Who could have left, at such a moment? Not I. His bizarre words touched a number of chords; some of them had to do with my job, but getting a good story was not what made me stay and listen. It was already something deeper, and more important to me; something grounded in my own past, some need unfulfilled, some quest not yet undertaken. I felt, as strongly as I had ever felt before, that if I went away without hearing what he had to say – however strange, however nonsensical – I would never log my due ration of experience, I would never really catch up.
I had felt the same sort of thing, on a more light-hearted plane, in the past: the conviction that if I left a party early, I would lose something worthwhile; that if I didn’t kiss a certain person, I would be short of one girl for the rest of my life; even that if I missed a television show, I would miss it for ever.
Such things can scarcely ever be true; but I had the same feeling now, and this time it was not related to a significant meeting, a pretty girl, a classic performance. For some reason, I knew that a stage had been set for drama on a grand scale. I had been invited; if I walked out, I would be a traitor to my own future, and would mourn the fact for ever.
It was very late, on an Arctic night far from home; an apt moment for wayward fancy, a moment not to be trusted, not to be measured against the cold reason of broad daylight. But I did not hesitate. To do so would have been like edging away down a side alley of history, turning one’s back on the Battle of Waterloo, the murder of Caesar, the birth at Bethlehem … A web of such fantasies seemed to be brushing the inside of my skull. Common sense was overdue. I hung up my coat behind the door, on top of the shabby rucksack, and sat down in the armchair.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘You must explain.’
‘It’s a very long story.’
He was still sitting up in bed; he was not less eager than when he had made his last plea for me to listen, but his pale exhausted face showed what an effort it had been to capture my attention. Some doubt of his strength must have shown in my face, for he smiled gently, and said: ‘If Mary brings us some more coffee, I promise to last out the night.’
She was off in a moment, and back very soon, with the reheated coffee; silence ruled the room, and indeed the whole house, for when Mary returned, and shut the door behind her, she said: ‘I guess she’s gone to bed.’ There was only one enemy ‘she’ in our lives … The old man settled back again; Mary sat at the foot of the bed; I made myself as comfortable as I could in the wrecked armchair.
I was watching old Shepherd with close attention. He had changed notably; in particular he was no longer the man I had first seen in the hotel bar, using words like ‘Idiot’ and ‘Animal’, losing his temper, flogging a sodden brain and still failing to find the right phrase. Of course, over the last few hours the liquor had ebbed away, but this was more than a sobering-up. In some way he had been purified.
Pain seemed to have brought him to his senses, and his senses were delicate and subtle. A drunken babbling old man no longer lived in that frail body; he had been exorcized, and in his place was another man, old and wise, who had an important story to tell, and who could tell it skilfully, in exactly the way it should be told. Whether it was an effort for him, I did not know, any more than I knew how long he had to live. But if he knew how long, the knowledge might be the spur, the agent of precision.
His voice was thin and reedy, and sometimes it paused and sometimes it faltered. But one forgot the man, very soon. Like the best of the boxing referees, one hardly realized he was there at all. He did not come between us and the facts; the facts stood revealed under a naked light, on the very apron of a fantastic stage.
Nearly a quarter of a century earlier (said the old man) he had come to this part of the world for the first time. He had been, of all things, a ship’s doctor, for a company which ran small freighters from Liverpool and Bristol to the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States. It was not a good company. Its ships were old, patched up, disgracefully staggering to and fro on their last sea legs. Always there came a day when they finally refused duty, and whenever and wherever that happened, they were sold as scrap or left to rot.
Shepherd’s last ship chose the port of Churchill, on the western side of Hudson Bay, for her everlasting graveyard. She had suffered a prolonged engine breakdown; winter caught her and she was iced in; the ancient hull failed under pressure, and began to fall to pieces at the quayside. There were claims and counter-claims, a bankruptcy, an insurance wrangle, a repudiation of liability; far from home, the crew was orphaned and abandoned. Most of them, cared for with that special public generosity which sailors can count on, all the way round the globe, found their way back to England. Shepherd stayed where he was.
He had been a doctor by accident; it was the most recent of many careers; he was fifty years of age; he could still, he felt, be anything or nothing. In the spring he began to wander, north and north-west, turning his hand to any odd job that came along – construction, prospecting, trapping, fishing, guiding; living with the Eskimos, or by himself, learning his way about. He was looking for something. As long as he did not know what it was, he need not acknowledge failure, and thus was happy.
‘Part of it was probably the so-called “lost mine”,’ he admitted, almost shamefacedly. ‘Or the hidden valley, like Shangri-La, when you climb a mountain, and descend a glacier, and find yourself suddenly in a secret garden of trees, grassland, flowers, temperatures of seventy and eighty degrees … There are many such legends. They persist and they do no harm.’
