Smilla's Sense of Snow aka Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

6

I stick my head inside the dryer and bury my hands in the dish towels, still burning hot. I can feel the skin on my face and hands start to dry out at once.

If you're homeless, you're always looking for connections, similarities, little smells and colors and sensations that remind you of a place where you felt at home, where you once felt settled. The air inside a clothes dryer is desert air. I once felt at home in a desert.

We were walking across a plain at the bottom of a valley; around us stretched flat, lifeless steppes; overhead was the hot sun. As if a mercilessly curious god had pointed his microscope and laboratory light at us because we were the only living creatures in an otherwise dead world. We walked through sand dunes and across salt pans, through a yellowish-brown and ashen-gray and yet incredibly beautiful hell of heat. At the end of the day a sandstorm came up and we had to lie flat on the ground with scarves over our faces. We didn't have any water left, and one of the participants, a young man, became delirious and screamed that he was going to die of thirst. When the storm let up, a curtain of blowing sand hung between us and the sun for a moment. It shone from inside, as if it had encircled the sun, as if a great, glowing swarm of bees were about to rise up into the sky with it. I felt clear-headed and happy, for no explicable reason. The time was 11:30 at night, the burning light was the midnight sun, and the place was Schuckerdt Valley in Northeast Greenland, an Arctic desert where, during a very brief summer, the polar sun heats up the cliffs to 95°F, creating a mosquito-plagued landscape of dried-out riverbeds and a rocky surface shimmering with heat. It took two days to cross it, and ever since I've often wished I could go back. My brother was on the expedition as a hunter. That was the last time he and I took a long journey together. We felt like children, as if the time when Moritz forced me to go to Denmark had never existed, as if we had never experienced twelve years of separation. At this moment, in front of the clothes dryer, I hang on to that inexplicable memory of my youth, whose sweetness I will never again share with anyone. The bad thing about death is not that it changes the future. It's that it leaves us alone with our memories.

I pull the screwdriver out of its cork and rip open the big black garbage bag.

It was the night before last that Jakkelsen showed me the cargo hold. Since yesterday I haven't gone anywhere without the screwdriver.

Yesterday around noon I left the laundry room to go back to my cabin and change my clothes.

My life as a whole might seem rather messy. But my clothes are always neat. I've brought along trouser hangers for my pants, inflatable hangers for my blouses, and I always fold my sweaters in a particular way. Your clothes will seem new and yet comfortable if they're properly ironed, folded, hung up, brushed, or stacked up in their place.

There's a T-shirt in my closet that's not folded the way it should be. I examine the pile. Someone has gone through it.

I sit down next to Jakkelsen in the mess. I haven't seen him since the night before. For a moment he stops eating, then he bends over his plate.

"Did you search my cabin?" I ask him quietly.

A touch of fear appears in his eyes, like a slight fever. He shakes his head. I ought to eat something, but I've lost my appetite. Before I report for work in the laundry room after lunch, I put two thin strips of tape on my door.

When I come back before dinner, they're broken. Since then I've carried the screwdriver with me everywhere. It might not be a rational reaction, but people use so many odd objects to buck up their courage. A Phillips screwdriver is no worse than so many other things.

A heap of men's clothing spills out of the bag onto the floor. Net undershirts, shirts, socks, jeans, underpants, and a pair of heavy pants made of cavalry twill.

What I have here is the first batch of laundry from the off-limits boat deck.

A small amount of women's clothing. A cardigan, stockings, a cotton skirt, towels labeled THE JUTLAND DAMASK MILLS and made of thick terry cloth, embroidered with the name Katja Claussen. She hasn't sent me anything else. I understand her quite well. Women don't like having others see or handle their laundry. If I wasn't the only one in charge of the laundry, I'd wash my own clothes in the sink and dry them over the back of a chair.

There's one other pile of men's clothing: T-shirts, shirts, sweatshirts, linen pants. There are three things worth noting. That everything is new, expensive, and size extra large.

"Jaspersen."

In every room on board the Kronos there are small black plastic telephones that can be activated from the bridge, allowing whoever's standing watch to interrupt and give orders whenever he likes. For me-at least at this moment-it's a manifestation of what has come out of the last forty years of technological development: brilliant, sophisticated, slightly despotic, and grotesquely superficial.

"Please serve coffee on the bridge."

I don't like being watched. I hate punch cards and flex time. I'm allergic to cross-referenced lists. I detest passport control and birth certificates. Obligatory school attendance; mandatory disclosure of information, legally required financial support, legal liability, oaths of confidentiality-the whole rotten monstrosity of government controls and demands that fall on your head when you come to Denmark. All the things that I normally sweep out of my mind but which may still confront me at any moment, perhaps manifested in a little black telephone.

I hate it even more because I know that it's also a kind of back-handed blessing: all the Western mania for control and archives and cataloging is meant to be helpful.

In the thirties, when they asked Ittussaarsuaq-who as a child had wandered with her tribe and kinfolk across Ellesmere Island to Greenland during the migration when Canadian Inuit had their first contact in seven hundred years with the Inuit of North Greenland-when they asked her, an eighty-five-year-old woman who had experienced the entire modern colonization process, moving from the Stone Age to the radio, how life was now, compared to the past, she said without hesitation, "Better-the Inuit very rarely die of hunger nowadays."

Emotions must flow purely if they're not to become confused. The problem with trying to hate the colonization of Greenland with a pure hatred is that, no matter what you may detest about it, the colonization irrefutably improved the material needs of an existence that was one of the most difficult in the world.

The intercom has been turned off. I lean against the wall next to it.

"I was just standing here," I say, "waiting for a chance to do my utmost."

On my way up, I step out onto the deck. The Kronos is rolling on long transverse waves, old swells formed by some distant storm that has disappeared, leaving behind nothing but this moving, matte-gray carpet of energy bound in water.

But the wind is blowing from the bow, a cold wind. I breathe in the air, open my mouth, letting it find a resonance, a deep upright wave, like when you blow across the top of an empty bottle.

The tarp has been taken off the landing vessel. Verlaine is working with his back to me. He's fastening long teak slats onto the bottom with an electric screwdriver.

Lukas is alone on the bridge. With his hand on the tiller. The automatic pilot is off. Something tells me that he prefers to steer manually, even though it results in a less precise course.

He doesn't turn around when I come in. Until he speaks, there's nothing to show that he knows I'm here. "You're limping."

He has developed an ability to see everything without looking directly at anything in particular.

"It's my varicose veins."

"Do you know where we are, Jaspersen?"

I pour him a cup of coffee. Urs knows exactly how he likes it. Thick and black and poisonous, like a thimble of boiling tar.

"I can smell Greenland. Today, out on the deck," I say. His back emanates suspicion. I try to explain. "It's the wind. It smells of earth. At the same time, it's cold and dry. There's ice in it. It's the wind from the ice cap that blows along the coast and reaches us out here."

I put the cup down in front of him. "I can't smell anything," he says.

"It's a scientific fact that chain smokers burn out their sense of smell. Strong coffee doesn't help, either."

"But you're right. Tonight, around 2:00 a.m., we'll pass Cape Farewell."

He wants something from me. He hasn't spoken to me since the day I came on board.

"It's customary that when you pass the cape, you make a report to Greenland Ice Center," he says.

I've spent three hundred flying hours in the Ice Center's Havilland Twin Otter, and three months in the barracks at Narsarsuaq drawing ice maps on the basis of aerial photos, which were then faxed to the Meteorological Institute, which in turn forwarded them to the shipping industry via Skamlebxk Radio. But I don't tell Lukas any of this.

"It's voluntary," he says. "But everyone takes advantage of it. They sign in and then report back every twenty-four hours."

He downs the coffee like swallowing an aspirin. "Unless you're on a mission that's not legal. And you want to hide your movements. If you don't report to the Ice Center, no word is sent to the Danish inspection vessels, either. Or to the police."

Everybody seems to be talking to me about the police. Verlaine, Maria, Jakkelsen. And now Lukas.

"We've made an agreement with the shipowner that the telephone on board would not be used during the trip. I'm willing to make one exception."

At first the offer takes me by surprise. I didn't think I'd given the impression that I needed to gab on the phone, whinning with my relatives via Lyngby Radio.

Then it dawns on me. Too late, of course, but all the more obvious. Lukas thinks I'm from the police. Verlaine thinks so, too. And Jakkelsen. They think I'm here undercover. That's the only explanation. That's why Lukas took me aboard.

I glance over at him. There's nothing evident, but it must be there: fear. It must have been there at our first meeting, in his face, turned away but reflected in the windowpanes of the casino. He must have made quite a few questionable voyages in his life. But there's something special about this one. This one scares him. So much that he took me on board, believing that I was on the trail of something. And that his reluctant cooperation would give him some sort of alibi if the hand of the law should fall on him and the Kronos and her passengers.

It's apparent in the rigidity of his back, in the way he tries to keep watch over everything, to be everywhere at once. In the discipline he maintains.

"Is there anything you… need on board?"

The question doesn't come to him naturally. He's not a welfare worker or a personnel director. He's a man who gives orders.

I move up behind him. "A key."

"You have a key."

I'm so close that I can breathe on the back of his neck. He doesn't turn around.

"To the boat deck."

"It's been confiscated."

His bitterness lashes at me, at my request. But mostly at the fact that they've taken away his omnipotence as the commander in chief of the ship.

Then I ask him the question that Jakkelsen asked me. "Where are we headed?"

His finger jabs at the sea chart at his side. It's a map of South Greenland. Over it a clear plastic facsimile has been placed of lines, circles, cross-hatching, and inky black triangles of the transmitter at Julianehab, indicating ice concentrations, the visibility, and the position of icebergs. A course has been marked out north along the coast, around Cape Thorvaldsen, and then north by northwest. The course stops near Vestland, at a spot in the middle of the ocean.

"That's all I know."

He hates them for this. For keeping him on a short leash like an infant.

"But the western ice stretches south to Holsteinsborg. And it's no picnic. A little north of Søndre Strømfjord. That's as far as they'll get me to take them."

I've sat down next to Jakkelsen. Fernanda and Maria are sitting on the other side of the table. They've permanently joined forces against the male world surrounding them.

They ignore me, as if they were rehearsing for the way it will be when, quite soon, I no longer exist.

Jakkelsen is staring at his plate. His bunch of keys is lying on the table next to him. I put down my knife and fork, stretch, put my right hand on his keys, move them slowly across the table, and let them drop into my lap. Under the shelter of the table edge I move them through my fingers, one by one, until I find the key marked with three Ks and a seven. It's the standard utility key on the Kronos; I have one myself. But Jakkelsen's also has an H. The ship was repaired in Hamburg. The H stands for Hauptschliissel, a passkey. I twist it off the key ring. Then I put the rest of the keys back on the table and stand up. Jakkelsen hasn't moved.

In my cabin, I put on warm clothes. Then I go out on the quarterdeck.

I saunter along with my hand on the sea rail. It's supposed to look as if I'm taking a stroll.

In North Greenland distances are measured in sinik, in "sleeps," the number of overnights that a journey requires. It's not a fixed distance, because the number of sinik can vary, depending on the weather and the time of year. It's not a measurement of time, either. Under the threat of a storm, I've traveled with my mother non-stop from Force Bay to Iita, a distance that should have taken two overnights.

Sinik is not a distance, not a number of days or hours. It is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon, a concept of space-time that describes the union of space and motion and time that is taken for granted by Inuits but that cannot be captured by ordinary speech in any European language.

The European measurement of distance, the standard meter in Paris, is quite different. It's a concept for reshapers, for those whose primary view of the world is that it must be transformed. Engineers, military strategists, prophets. And mapmakers. Like me.

The European system of measurement didn't really become part of me until I took a course in surveying at Denmark's Technical College in the fall of 1983. We surveyed the Deer Park. With theodolites and tape measures and normal distribution and equidistances and stochastic variables and rainy weather and little pencils that had to be sharpened constantly. And we paced off areas. We had a teacher who repeated over and over that the alpha and omega of surveying is that the geodesist must know the length of his own stride.

I knew my own pace measured in sinik. I knew that when we ran behind the sled because the sky was black with pent-up explosions, the space-time around us would be half the number of sinik required when we let the dogs pull us over smooth new ice. In fog the number would double, in a snowstorm it might be tenfold.

In the Deer Park I translated my sinik into feet. Ever since, no matter whether I'm walking in my sleep or secured to a line, whether I'm wearing boots and crampons or a tight skirt that forces me to shuffle along two inches at a time, I've always known exactly how much distance I'm covering when I take a step.

I'm not taking this stroll on the quarterdeck for fun. I'm measuring the Kronos. I'm gazing out across the water, but all of my energy is focused on remembering the measurements.

I saunter eighty feet past the mast farthest astern and its two winches, down to the aft superstructure. Forty feet along the superstructure. At the railing I lean over and estimate the height of the freeboard to be sixteen feet.

Someone is standing behind me. I turn around. Hansen fills the doorway to the metal shop. Massive, wearing huge, wooden-soled boots. In his hand he's holding what looks like a short dagger.

He regards me with that indolent, brutal satisfaction that physical superiority makes some men feel.

He raises his knife. Then he puts his left hand up to the blade and, with a circular motion, starts polishing it with a little rag. It leaves a white soapy film on the blade. "Viennese chalk. You have to polish them with Viennese chalk. Or they won't hold an edge."

He doesn't look at the knife. His eyes are fixed on me as he talks.

"I make them myself. Out of old cold chisels. The hardest steel in the world. First I set the edge with a diamond wheel. Then I polish it with carborundum and oilstone. Finally I polish it with Viennese chalk. Very, very sharp."

"Sharp as a razor?"

"Sharper," he says with satisfaction.

"With a point like a nail file?"

"Much more pointed."

"Why is it then," I ask, "that you're in such desperate need of a shave, and you show up in the galley that I've just cleaned with such incredibly filthy nails?"

He glances up toward the bridge and then back at me. He licks his lips. But he can't come up with an answer. Isn't this an example of history repeating itself? Hasn't Europe always tried to empty out its sewers in the colonies? Isn't the Kronos a repeat of the prisoners on their way to Australia, the foreign legion off to Korea, and British commandos going to Indonesia?

Back in my cabin I take out the two folded pieces of paper that I've been carrying in my jacket pocket. I've stopped leaving anything important in my cabin. While I remember them, I record the numbers I've paced off onto the sketch I'm in the process of drawing of the Kronos's hull. In the margin I write down the other figures; some I know, the others I guess at.

Overall length: 345 feet Length p.p.: 318 feet Height of upper decks: 31 feet Height of second deck: 20 feet; Cargo capacity (second deck): 100,000 cubic feet Cargo capacity (in hull): 125,000 cubic feet Total: 225,000 cubic feet

Speed: 18 knots, comparable to 4,500 BHK Diesel consumption: 14 tons per day Range: 10,000 nautical miles

I look for an explanation for the restrictions that have been placed on the movements of the Kronos's crew. When the Inuit Hans sailed with Peary to the North Pole, the sailors were not allowed on the officers' deck. It was part of the exercise, an attempt to bring along the security of a feudal hierarchy to the Arctic. On ships today the crew is too small for these types of regulations. And yet they exist on the Kronos.

I start the washing machines. Then I leave the laundry room.

When you're part of an isolated group of peoplewhether in a boarding school, on the polar ice cap, or on a ship-your individuality dissolves and is partially replaced by a sense of unity. Unconsciously, at any given moment, I can place everyone else in the universe of the ship. By their footsteps in the corridor, by their breathing when they're asleep behind closed doors, by their whistling, the rhythm of their work, and my knowledge of their work shifts.

Just as they know where I am. That's the advantage of the laundry room. It sounds as if I'm there even when I'm not.

Urs is eating. He has pulled out a folding table next to the stove, spread a cloth over it, set the table, and lit a candle. "Fraulein Smilla, attendez-moi one minute."

The crew's mess on board the Kronos is a Tower of Babel of English, French, Tagalog, Danish, and German. Urs drifts helplessly among fragments of languages he has never learned to speak. I sympathize with him. I can hear that his mother tongue is disintegrating.

