Up the snow-choked gorges went tracks of musk-oxen as of foot-dragging skiers. I felt trapped and gloomy. The wind had not come yet. At eleven in the morning the world was blue and white and perfect with hard-snowed clarity — the reification of some extreme ideal. The whole island, vast and by temperate standards almost lifeless, was in effect its own planet, low, blue, white, and brown, the horizon often no more than knee-high, so that heaven was all around. A realm of the Platonic Forms might be thus. I seemed to see nothing but solidified space without a predicate. It was a blank page of all possibilities, not excluding loveliness and terror. Absolute potentiality was a very wearisome thing to any imperfect being (such as myself) which crawled across the gravel flats. By now my companion and I had come a considerable distance from the coast. The Arctic Ocean having vanished from sight, we were left with only a cold and ugly river to follow. Muddy canyons grooved the land with dreariness. But a new force, no less inhuman, was entering the realm. I could feel it and did not know whether to fear it. My companion said nothing.
By eleven-thirty mist had covered the sky, except for a blue-gray line at the horizon. Lenticular clouds rushed at right angles to the ridges.
There was a white plateau (although it was not really a plateau; it was a river-edged valley, but because there was snow on it I could not see any difference between floor and wall anymore), and above the plateau was a thin blue smudge of sky, and above the sky was a white plateau of cloud with its own humps and mounds and appendages; there was nothing else.
A breeze began to deaden my fingers inside the mitts.
How are your gloves holding up? I asked my friend.
Not bad, really. — He was stretching out socks over the gas stove. — There's a couple of dry spots here, he said.
The wind increased.
My friend got into his sleeping bag, unzipped the vestibule door and lit a cigarette. — Kind of a much different day from when we got up, he said. Looks like it must be melting out there. Or it may just be the way the light changed.
An hour later, when the wind began in earnest, the shriekings of it precluded sleep. The tent-poles bent, quivered and lashed, and the tent bulged concave and convex, while snow blew up from the ground and worked itself into shifting patterns of continents between tent and fly, constantly changing and scattering like the harvest of a kaleidoscope. Ice from condensation rattled down on our sleeping bags. Somewhere in the storm could be heard the loud and regular cries of a seagull.
Suddenly I knew that there was something for me in the wind but I did not have the courage to take it. Thus the wind was but the increase of my despair. My heart stumbled into the deep wide ditches of tundra polygons treacherously covered by snow.
In the end I did sleep, and I dreamed. When I awoke, my companion was still sleeping uneasily. Everything was quiet. I unzipped the tent flap. Outside, the country was magically white and clean. The land had been scoured down to brownness in great long tracks across the valley; elsewhere the snow was neatly raked into drifts, mound after mound of them, and the river stones were black and white. A fierce white light hung above the ridges.
I'd dreamed that I walked up a round ridge-mound into a cloud, and the wind got stronger and stronger and threw sleet in my face so that I grinned and ducked my head and climbed so happily; then the wind threw sharp ice-crystals into my face and pushed me; and I staggered but outspread my arms like flapping wings, joking with the wind. Gaining the summit, a wide upturned bowl of snowdrifts and tan pebbles, I turned myself around so that I was looking back the way I had come, with the wind at my back; the wind became mine. I felt the steady eager thrumming of it between my shoulderblades, pressing at my back and legs with unerring force.
Below me, corkscrew trails of snow whirled across the plain and fogged the ridges. They blew across the land like parallel wave-crests. The fjord also flowed in that direction; the wind was pushing it, wind-ripples greenish-grayish-gold.
I raised my arms to my shoulders, and opened them wide. I laughed as the wind lifted me under the armpits and bore me up into the blue sky, where the clouds floated like drifts of ice. I flew far.
I came to a place where the ice was gray but gold-bordered. It seemed to glow from beneath. On the white snow-beach I saw the black silhouette of a woman, with white fur-ruff around her face.
