The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 48

Guy, Israel, and Thord collected forward to confer. I sensed their digust with Grandfather. It was deserved. He had quit decency again, permitting his genius for metaphorical persuasion—which supported his superhuman resolve in a crisis—to become distorted in the calm, moving him to cruelty, hysteria. It was much the same distortion that had carried him from the Gulf of Bothnia to the pulpit of the Pillar of Salt to the near dictatorship of the North. I saw this, and tried the impossible, to give my loyalty to two irreconcilable parties.

“Whatever it is,” I began, “it must feed on the wind. If we try for the trades to the Caribbean, we have to risk being dragged into that. It blocks us. We shouldn’t go back there.”

“It is Satan, Grim,” said Grandfather.

“Shut up, old man, I swear,” said Israel.

“Act, for pity’s sake, act,” spoke up Cleopatra. “What good is your talk?”

As Gizur explained her words Grandfather clapped his hands, well pleased with Cleopatra. We stood there gripped by her cold, obvious fact. Either we found the wind and sailed out of that calm, or the back draft of the fire storm would drag us into the burning sea. We had less choice than I had presented.

Grandfather thundered forth Psalm 100, “Acclaim the Lord, all men on earth, worship the Lord in gladness, enter his presence with songs of exultation, know that the Lord is God!” pausing between his bursts to order us to launch Black Crane and the jolly, to take to oars in teams, and, in Grandfather’s words, to tow Angel of Death “free of the fumes of Hell.”

“Pull, children!” Grandfather cried from the bow. “Until you know perdition when you see it, pull! Until you fear damnation more than death and death more than pain, pull!”

And I remember this: while I was going out to my shift and Lazarus was returning from his, I overheard him and Cleopatra; she pointed to the burning sea and asked, “Could there have been a war?” It was an idea that had not occurred to me, for I was ignorant of Lazarus’s so-called political science. I waited to hear Lazarus say, “Nothing so easy, wilder, no explanation, none,” and then he slumped to her.

We did catch the wind, after three days of rowing that wore us down badly and broke Earle’s health. Grandfather thereupon proclaimed his own counsel. Hell was behind us, he said, he would not go back, and as master of Angel of Death, he would not risk proceeding east or west into the trades without trying for a landfall to mend the foremast and other minor damage that would worsen in a blow. At our council there was a bitter argument about Grandfather’s fitness to continue as captain of the ship. I opened my charts to assist their decision. Guy wanted to go back, arguing the fire would burn out; Israel was wary of another calm, and equally of another storm. I told them we were three degrees south of the equator. If we were to continue without repairs, our choices were: either make for the southeast trades and ride the Benguela Current into an African port along the Gulf of Guinea, risking pirates and cutters; or to ride the trades across the Atlantic to catch the Brazil Current and, bypassing American ports for the same reason we should avoid Africa, try for the Pacific via the Strait of Magellan, the legendary grave of all ill-crewed, ill-equipped ships. I pressed them that making for the southwest seemed safest, and mending our foremast beforehand seemed most prudent. Grandfather’s preference for a landfall midocean had two possibilities: either Saint Paul’s Rocks to our northwest, an uninhabited desolation; or Ascension Island to the southeast, a British naval station that might be as hostile as had been the British Isles.

Israel and Guy listened and studied, then gave a qualified assent to Ascension for repairs, saying that only then would they decide whether we went west, east, or back north.

This was good caution; it was bad luck. Making for Ascension was another defeat. I am unsure if there were better choices; still, there might have been some other way than I was able to formulate, some other way that I could not see, that would have carried us back inside civilization. I stress this; it is not exaggeration. We knew we were in absolute peril, though we deceived ourselves, though we had known it since first we heard the word cholera. It was not something we were strong enough to share at meals. How does one say, “I think we are lost”? I could place us on the chart. Yet we were lost. Somehow, at some point, for a reason I do not yet comprehend (a mystery that compels this story), we on board Angel of Death had passed from the inside of civilization, reason, decency, privilege, common sense, and security to the outside of civilization, where there was no sense, only terror, silence, worse upon worse. Did it happen in Stockholm harbor when we stole Peregrine? Did it happen when we obeyed the exclusion by the cutters and fled? Did it happen when we ignored the massacre of children off Portugal? Did it happen when we walked through Port Praia in a nightmare? Did it happen when we survived a tempest that would have destroyed us except for Grandfather’s bravado and our luck? Had we failed and were we condemned, had we dared and were we trapped, or had we stumbled and were we being tempted? It was this: We were lost to what we had had, by fortunate birthright, back in Sweden and America; and it became necessary to find a new life that was outside, other, incredible. If there was a greatest Good, it was no longer for us.

A week of rugged sailing brought us windward of Ascension Island. Thick weather had closed about us, and the rains were down in sheets, solving our fresh-water problem but keeping