He pulls up a chair for me and puts down a plate. He likes company when he eats. He eats as if he'd like to unite the peoples of the world around his pots and pans, with the optimistic knowledge that we all have a need to feed ourselves despite wars and rape and language barriers and differences in temperament and the Danish military's exercise of sovereignty over North Greenland, even after Home Rule.

On his plate he has a portion of pasta that is big enough for two.

He gives me a melancholy look when I decline. "You are too thin, Fraulein."

He grates a big piece of Parmesan cheese; the dry golden dust drifts down over the pasta like snow flurries. "You are ein Hungerkiinstler, a hunger artist."

He has slit his homemade baguettes lengthwise and warmed them up with butter and garlic. He stuffs four inches at a time into his mouth, chewing slowly and with pleasure.

"Urs," I say, "how did you happen to sign on?"

I can't imagine being on more formal terms with him. He stops chewing. "Verlaine says that you're Polizist." He considers my silence. "I was im Gefdngnis, in prison. For two years. In der Schweiz."

That explains the color of his skin. Prison pallor.

"I was on a driving tour of Morocco. I thought that if I took five pounds along, I'd have enough for two years. At the Italian border they pulled me over at random. I got three years. Released after two. In October of last year."

"How was prison?"

"Die beste Zeit meines Lebens." Emotion has made him switch over to German. "The best time of my life. No stress. Only Rube, peace. I did voluntary kitchen duty. That's why I got Strafermitssigung, a reduction in sentence."

"And the Kronos?"

Once again he considers my intentions. "I did my military service in the Swiss Navy."

I wonder whether this is supposed to be a joke, but he stops me with a gesture of his hand.

"Flussmarine, the river patrol. I was a cook. One of my colleagues has connections in Hamburg. He recommended the Kronos. I did part of my apprenticeship in Denmark, in Tonder. It was difficult. It's hard to find work when you've been in prison."

"Who hired you?" He doesn't answer. "Who is Tørk?"

He shrugs. "I've only seen him once. He stays up on the boat deck. Seidenfaden and die Frau are the ones who come out."

"What are we going to pick up?"

He shakes his head. "I'm just the cook. It was impossible to find work. You have no idea, Fraulein Smilla…"

"I want to see the walk-in coolers and the storage rooms."

There is fear in his expression. "But Verlaine told me that Jaspersen would…"

I lean across the table. In this way I force him away from his pasta, away from our previous intimacy, from his trust in me.

"The Kronos is a smuggler ship."

Now he's panic-stricken. "Ahh, ich bin kein Schmuggler. I couldn't stand going back to jail."

"Wasn't it the best time of your life?"

"Once was enough."

He takes me by the arm. "I don't want to go back. Bitte, bitte. If we're caught, tell them I'm innocent, that I don't know anything."

"I'll see what I can do."

The food storerooms are right under the galley. They consist of a meat locker, a freezer for eggs and fish, a double-cooler kept at 36°F for other perishable goods, plus various cupboards. The whole area is well stocked, clean, orderly, functional, and subject to such constant use that it would be no good as a hiding place for anything.

Urs shows me the area with equal parts professional pride and fear. It takes ten minutes to inspect. I'm on a schedule. I go back to the laundry room, spin dry the clothes, stuff them in the dryer, and turn the dial back to Start. Then I sneak out again. And head below.

I don't know a thing about engines. And what's more, I have no intention of learning about them, either.

When I was five years old, the world was incomprehensible. When I was thirteen, it seemed to me much smaller, much dirtier, and depressingly predictable. Today it still seems muddled, but once again-although in a different way-as complex as when I was a child.

With age I have voluntarily chosen certain limitations. I don't have the energy to start over again. To learn new skills or fight my own personality or figure out diesel engines.

I rely on Jakkelsen's off-hand remarks. This morning I surprised him in the laundry room, sitting with his back against the insulation on the hot-water pipe, with a cigar in his mouth and his hands in his pockets so the salt air won't sneak in and damage his peach-soft skin that's supposed to be used for stroking the ladies' inner thighs.

