The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure (4 page)

I need not have worried that Brown would be taciturn. He was a gentleman but not one of the stuffy sort. He was more like the sporting gentlemen who talk avidly about the fancy to anyone without regard for social distinctions. Brown soon engrossed me in his story of the Antarctic expedition. I drank it in and tried to remember to ask questions and make notes when I could. There was a good buzz of conversation around us, and I had little concern about being overheard.

“He knew how to keep morale up and jolly us all along,” mused Brown. “Always starting a round of songs or games, or story-telling. And poetry, too—he could quote reams of the stuff, mainly Browning. ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp’ and that... he wouldn’t put up with gloom.”

“Did he ever talk about fossils?” I asked.

“Fossils? He wasn't much interested in that sort of science stuff.”

“Not even if it meant important new discoveries?”

“That wasn't his idea of discovery! The Boss wanted lost cities and palaces piled high with treasures. King Solomon's Mines were more in his line. I suppose he might have been satisfied with a valley full of dinosaurs, if we could have brought a few of them back alive.” Brown’s mouth twitched into a smile. “As I recall, he tried to tell us there were giant pterodactyls nesting in the crater of Mount Erebus.”

“He actually told you that?” I asked, bemused.

“I imagine they were just albatross, but you needed field glasses to tell. Oh yes, the Boss would spin six impossible stories before breakfast. He was a great one for tall tales and practical jokes. Ribbing us about penguins that talked like parrots, or saying to look out for ice goblins. You know he once came limping back from a seal hunt, covered in blood, saying he'd been mauled half to death by a sea elephant? Of course it was just seal blood he’d smeared all over himself, but he didn’t half give us a fright.”

“Wasn't it confusing, never knowing what you could believe?”

“It was part and parcel of his magic. With him, you always believed that the fantastic might just happen.” He took a swig of beer. “Polar expeditions are always against the odds. A realist would give up before he started. But a man like the Boss… it's men like him who make it to impossible places, even when the others are saying it can't be done.”

“But he was a practical man—”

Brown laughed and slapped the table. “He was never practical! His schemes never worked out, like those ridiculous motor sledges. He never mastered driving dogs or even skiing, or anything technical. He was brilliant at improvisation, though. Give him a piece of rope, a broken chisel, and a banjo, and he’d lead an expedition over the Himalayas. And the banjo would be the important thing. He jollied us all along with promises of the riches of Fata Morgana—”

“Of what?”

“Fata Morgana. A fairy city of spires and towers in the distance you see quite often down South. It's an optical illusion, caused by refraction off seawater or ice or something.  It can make whole phantom mountain ranges. The Boss could tell you all about it. The Arabs call it the City of Genies, I remember that.”

“‘A beautiful dazzling city of cathedral domes, spires and minarets,’” I quoted, to show I knew what he was talking about. Only his pronunciation of the name Fata Morgana, which I had not heard spoken aloud before, had confused me. “But surely there can’t be any cities there?”

“Who knows? The Boss said there was a genuine Fata Morgana, and that the mirages were projections of it—like seeing an oasis from dozens of miles away.”

“The Antarctic seems like an unlikely place for a treasure hunt.”

“The Boss didn't think so. He loved treasure hunts. He once hid his mother’s jewellery in the garden shed and had the whole family looking for it… but as he said, thousands of people had been hunting for the hoard left by Alaric the Goth after he sacked Rome, and the Crown Jewels that King John lost in the Wash. But nobody else had ever searched the Antarctic before us.”

“But there’s nothing but ice and snow…”

“Now, maybe, but in ages past… you should have heard him on the subject! He was full of Celtic legends and ancient manuscripts. Ever hear of the Piri Reis map? A Turkish admiral pieced it together in the sixteenth century, from maps older than Noah. It shows the coastline of Antarctica, hundreds of years before Europeans set foot there, with trees and animals. The Boss said he'd studied it and there were some marks worth investigating.”

“I don't think he ever mentioned anything like that in his book.”

“He always knew the right story for the person he was talking to,” said Brown. “And he charmed thousands of pounds out of the backers, when you or I couldn't get sixpence.”