He did not find his fabulous lost mine; he never stumbled into Eden. Colder climates, harsher journeys, beckoned him again; the pride of manhood had then been very strong. He crossed the Hudson Strait into Baffin Island, and the shores of Foxe Basin. He pushed further northwards, sometimes with other wanderers, sometimes alone; by now he was an expert at staying alive in this hardest of countries. He passed the far-off spine of mountains which were the crown of Baffin. He reached the northern tip of the island. He joined some Eskimos in a whaleboat, crossing to Bylot Island. Then there was a quarrel, and he was alone again.
Bylot was then an empty land, most desolate, topped by the noble peak of Mount Thule, more than six thousand feet nearer Heaven. Somehow he wintered there, the worst winter of his life. When spring came, and he felt strong again, he began to look about him.
Throughout that long winter, he had constantly been attracted by a faraway mountain of ice, not part of Mount Thule, but towering by itself on the northern coast. It was one of several, like a line of distant white battlements. Their shapes were serenely perfect, as if they had been hand-sculptured – though the hand was Time itself, and the span of the hand might have been a million years. Shepherd set out to take a closer look; he lost his way in a three-day snow blizzard, and when the weather cleared, he was high above sea level and had reached the base of one of the ice castles – he was not sure which.
One wall of it seemed to have been eroded; there were climatic changes hereabouts which, over an enormous number of years, were doing unpredictable things in the Arctic. In this case, a slope of the ice-cap had melted, leaving bare a natural pathway leading to a breach in the ice wall. Shepherd took the curved pathway, because it was easier and he needed rest and shelter.
When he turned the last corner, he met a man.
‘Oh, a dead man,’ said Shepherd, answering my astonished look. ‘He was standing on guard before the breach in the ice wall; leaning back against one side of it, frozen there for ever.’
‘Was he an Eskimo?’ I asked. It was the first time I had interrupted.
‘No. Not an Eskimo. Very different, facially. He was small and dark. And naked.’
‘Naked? In that cold?’
‘This man did not need clothes … Have you ever seen an armadillo?’
‘Yes.’
Well, the small man had been like an armadillo; his skin was scaly, but perfectly armoured and jointed. He seemed to have been frozen, not by death but by horror or amazement; his eyes were narrowed, and his hand was up to protect them – as if he had seen some hideous burst of light on the far horizon. Shepherd had the clear impression that he had walked out of the breach in the wall, and straight into a shock wave which, baulked by a mountain, could strike a man dead.
Or it might have been, he thought, some kind of selective weapon which took care of human beings, and also took care – in another sense – of their property. At any rate, the scaly man was dead, and the ice castle he guarded was intact.
Shepherd, whose nerves had been toughened by solitude, edged past the dead man and moved inside. He found himself in a small rock chamber which must have served as a kind of guardroom, for there were the scaly man’s companions – six of them, seated on a bench at a long table, frozen in the same bizarre way. They sat in graded attitudes of wakefulness, ranging from the man nearest the door, whose fists were on the table as if he had been rising in alarm, to the man furthest away, his head still sleepily sunk in his hands. Even the faces they showed were carefully graduated; the nearest man was full face, the last man in profile. It must all have happened in a few seconds of time. The man standing at the doorway, perhaps, had been the most alert of this unearthly crew.
It was not dark inside, though the guardroom was windowless; as Shepherd moved, something – probably his body heat – triggered an eerie glow from the floor, which was of some opaque material like roughened fibreglass. The same thing happened when he walked past the dead guards, and into the room beyond. But the room beyond was truly fantastic.
He found himself inside a vast hollow mountain of iced rock, an arched cathedral literally miles long. It was clear, immediately, what the place was; a huge refrigerator crammed with food. It was constructed on many floors; its bays stretched away into the darkness, though once again, as Shepherd walked forward, the floor lights came on in a thirty-foot circle all round him, and a corresponding light answered from the roof. The bays were so immense that he never reached the end even of one of them; he estimated them to be at least ten miles long. He guessed that the place was lit, and powered, by solar heat. There was a fleet of enormous trackless trolleys which began to move when he stepped on them; they moved in whichever direction he was facing. Whole storeys changed position, up or down, as soon as a hand was stretched out.
Of course, he did not discover this all at once; it took endless experiment before he had mastered the control system – or even part of it.
‘I spent hours – days – practising with the various mechanisms,’ he said. ‘It was like playing trains – with trains. It took me a long time to notice that the trolleys moved faster when I spread my feet apart. Then I discovered that whichever floor – well, they were huge shelves, really – whichever shelf I pointed at directly, with a straight arm, came down noiselessly to my own level, for unloading on to the trolleys. Then when the trolley moved away, the whole system of shelving went back to its normal position. It was immensely ingenious. We certainly could not match it at our present stage.’
