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Authors: Georgina Harding
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endeavour to occupy myself and as I await the Lord's compassion I have repaired my clothes and
made the heels for fifty pairs of shoes. Two or three times a day I cast myself down in prayer. I pray to the Lord that He
may hold me sane as well as alive until I shall see His blessed sun again, that He will hold me to this Earth, for there are
moments when delusions and dreams come to me more vividly than my actuality.
He writes this and knows that what he writes is not the full truth. But is a man's diary ever the truth? Isn't it always an
invention, an idea of a possible truth which he uses to control his understanding of himself? He dips his pen again into the
ink that he keeps warm by the edge of the stove.
The truth is that the hardest thing to bear through these frozen days has not been the dreams but the absence of them. The
loneliness. He remembers how it was in his illness, how she came to him and slept by him and was a comfort to him. She has
not come to him again since the storm began, since that moment when she stood out there beside him beneath the sky.
A short time before the onset of this storm I beheld a most amazing display of lights in the heavens. They appeared high above
the northwest horizon and played until the very zenith of the sky was lit with shooting rays of fiery colours such as I had
not seen before. No sooner had these vanished and I myself returned and closed myself within the fastness of the tent than
there came a rush of sound and the wind began its awful howling. As I had seen no other indication I begin now to wonder whether
this very phenomenon of the lights may not have been a harbinger of the weather that was to come.
He writes at the table with the light beside him, puts his pen once more to the ink and sees in the corner of his eye the
movement of a shadow against the wall. He looks up, but there is nothing there. The effect can only have been due to the movement
of his own arm across the light. He reaches again, experimentally repeating his previous action, and there it is, the same
dim shudder. He feels a touch light on his head, but it is no more than a flake of ash that has detached from the chimney.
He puts a hand to his eyes for a moment's rest, but pulls it away and opens them sharply, thinking that he has heard the rustle
of her skirt in the sound of the flames.
He opens his door at last, clambers up over driven snow. Every surface reflects the moonlight, white and smoothed as the wind
has left it, the form of the tent gone into a dune, the boilers, the two remaining shallops, every mark of the whalers erased,
his footprints gone from the ground. There was a path he had made to a pool far along the beach where water still ran from
beneath the glacier and since the beginning of winter he had been able to break through the ice. It is quite lost now, the
landmarks about it eerily altered. He sees that he will not find the spot again but must melt snow for his drinking until
the ice itself begins to thaw. He brings out a half-barrel and fills it, ramming his shovel against the hard crust.
The aurora that appears as he works comes without colour or pulsation. He perceives only an increase in the light about him
and looks up to see white shining clouds in the sky. Like high cumulus, he thinks, soft and woolly like lambs, but they come
and go without pattern, without wind to drive them. And before he turns his eyes back to the ground he sees that she is standing
not twenty yards off where the beach merges with the ice.
The air is cold enough to pain his nostrils and freeze a rime on his beard and yet she has only a shawl wrapped about her
jacket and her hands tucked into it as into a muff.
'With the baby,' she says, 'I am always warm. It is like a stove within me.' And she is big like a stove and he puts his hand
to her so that it might warm him too.
And then she walks off ahead of him and he follows, leaving a single line of new footprints in the
made the heels for fifty pairs of shoes. Two or three times a day I cast myself down in prayer. I pray to the Lord that He
may hold me sane as well as alive until I shall see His blessed sun again, that He will hold me to this Earth, for there are
moments when delusions and dreams come to me more vividly than my actuality.
He writes this and knows that what he writes is not the full truth. But is a man's diary ever the truth? Isn't it always an
invention, an idea of a possible truth which he uses to control his understanding of himself? He dips his pen again into the
ink that he keeps warm by the edge of the stove.
The truth is that the hardest thing to bear through these frozen days has not been the dreams but the absence of them. The
loneliness. He remembers how it was in his illness, how she came to him and slept by him and was a comfort to him. She has
not come to him again since the storm began, since that moment when she stood out there beside him beneath the sky.
A short time before the onset of this storm I beheld a most amazing display of lights in the heavens. They appeared high above
the northwest horizon and played until the very zenith of the sky was lit with shooting rays of fiery colours such as I had
not seen before. No sooner had these vanished and I myself returned and closed myself within the fastness of the tent than
there came a rush of sound and the wind began its awful howling. As I had seen no other indication I begin now to wonder whether
this very phenomenon of the lights may not have been a harbinger of the weather that was to come.
He writes at the table with the light beside him, puts his pen once more to the ink and sees in the corner of his eye the
movement of a shadow against the wall. He looks up, but there is nothing there. The effect can only have been due to the movement
of his own arm across the light. He reaches again, experimentally repeating his previous action, and there it is, the same
dim shudder. He feels a touch light on his head, but it is no more than a flake of ash that has detached from the chimney.
He puts a hand to his eyes for a moment's rest, but pulls it away and opens them sharply, thinking that he has heard the rustle
of her skirt in the sound of the flames.
He opens his door at last, clambers up over driven snow. Every surface reflects the moonlight, white and smoothed as the wind
has left it, the form of the tent gone into a dune, the boilers, the two remaining shallops, every mark of the whalers erased,
his footprints gone from the ground. There was a path he had made to a pool far along the beach where water still ran from
beneath the glacier and since the beginning of winter he had been able to break through the ice. It is quite lost now, the
landmarks about it eerily altered. He sees that he will not find the spot again but must melt snow for his drinking until
the ice itself begins to thaw. He brings out a half-barrel and fills it, ramming his shovel against the hard crust.
The aurora that appears as he works comes without colour or pulsation. He perceives only an increase in the light about him
and looks up to see white shining clouds in the sky. Like high cumulus, he thinks, soft and woolly like lambs, but they come
and go without pattern, without wind to drive them. And before he turns his eyes back to the ground he sees that she is standing
not twenty yards off where the beach merges with the ice.
The air is cold enough to pain his nostrils and freeze a rime on his beard and yet she has only a shawl wrapped about her
jacket and her hands tucked into it as into a muff.
'With the baby,' she says, 'I am always warm. It is like a stove within me.' And she is big like a stove and he puts his hand
to her so that it might warm him too.
And then she walks off ahead of him and he follows, leaving a single line of new footprints in the
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