as we heated the hoosh, he confessed to me the agony he was suffering from friction. His under-trousers went under with the sledge, and his private parts have been rubbed almost raw by the constant swish of wet furs. I persuaded him to strip them off, and started to dab at the worst parts with vaseline and gauze.

“Lorenzo did this for me, before …”

His remark came as a surprise to me. We’ve hardly mentioned Laurence since he fell, and I had no idea that Filippo was suffering this discomfort even before the loss of the sledge. He was in delirium by now, though, and continued to mumble half to himself.

“Lorenzo, little Lorenzo. His hands were soft and cold, like the snow. His body was as white as a girl’s …”

The brute’s prick by now was starting to stand up, so I hastily ceased my ministrations and tried to steer his mind onto other things. Filippo had a great wish to see Australia and New Zealand, and I started to tell him of the green hills and hot bubbling pools we soon should visit together. In vain. I already suspected what he had to tell, but that made it no better hearing it from his lips.

“Back home, when two boys like each other, they give each other girl’s names. I was his Phillippa, he my little Laura. I did not tell him I had known a

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Laura at home, a cruel girl who would not give me satisfaction, though I offered her everything I had – everything my family had gathered over the generations. She took the gifts, but laughed in my face when I tried to claim something back from her. She let me kiss her hand; then slapped me across the face with it … and laughed. She was always laughing, that one.

“I tried to write her verses, for I had heard that women admire a clever man, but my efforts had no merit even in my own eyes. So I asked the schoolmaster for help, and he told me a poem I could use. I remember it still, I think. Ah yes:

Questa fenice, ch’al bel sol s’accende

What could that be? Something like:

Questing phoenix, who braves solar ascent

And then:

E a dramma a dramma consumando vassi
from drama to drama consuming vastly

No, not that. That’s not what it means. I’m joking. It sounds a bit like that, though. One could go on:

Mentre, di splendor cinta, ardendo stassi,
Men trade your splendour for ardent ecstasy
Contrario fio al suo pianeta rende;
Contrary faith back to your planet render

Perchè quel che da lei al ciel ascende,
Tepido fumo ed atra nebbia fassi,
Onde i raggi a’ nostri occhi occolti lassi
E quello avvele, per cui arde e splende.

“What can I say for that? Perché sounds a little like “perky,” I suppose – only it means “because.” Some stuff about how the smoke of its burning

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obscures the phoenix bird and, at the same time, produces the light that makes it divine.

Tal il mio spirto (ch’il divin splendore
Accende e illustra), mentre va spiegando
Quel che tanto riluce nel pensiero,

We’ve made ourselves a kind of gutless language,
dirtying everything
it touches: Perky tits, arse, tush …

Manda da l’alto suo concetto fore
Rima, ch’il vago sol vad’oscurando,
Mentre mi struggo e liquefaccio intiero.

How can I say
what you mean to me
– Rima, spirit of the forest?

Oimè! questo atro e nero
Nuvol di foco infosca col suo stile
Quel ch’aggrandir vorrebbe, e’l rende umile.

Your soul evades those nets,
black, crusted fog.
You go out singing in the pouring rain.

“When she heard me repeat this to her, she laughed louder than ever, but said that I had pleased her for once, so she would let me see what I would never touch. First, though, I must bow at her feet.

“A quick flash of her black hairy figa, that was what she gave me. One glimpse to last me down the years. I lunged for it, but she was gone. She could always run fast, that one – too fast for me, but not for everyone, as it turned out.

“The next year she ran off with a city boy. She gave him more than a flash of what she had, I know, for she was gone less than a year. When she came back she would see no-one. The rumour spread that she had caught some

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disease in the city, something terrible which only the worst whores could contract.

“I went to visit her every day of the week, but she would never see me. I could hear her laugh, weaker each time, from within her room as her mother told her I was waiting outside – but she wouldn’t see me. Not till she was dead. Then I saw her, saw the worthless whore I’d dreamed about through all my youth and young manhood, the girl who’d teased me and mocked me and never taken pity on me for a single moment. She lay there with a smile on her lips like the Madonna, though her soul must have gone straight to hell …”

“And Laurence?” I asked, confused and interested against my will. It all seemed to jibe only too well with my own dreams of the heart of the snow, the scar, the girl.

“What? Ah, Lorenzo, he was like a little girl to me. I used him like one. His Mummy had made him scared of women, and he liked to have a man to take care of him. I found that out on the ship, coming down. I caught him one day with his trousers open, pleasing himself, and threatened to tell the whole crew if he would not do what I said. In truth, he hardly needed the threats, for he must have been thinking about it for some time. I made him kiss it first, before I did all the things I’d dreamed of with that false whore …”

“You fucking liar! He was a British boy, not a …”

“Ah, you loved him, too, Captain? Perhaps you too have thought of him in your warm bag, pressed up against you at night?”

I wanted to strike the foreign brute, with his dirty talk of sacred things. I wanted to knife him then and there, like a great gross elephant seal. But somehow I could not. I looked at his full, slug-like lips, strangely in contrast with his wizened mountaineer’s body, and felt the wisdom it contained, wisdom denied me, secret knowledge of the senses and the mind. I had fucked my girl, while he had never touched his own, but I knew that I was a child beside him.

He smiled, greasily, with putrid self-assurance, then the smile faded into a frown. “You wish to know what I know, do you not, Captain Jordan? But it is not Laurence you wish to know, now, is it? It is yourself. You should have spoken earlier …”

I should have spoken earlier. I could have held that white boy’s body against mine. I could have cut out this Swiss bastard’s heart and eaten it raw on the end of my knife. And now all that was left was he and I – and the racking blizzard outside.

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“I could kill you!” I shouted.

“Yes, you could kill me, but I shall be dead soon enough anyway. I’m cold, Captain Jordan, Bruno Jordan – your name is like one of ours. I want you to hold me in my arms and warm me up. I shall never be warm again if you do not do that.”

And how could I refuse? It was not that I desired him. No, not that at all. I loathed him, his leathery, filthy skin, his shrunken face, but I held him next to me inside my sleeping bag, and after a while the same teasing warmth began to creep through us, through both of us. He whispered endearments in my ear, endearments framed for a score of lovers, no doubt. Once he told me to close my eyes, and then whispered in my ear, “Son’ il tuo Lorenzo.” At that my body tensed and spent, and I settled to sleep, shamed yet satisfied in the sticky remnants of my love.

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As there is little chance of my reaching human aid alive I greatly regret my inability to set out the coast line as surveyed for the 300 miles we travelled and the notes on glaciers and ice formations, etc.


It is strange to wake in the arms of a dead man. A girl, yes, though even there one tosses and turns so as to connect with the other only at a flank, a leg, a touch. And not dead, no. Just that deadness of not wanting to touch again, that early morning shame.

Here, though, Filippo was wholly pressed against me, his mouth lolling open to show me the stub of his tongue. He was not yet stiff, and even his body still had some warmth in it – warmth robbed, I fear, from my own scant store.

I began to pull myself slowly from the bag, afraid to hurry, afraid that once I let the full strength of my revulsion show, I would tear the precious fabric to shreds. He stank like shit, like some animal, but I had to pull myself from him as delicately as a lover, afraid to wake the beloved as you start on the journey away.

Once before this, in the long days retreating from the crevasse, I had had to clean him, when he filled his trousers inadvertently, and this time, too, I could not let him go down into the cold ice unwashed. He was a brute, but, in the end, a loved and loving brute.

The bag I turned inside out before I strapped it onto the sledge. I could not imagine using it again, but knew that by nightfall I would crawl into it with the gratitude of a slave excused a beating. His own bag I used for grave-shroud, and – while I could not dig deep enough for my satisfaction – I laid him in the eternal ice with sorrow. There he will lie, unchanged, his mouth half-open (I could not close it) to show his few good teeth, that insinuating, caressing tongue silenced for good. There he will lie, more imperishable than Pharaoh, as the years turn and the centuries gather over his head, and his memories, his memories of that village Laura, her cruel ways, and that one fleet glimpse of a furry slit attenuate and perish in the cold.

I said none of that above his body, though. No, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. I read from the Bible, from the Song of Songs.

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How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! The joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.

Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor; thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

Oh, God! How beautiful were the white feet of Laurence, that son of London-town …

Hysterical. I am becoming hysterical. I can see the two of them to either side, poor rejected Filippo, and that svelte young Laurence. They are anxious to depart, and I am delaying them. They help me attach the sail – poles, ropes, steel runners – for easy sledging with the wind, for all the dogs have been eaten (and wept over) long since.

Thy breasts are like two huskies that are twins; thy eyes like two black noses.

The virgin of the snows is a whore, a whore. I fucked her back in Melbourne. Is that why she comes back now to tease me and lead me on? The two boys have disappeared again, but no doubt are somewhere back there in the snowy distance. She alone runs on before me, her long red scar again visible, circling and circling her slender waist, the curl of ribs below her pretty clavicles, twin buttocks like jewels, cut-glass goblets full of liquor.

Will she have me again? Her furs, her masks are gone. I follow her through the ivory snows, my horn of plenty, of desire; follow her false dreams of satiety, of heaps of wheat caught up in the raw wind, till they turn back to blizzard, mere dull hoosh.

If it were not for … the maps, the expedition? No, for my two comrades, the red scar, the miracle of the ice, my black – toes? No, for those two cold graves, breasts like two young seals that are twins, I could not go on. If it were not for … the sails, the dogs (all eaten), my porridge of salty tears, snow-bathing boys, skidding to darkness, I should be quite lost. If they did not aid me, I should lie down and die.

If you do not help me, I shall become the ice.