He constantly stressed this – that the place reflected a technological standard far in advance of our own. And if other proof of an incredible antiquity were needed, it was in the food itself.
Some of it was modern, in the sense that it could be recognized; other categories could only be guessed at; the endless galleries of ancient yet sophisticated food, in this whole city of provisions, continued to astonish him, wherever he explored. There were jars of oil and wine. There were towering silos of some kind of grain. There were millions of loaves of bread on racks. There were tubs of pressed meat. There were huge carcasses, birds and animals of unknown shape – he noticed one vaguely like a mammoth, but with a great flaring snout instead of a trunk; another like a hen, but a hen as big as an ostrich, with four wings and four legs. (‘Like the bumble-bee,’ said Shepherd with a faint smile, ‘it was aerodynamically impossible.’) There were acres and acres of fish the size of fat cattle, very carefully graded in weight and perhaps in quality; he guessed that they were part of a controlled herd, probably grazed under water on beds of kelp.
‘I found that idea heartening,’ he said in parenthesis. ‘Because it was so promising for our own future. These people seemed to have tapped the riches of the sea, and brought them under control, as we control the soil now. Those fish had been bred and raised in underwater pastures … There were other things, concentrates, from the same area.’ He smiled again. ‘I thought I was very brave when I ate some.’
A question was irresistible. ‘What did it taste like?’
‘Seaweed. But a mouthful of it satisfied my hunger for a whole day.’
Now, it seemed, he was nearing the end of his account; his voice was weakening, and his face grey with exhaustion. At one point he appeared to have fallen asleep, and we had to wait many minutes until, unprompted, he took up his story again.
He spent more than two months in the great ice box; exploring, mapping, taking notes, making sketches. He never discovered how these stores were listed or labelled; he saw no writing of any kind, but there was a large number of soft-metal plaques set into the floor, each bearing a certain number of indentations arranged in various shapes. It was possible that this was some kind of card index system, which an expert could read at a glance. The only human bodies he discovered were those of the original seven men; he thought it probable that there were other entrances and other guardrooms, which he did not reach.
The ice mountain was on the very edge of the coast, but there were no traces of any harbour installation. However, the water level had dropped more than a thousand feet, bearing, over the centuries, everything movable with it. Shepherd conjectured that outside distribution might have been by air, handled from launching platforms on the ice. He spent weeks of pondering on such riddles; considering the intricacies of the ice box, it did not seem that the men who could build an instrument of such complexity would have any difficulty in solving their logistical problems.
‘I found it very sad to leave,’ he said towards the end. His voice had slowed, and sunk to a murmur. ‘The place had an unbelievable fascination, even though to be alone in its vastness seemed to reduce me to the status of a pigmy – a jungle pigmy in a terrifying urban canyon. I wanted to grow, to master it, and to enjoy it for ever … But I had to remind myself that there were problems which twentieth-century man had not yet solved – such as getting home again in an Arctic winter. And of course I was wildly impatient to tell the world about it … On the last day I made up a package, as much as I dared carry, of some of the smaller items. I had a last run on one of the trolleys, up to the outer doorway. Then it was time to go.
‘As I left, I touched the shoulder of the small scaly man, for luck. How I longed to question him … I needed luck, I can tell you, on that journey back.’
He paused now for a long time. His eyes were closed. When he opened them, he was staring directly at me.
‘You see what this means, don’t you? It is a clear warning from the past. It means that there was a sophisticated world, of applied science, millions of years ago, which all but vanished. There can be no other explanation. That world reached at least the same stage as we have now, and then it destroyed itself. Why? Because it discovered more than it knew how to use. So have we. It happened then, and it can happen now, unless we retreat from it. Like them, we have only one more step to take.’
I was stupid with prolonged concentration, and lack of sleep. ‘What happened then, exactly?’
He muttered, almost testily: ‘I told you – the last of their wars, and the end of the world.’
Then he fell silent again. Presently his breathing grew deeper, and his head fell to one side, and he was at last at rest.
It was dawn when I stood up; the pale light, falling on the bed, showed the old man’s hands paper-thin on top of the blanket, and his face sunken and deeply lined. He would talk no more that night. I stretched, and found that my whole body was aching; my head fluttered emptily, and then, a moment afterwards, felt as if it would burst if it were burdened with a single thought more. I wanted to live some time, very quietly, with this story before I came to grips with it.
Mary said two things to me, in farewell. One was: ‘I will stay, and watch,’ and the other: ‘You must believe him, Peter.’ The last appeal, in a voice as small as conscience, followed me as I went stiffly down the stairs, and out into the brilliant cold.