The Atlas

EXALTED BY THE WIND

Up the snow-choked gorges went tracks of musk-oxen as of foot-dragging skiers. I felt trapped and gloomy. The wind had not come yet. At eleven in the morning the world was blue and white and perfect with hard-snowed clarity — the reification of some extreme ideal. The whole island, vast and by temperate standards almost lifeless, was in effect its own planet, low, blue, white, and brown, the horizon often no more than knee-high, so that heaven was all around. A realm of the Platonic Forms might be thus. I seemed to see nothing but solidified space without a predicate. It was a blank page of all possibilities, not excluding loveliness and terror. Absolute potentiality was a very wearisome thing to any imperfect being (such as myself) which crawled across the gravel flats. By now my companion and I had come a considerable distance from the coast. The Arctic Ocean having vanished from sight, we were left with only a cold and ugly river to follow. Muddy canyons grooved the land with dreariness. But a new force, no less inhuman, was entering the realm. I could feel it and did not know whether to fear it. My companion said nothing.

By eleven-thirty mist had covered the sky, except for a blue-gray line at the horizon. Lenticular clouds rushed at right angles to the ridges.

There was a white plateau (although it was not really a plateau; it was a river-edged valley, but because there was snow on it I could not see any difference between floor and wall anymore), and above the plateau was a thin blue smudge of sky, and above the sky was a white plateau of cloud with its own humps and mounds and appendages; there was nothing else.

A breeze began to deaden my fingers inside the mitts.

How are your gloves holding up? I asked my friend.

Not bad, really. — He was stretching out socks over the gas stove. — There's a couple of dry spots here, he said.

The wind increased.

My friend got into his sleeping bag, unzipped the vestibule door and lit a cigarette. — Kind of a much different day from when we got up, he said. Looks like it must be melting out there. Or it may just be the way the light changed.

An hour later, when the wind began in earnest, the shriekings of it precluded sleep. The tent-poles bent, quivered and lashed, and the tent bulged concave and convex, while snow blew up from the ground and worked itself into shifting patterns of continents between tent and fly, constantly changing and scattering like the harvest of a kaleidoscope. Ice from condensation rattled down on our sleeping bags. Somewhere in the storm could be heard the loud and regular cries of a seagull.

Suddenly I knew that there was something for me in the wind but I did not have the courage to take it. Thus the wind was but the increase of my despair. My heart stumbled into the deep wide ditches of tundra polygons treacherously covered by snow.

In the end I did sleep, and I dreamed. When I awoke, my companion was still sleeping uneasily. Everything was quiet. I unzipped the tent flap. Outside, the country was magically white and clean. The land had been scoured down to brownness in great long tracks across the valley; elsewhere the snow was neatly raked into drifts, mound after mound of them, and the river stones were black and white. A fierce white light hung above the ridges.

I'd dreamed that I walked up a round ridge-mound into a cloud, and the wind got stronger and stronger and threw sleet in my face so that I grinned and ducked my head and climbed so happily; then the wind threw sharp ice-crystals into my face and pushed me; and I staggered but outspread my arms like flapping wings, joking with the wind. Gaining the summit, a wide upturned bowl of snowdrifts and tan pebbles, I turned myself around so that I was looking back the way I had come, with the wind at my back; the wind became mine. I felt the steady eager thrumming of it between my shoulderblades, pressing at my back and legs with unerring force.

Below me, corkscrew trails of snow whirled across the plain and fogged the ridges. They blew across the land like parallel wave-crests. The fjord also flowed in that direction; the wind was pushing it, wind-ripples greenish-grayish-gold.

I raised my arms to my shoulders, and opened them wide. I laughed as the wind lifted me under the armpits and bore me up into the blue sky, where the clouds floated like drifts of ice. I flew far.

I came to a place where the ice was gray but gold-bordered. It seemed to glow from beneath. On the white snow-beach I saw the black silhouette of a woman, with white fur-ruff around her face.

The snow was raked into parallel ridges half a foot high. Ridges ran also between the black rocks that protruded from the snow-covered river, so that they seemed to be lined up in rows. The scene expressed above all an unearthly precision. Once again golden plant-stalks rose above the snow; the faraway ridges were blue, and all was calm.

The wind began to keen, and I closed my eyes again. In my sleep the wind caught me and carried me to the woman with the fur-bordered face. She kissed me. Then I heard my friend unzip his sleeping bag and open the outer door; I heard the match strike and smelled the sulphur of it; I smelled the cigarette smoke. Opening his eyes, I saw the smoke mingling with the steam of my own breath. It was another cold and dreary day. Yet somehow it did not seem dreary anymore.

In the afternoon the sun came out, but the snow and wind kept on for a long time. Finally the snow stopped and I lay in the tent watching the fly flap away from the tentwall in the gusts so that the wall became sublimely white and perfect for a moment before the fly's writhing shadow lashed it; all day I watched the sun-play and felt that I needed no more.

Later my companion and I came to a mound of frozen sand and stones like the one in my dream, and as we started to climb it the wind swooped to chill our faces numb and white. And yet we both were laughing, too. By the time we reached the summit of that upturned bowl the wind was almost strong enough to carry us away. I wanted to be carried away. I said to the wind: Please carry me away. — Then my companion rushed past me. Before he disappeared in a lenticular cloud, I saw that his eyes were closed and he was smiling tenderly and his arms were outstretched as if he were about to embrace someone.