I went to the bar for two more pints. At the mention of money, I could not help but notice Brown’s own condition. His shortage of funds was not temporary. His woollen sweater, like his greatcoat, was showing its age, and his shoes had been mended more than a few times. Nothing about him spoke of prosperity, and he drank his beer as though he had not tasted its nectar in years. Life was not simple for ex-explorers.

A man with a distinctive unkempt beard was drinking alone in the next booth. I did not know him, but I had seen him before.
Is he listening to us?

“Even if you reached your Fata Morgana,” I said, placing a mug in front of Brown, “even if it had tombs as rich as Tutankhamen’s, and they were intact, and you managed to break into one... you wouldn't be able to carry out much on a sled.” I could not recall my exact calculations on the amount of gold an Antarctic explorer could carry, but they were in my notebook. “And as soon as the place was known, you couldn't stop others from coming afterward and there being a free-for-all.”

“That was one of the Boss's favourite riddles. Suppose we did reach Fata Morgana itself, and we found the treasure room in the royal palace—piles and piles of loot—and you could only take out what you could carry. What would you have? He had us talking about that for days.”

I scratched my chin. This sort of exercise requires a special type of imagination. Sir Ernest had it to excess, but I am perhaps deficient. I tried to see myself in some treasure room, like the colour plate in the
Arabian Nights
book I read as a boy. “I supposed I’d fill my pockets with gems and jewels.”

“But how would you know if they were real ones or paste?” Brown smiled. “That's what the Boss always said. How would you know if they were stones that were valuable to the ancients but worthless these days, like quartz or coloured glass?”

I have some skill in valuation, but jewellery is a specialist’s job. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully, not wishing to appear foolish.

“If it’s a necklace with stones as big as grapes then it's bound to be costume stuff,” Brown went on. “Ever seen the Crown Jewels in the Tower? They’re not half as impressive as the stones the girls wear in Shaftesbury Avenue shows. How do you tell?”

“Well, I don't know much about gemstones. What's the answer?”

“Oh, you don't get out of it that easy.” He laughed, enjoying the game. “The Boss would string us out with this sort of thing for hours, days. What about works of art, eh? What about priceless books? Portable wealth... we'd spend whole evenings arguing about it, and about what we'd spend the money on afterwards. The Boss knew how to keep us going. It's funny, but even though you know the whole thing is one of his fantasies, you do get to thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

Brown was looking at the wall, but I imagined he was seeing a perfectly white landscape stretching endless out under a blue sky. Just him and two dozen others, the only humans for a hundred miles. Looking at the ice ridges and dunes and the deep crevasses that led down to the ancient bedrock far below. “Thinking if maybe there wasn't just some possibility you would find a lost city there. That maybe the Boss did know something about it, and maybe some of the others on earlier expeditions. Perhaps not every Fata Morgana was an optical illusion after all...” He looked up suddenly. “Crazy dreams, when you say them out loud in a place like this. But it's surprising what keeps you going in places like that.”

“I can't imagine what it was like.”

“Fresh fruit, that was an obsession of mine. I kept thinking we might find a greenhouse with oranges and pineapples and bananas growing in it—you know, there were days when that would have been more valuable to me than all the gold in the world, just to taste fresh fruit again. Sometimes the sunlight would catch sheet ice that had been swept clean by the wind, and the Boss would say ‘Look there, I think it might be one of Brown’s greenhouses up ahead!’ He laughed and shook his head. “He was always the first to spot anything.”

I did not see how it could be a happy memory, how he could look back with nostalgia to the bitter cold, the deprivation, the constant exhaustion, all the pains and sufferings of an Antarctic expedition. But he smiled as fondly as though it had been a week at the seaside.

A vendor was doing the rounds with a tray of jellied eels, and I bought two pots. Brown fell on his and devoured it with such gusto that I ordered a couple of savoury pies from a second vendor to go with them. As Brown ate, I looked through my notebook, scavenging for some scrap I could try him on. “There’s a puzzling remark of Sir Ernest’s here,” I said. “About how ‘future explorers will doubtless carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes’ and be fed by radio waves. What does it mean?”