"Smilla," he says when I ask him about the engine, "it's enormous. Nine cylinders, and each is 18 inches in diameter, with a 29-inch stroke. Burmeister and Wain direct reversible, with supercharger. We're sailing at 18 to 19 knots. It's from the sixties, man, but it's been renovated. We're outfitted as an icebreaker."

I stare at the engine. It's looming up before me; I have to walk past it, with its injection valves, fuel cocks, radiator pipes, springs, polished steel and copper, its exhaust manifold, and its lifeless yet dynamic motion. Like Lukas's little black telephones, the engine is a distillation of civilization. Something that is both taken for granted and incomprehensible. Even if I had to, I wouldn't know how to stop it. In a certain sense, maybe it can't be stopped. Temporarily interrupted perhaps, but not permanently brought to a standstill.

It may give this impression because, unlike a human being, it has no individuality; it's a replica of something else, the soul of the machine or the system of axioms underlying all machines.

Or maybe it's a mixture of loneliness and fear that's making me see visions.

But I still can't explain the essential thing: Why was the Kronos outfitted two months ago in Hamburg with a vastly oversized engine?

The hatch in the bulkhead behind the engine is insulated. When it falls shut behind me, the noise of the engine vanishes and my ears ring deafly. The tunnel goes down six steps. From there the corridor stretches twentyfive yards, straight as an arrow, lit by wire-wrapped lamps-an exact copy of the stretch that Jakkelsen and I covered less than twenty-four hours ago, although now it feels like the distant past. '

The diesel tanks below deck are marked with numbers on the floor. I pass numbers 7 and 8. On the wall, next to the location of each tank, there is a foam extinguisher, a fire blanket, and an alarm button. It's not pleasant being reminded about the dangers of fire on board ship.

At the end of the tunnel a spiral stairway leads upward. The first hatch is on the left-hand side. If my provisional measurements are right, it goes to the smallest cargo hold farthest aft. I move past it. The next hatch is ten feet higher up.

The room is different from what I'd seen before. It's no more than twenty feet high. The sides don't go all the way up to deck level but stop at the between decks, where the beam of my flashlight disappears in the darkness.

The room is a peeling, spotted, and much-used cargo hold. Wooden wedges, hemp ropes, and sacks used for moving and securing cargo are piled up against one bulkhead.

Against the other bulkhead about fifty railroad ties are stacked up and strapped down.

One level up, a door opens onto the between decks. My flashlight finds distant walls, the high ridge where the cargo hold juts up, the bracing under the spot where the aft mast must stand. Clusters of white-painted electrical cables and the outlets of the sprinkler system.

The between decks is as wide as the ship, and is actually a single vast low-ceilinged room supported by columns; behind one end of the room are the coolers and storage rooms. The opposite end vanishes aft into the darkness.

That's the direction I head. After twenty-five yards there is a railing. Ten feet down my light strikes bottom. The aft cargo hold. I remember Jakkelsen's statistics: 1,000 cubic feet, as opposed to the 3,500 in the hold I've just looked at.

I take out my sketch and compare it with the space beneath me. It seems somewhat smaller than I've drawn it.

I go back to the spiral staircase and down to the first door.

Seen from the floor of the hold, it's understandable why it seems smaller than in my drawing. It's half filled with a rectangular shape five feet high under a blue tarp.

With my screwdriver I make two punctures and a rip in the canvas.

Keeping in mind the railroad ties, you might think we were on our way to Greenland to lay seventy-five yards of track and start up a rail company. Under the tarp there is a stack of rails.

But you wouldn't be able to attach them to the ties. They're welded together in a huge, rectangular construction with an iron bottom.

It reminds me of something. Then I let the thought pass. I'm thirty-seven years old. With age everything starts reminding you of something else.

Back on the between decks I glance at my alarm clock. By now the laundry room must be quiet. Someone might have called me. Someone might have come by.

I walk farther aft.

The vibrations in the hull tell me that the propeller must be somewhere below, right in front of my feet. According to my diagram, about fifteen yards away. Here the deck is cut off by a bulkhead with a door. Jakkelsen's key fits the lock. Inside, there is a red emergency light with a switch. I don't turn on the light. I must be on the floor beneath the low aft superstructure. It's been locked ever since I came aboard.

The hatch leads to a short passageway with three doors on either side. The key opens the first one on the right. No doors are closed to Peder Most and his friends.

Until not very long ago this room was one of three small cabins on the port side. Now the dividing walls have been torn down to create one room. A storeroom. Along the walls are rolls of blue 2-inch nylon hawsers. Woven polypropylene rope. Eight sets of quarter-inch Kermantel double rope in fluorescent alpine safety colors, an old friend from the ice cap. Every set costs 5,000 kroner, can handle up to five tons, and it's the only rope in the world that can stretch 25 percent of its own length.

Under straps there are aluminum ladders, firn anchors, tents, lightweight shovels, and sleeping bags. Metal hooks screwed into the walls hold ice axes, climbing hammers, pitons, carabiners, dynamic brakes, and ice screws-both the narrow ones that look like corkscrews and the wide ones: you screw a cylinder of ice into the core and they can hold an elephant.

Inside several metal cabinets along the wall, opened at random, I find wedges, glacier goggles, a crate of six Tommen altimeters. Frameless backpacks, Meindl boots, safety harnesses. Everything straight from the factory and wrapped in clear plastic.

The room to starboard was also formed by combining three cabins. There are more ladders and ropes and a fire chest marked EXPLOSIVES, which Jakkelsen's key unfortunately will not open. In three big cardboard boxes there are three identical examples of Danish quality craftsmanship: 20-inch manual winches with three gears from Sophus Berendsen, Inc. I don't know much about mechanical gear ratios, but they're as big as barrels and look as if they could lift a locomotive.

I pace off the hallway at eighteen feet. At the end a stairway leads up to deck level, where there's a toilet, a paint room, a metal shop, and a little mess hall used as a shelter when they're working on deck. I decide to postpone my inspection to another time.

Then I change my mind-.

I had left the door through which I came ajar. Maybe because the hallway and the small rooms would feel like a rat trap otherwise.

Maybe to see whether a light would be turned on behind me.

There's a sound now. Not much. Just a little noise that almost disappears in the sound of the propeller and the seething crash of the sea along the hull.

It's the sound of metal on metal. Cautious, but enhanced by the harsh echo of the room.

I head up the stairs to reach the deck. At the top there's a door. The key makes the latch click back, but the door doesn't open. It's battened down from the outside. I turn back.

In the darkness of the between decks, I withdraw to the side, squat down, and wait.

They arrive almost at once. There are at least two of them, maybe more. They move slowly, inspecting the space around them along the way. Discreet, but without making an effort to be quiet.

I put my flashlight on the deck. I wait for the Kronos to roll on a high swell. Then I turn on the flashlight and let it go. It starts rolling to starboard as its beam flickers across the pillars.

I run forward, along the side.

It doesn't distract them. In front of me is something that feels like a curtain. I try to push it aside, but it wraps around me. Then another flutters around my chest and face, and I scream, but the sound is muted by the heavy fabric and becomes merely a ringing in my own ears, along with the taste of dust and wool in my mouth. They've wrapped me up in fire blankets.

It was done deliberately, without violence or drama. They lay me down and put pressure on the blankets, and there is a new smell of mildew and jute. They've pulled a sack over the blankets, over my head-one of the sacks I saw so many of in the cargo hold.

They lift me up, still taking care; I'm lying across the shoulders of two men who carry me along the deck. Irrationally, the vain thought strikes me that I must look ridiculous.

A hatchway is opened and closed. On our way down the stairs they hold me stretched out between them. Blindness leads to an increased awareness in my body, but not once do I hit the stairs. If it hadn't been for the wrapping and the circumstances, they might have been carrying a patient on a stretcher.

A sound that is both muffled and close at hand tells me that we're outside the door to the engine room. The door is opened, we pass the engine room, and the sound dies out again. Time and distance seem longer. I feel as if we've been walking for an eternity before they take the first step upward. In reality, it can't have been more than eighty feet to the bottom step.

Now there's only one shoulder under me. I try to get my arms free.

