[The rifles] by Vollmann William T

Author:Vollmann, William T
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Franklin, John, Sir, 1786-1847, British, Discoveries in geography, Explorers, Inuit, Historical fiction
Publisher: [New York] : Viking
Published: 1994-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

and then the next day M r Franklin directed them to haul the boats over each bow so that they could roll them on the young ice and crush it, which was most expeditiously done, and so they made three hundred yards, heaving and boring, humping and thumping, and then found another lead that carried them two miles to another hole of clear water in which the two ships could swim like trapped minnows; M r Franklin commanded them to tack about every quarter-hour, in order to avoid being frozen in; and the next day the ice was thick enough for the men to walk on, cutting a channel with saws, and M r Franklin watched them without much interest through his spy-glass; he fixed the lens on the Finnlander Kid, whose hair was plastered to his forehead in a manner perpetually wet; he was surprisingly intellectual-lipped (thought M r Franklin); with his clear eyes, thin brows, he might yet make something of himself ... and the Finnlander Kid was at Seth's shoulder while Seth worked the saw into the ice, and the Finnlander Kid was talking about how he'd wandered Russian America, sneaking into Esquimau cemeteries, looking for ivory carvings and deathmasks of Ipiutak skeletons in gravel beaches, and Seth shrugged and kept sawing and the Finnlander Kid said: want to see one? and Seth declined but the Finnlander Kid laughed like a bird and said: yes, you do! and Seth kept sawing and the Finnlander Kid pretended to help him and M r Fitzjames sang out: that's the way, lads! and the Finnlander Kid said: deathmask of death I defend my skeleton-soul - at which Seth, brooding, frowning, stern, intense, looked him in the face and indeed saw the fellow's skull like a rounded diamond of walrus ivory, incised with eye-slits and a mouth-slit and slanted nostril-slits, but even then Seth wasn't afraid because he understood that it was right for the Finnlander Kid to be a skull; the Finnlander Kid's soul was clean like a new shotgun; and so they came again into a great lake of open water which they thought must be the sea, and the men cheered. Under all studding sail they made progress deeper into their Northwest Passage; ahead lay another ice-blink. - Yes, my dear boy, he said to Fitzjames, the climate is like this in Van Diemen's Land. In 'forty-one, when I was Governor, Sir James and I went on a tour of the fossil forest ... - Ice ahead! cried the lookout. Now fog stroked them. M r Franklin gave the order to proceed under moderate sail, in order to avoid being separated from the Terror. As the fog condensed more heavily, the sisters began speaking to one another with rifles, in order to avoid any collision, and the heavy air devoured the echoes like meat and the breeze freshened until they had to reef their foresails, and then the breeze died down and M r Franklin was saying: My wife was present, too.

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