“Another of the Boss’s fancies.” Brown shrugged. “He said we would be the last generation that could explore before the aeroplanes and airships covered the globe.”

“Do you know what he was doing when he died?”

“It was his great final expedition, his swan-song. He wanted to go back south one last time.”

“For what purpose?”

“Coastal mapping, looking for lost islands. That was the official reason. He wasn't aiming for the Pole, I know that. He said he never had any interest in it.”

“Might he have been returning to a treasure hoard?”

“Who knows?” Brown shook his head and smiled. “With the Boss, who knows? He always said he'd die at forty-eight; a Gipsy told him once. I thought it was another of his stories, but his heart gave out just like that.” His gaze fell on the clock above the bar. “Good Lord, is that the time? I’d better shoot off.”

As we shook hands, Brown leaned closer and looked me in the eye. “Look here, Stubbs. You’re a decent chap and all that. You know a fellow can’t betray a confidence. If you do find anything—and I don’t say there’s anything to be found—just you remember what they say about sleeping dogs.”

“What do you—”

Brown turned on his heel and was off, whistling into the night on the long walk to catch his train. He left me to order another pint and jot down notes on our conversation. I could tell his warning was deadly serious, but the meaning was opaque.

I could still feel his hand, the hand that had shaken Sir Ernest's, in mine. Indeed, the hand that might have embraced Sir Ernest, for the men slept in each others’ arms to keep off the worst of the cold. Imagine that.

Brown was poor in material things but rich in spirit. I did not doubt he would find a place on an expedition up the Amazon or some such soon enough. His appetite for life was undimmed. Not like that wretch Armydale, who killed himself in Australia. Armydale had been a rich man with a wife and children. For some reason, he found life unbearable after he returned from the expedition. One evening he went to his club, put on his dress uniform, and shot himself.

There was no sign of the man with the bushy beard, but I observed a group of strangers in one booth. Their accents betrayed them as Irish labourers, not unusual. One finds groups of them everywhere, staying in the area for a few days or a few weeks, digging holes or working on construction sites. Some English folk take against them, but we don't have much trouble around these parts.

When I got up to leave, the Irish were smart about following suit. By the time I had wished goodnight to the barmaid and a few other acquaintances, they were already out the door.

Thirty yards from the pub, the pavement turns and widens, and there are iron railings on one side. The four Irish were waiting for me there, ranged across the pavement. They had adopted combative stances, and there was no mistaking their intention. The night air was very cold, and they exhaled plumes of steam like racehorses ready for the off.

“Mr Harry Stubbs,” said one, the Irish brogue loud and clear. “We'd be wanting a word with you.”

I looked along the row. One young fellow was almost my size, but the others were not in the same weight class. Clothes made the judgement difficult, but I placed the big fellow as a good heavyweight at sixteen stone, one a light heavyweight of about twelve stone, a welterweight of eleven stone, and another who might have been a lightweight. Obviously, size and weight are not the only considerations. Plenty of boxers have beaten men in a heavier class than their own, but for a trained fighter, weight counts for a good deal. I am about as big a size as heavyweights run to without being ungainly. I rolled my shoulders and flexed my arms.

“Will you look at the size of the fooker,” muttered the welterweight.

I was in high good humour. A gallon of good English beer was singing through my veins. I would never back away from a fight. I removed my bowler and hung it on the iron railings next to me as though on a hat rack. “Gentlemen,” I declared, unbuttoning my coat. “I am a working man myself. And I do believe you have taken money to do a job tonight.” I hung the coat by my hat and unbuttoned my stiff collar. They were hanging back, a picture of irresolution. The air felt fresh and clean. “Well then,” I said cheerfully. “Let us go to our work.”

You may say that I should have called for help or run back—the pub was just a few steps away, and if I had run, they could not have caught me before I got to the door. But I was feeling very well indeed. What lawyer’s clerk does not feel a surge of excitement when he can finally break free from pen pushing? Who does not long to meet a problem he can solve by punching it?

“Only fools and dogs fight for no money,” Sergeant Eagleton, my Army trainer, once told me. But there’s no sense in having two good fists if you never use them.