I'm placed carefully on the floor; there's a slight vibration of metal somewhere above my head.

Now I know where we're going. The opened door doesn't lead anywhere; it opens onto the little platform where Jakkelsen and I stood, forty feet from the bottom. I don't know why, but I'm positive that they're going to throw me from that platform into the bottom of the tank.

I'm in a sitting position. A fold in the blankets allows me to pull my left arm up along my chest. I have the screwdriver in my hand.

When he lifts me up from the floor, my chest rests against his. I try to feel my way to where his ribs end, but I'm shaking too hard. Besides, the cork is still on the screwdriver.

He leans me against the railing and kneels in front of me, like a mother about to lift her child.

I'm sure that I'm going to die. But I push the thought aside. I refuse to accept this humiliation. There's a degrading coldness about the way they must have planned it. It was so easy for them, and now here I am: Smilla the Greenlander, about to go splat.

As he gets his shoulder underneath me, I shift the screwdriver into my right hand. As he slowly stands up, I put it to my mouth, bite down on the cork, and pull it off. He rolls me around 90 degrees to get me free of the edge. With the fingers of my left hand I find his shoulder. I can't reach his throat, but I can feel the soft, triangular hollow between his collarbone and trapezius muscle, where the nerves lie exposed beneath a thin layer of skin and tissue. That's where I jab the screwdriver. It goes through the blanket. Then it stops. The surprisingly elastic resistance and solidity of living cells. I put the palms of my hands together, and with a jerk I lift my body free so that all my weight rests on the handle of the screwdriver. It slides into place.

He doesn't utter a sound. But all movement ceases, and for a moment we stand there swaying together. I wait for him to release me; I'm already anticipating the impact with the grating in the darkness beneath me. Then he drops me onto the platform.

I hit my head on the railing. Dizziness spreads over me, increases, and then disappears. The sack and the woolen blankets protected my head enough for me to remain conscious.

Then a ram batters me in the stomach. He's kicking me.

My first impulse is to vomit. But since the pain keeps coming, I can't manage to catch my breath between each kick. I'm about to suffocate. I think that it's too bad I couldn't get any closer to his throat.

The next thing I notice is the screaming. I think it's him screaming. Someone takes me by the shoulders and I think that now I've used up all my own resources and my luck, and I just want to die in peace.

But he's not the one who's screaming. It's an electronic screech, the sine wave of an oscillator. I'm being dragged up the stairs. The small of my back thuds against every single step.

A feeling of coldness reaches me, along with the sound of rain falling. Then a hatch is opened and I'm released. Next to me an animal is coughing up its lungs.

I work the sack up over my head. I have to roll back and forth to get free of the blankets.

I emerge into a cold, pouring rain, to the electronic screech, a blinding electric light, and to the retching breathing of the creature beside me.

It's not an animal. It's Jakkelsen. Soaking wet and white as chalk. We're inside a room that I can't immediately identify. Above our heads the sprinkler system is sending wildly rotating cascades of water over us. The sound of the smoke alarm is rising and falling, monotonous and nerve-racking.

"What else could I do? I lit a cigar and put my mouth up to the sensor. Then the shit hit the fan."

I try to ask a question but can't manage a sound. He guesses what I want to ask.

"Maurice," he says. "His days as a heartthrob are over. He didn't even notice me."

Somewhere overhead there's the sound of running footsteps. They're coming down the stairs.

I'm incapable of moving. Jakkelsen gets to his feet. He has dragged me up the stairs to the next level. We must be on the between decks, under the foredeck. The exertion had made him collapse.

"I'm not in very good shape," he says. Then he runs unsteadily into the darkness.

The door flies open. Sonne steps in. It takes me a moment to identify him. He's carrying a big foam extinguisher, and he's dressed in full firefighting gear with an oxygen tank on his back. Behind him stand Maria and Fernanda.

As we gaze at each other, the alarm stops and the water pressure tapers off in the sprinkler system and finally halts altogether. Amid the trickling of drops along the walls and the murmuring of streams on the ceiling and floor, the distant sound of waves breaking against the bow of the Kronos seeps into the room.