"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
One must rise early to see the day ascend over the ice floe’s horizon, at the hour when the sun of the southern latitudes spreads paths onto the sea in the distance. Miss Jane carried her parasol, I an elegant double-barreled shotgun. At every glacier gorge, we’d kiss in the mint crevasses and take pleasure in lingering to see the fiery sun carve a path through a lacework of glittering ice. We liked to walk along the shore where, the cliff breathing steadily with the tide, the sea’s soft, thick rolling predisposed us to love. The waves beat against the walls of blue and green snow, and threw giant crystal flowers at our feet in the coves, but the day’s approach was especially perceptible on that faint hem of phosphorus that lined the scallops of the waves’ crests, as when capital cities set sail at night on the stillness of high seas. At the Cape of Devastation, in the fissures of ice, grew edelweiss the color of midnight blue, and we were always sure to see, day after day, a fresh supply of those seabird eggs that Jane believed could brighten one’s complexion. It was a daily rite for me to repeat Jane’s words on her mouth, as if to gather them with my lips. Sometimes the clouds concealing the cliff’s foot announced an overcast sky for the afternoon, and Jane asked in a small voice whether I’d taken care to wrap the Cheshire cheese sandwiches. Eventually the cliff grew higher and chalky from the sun: that was Desolation Peak, and on Jane’s signal I spread the blanket over the fresh snow. We lay there a long while, listening to the sea’s wild horses beating their chests in the icy caves. The horizon of the open sea was a diamond blue semicircle submerging a wall of ice, where sometimes a flake of vapor emerged, protruding from the sea like a white sail—and Jane recited Lermontov to me. I could have spent entire afternoons there, my hand in hers, following the cawing of seabirds, and tossing chunks of ice into the chasm and listening to them fall, while Jane counted the seconds, sticking out her tongue in concentration like a schoolgirl. Then we embraced each other for so long and so tightly that a single channel narrower than a baby’s cradle formed in the melted snow, and when we got back up, the blanket among the white knolls brought to mind those Asian mules that descend from mountains laden with snow.
Then the sea’s blue deepened and the cliff turned purple; it was the hour when the evening’s sudden cold detaches from the ice floe those crystal castles that crumble into a dust of ice with the sound of a bursting world, turning over, under a blue wave’s gigantic scroll, the belly of a liner with dark algae in its cracks, or the heavy snorting of swimming plesiosaurs. For us alone there grew brighter and brighter, up to the edge of the horizon, that apocalyptic cannonade like a Waterloo of solitudes—and, for a long time, the freezing night, in the great silence, was punctured by distant ghosts gushing forth from tall, white-feather geysers—but I had already squeezed Jane’s icy hand in mine, and we were coming back to the light of pure Antarctic stars.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang