‘What!’
The captain snaps out of a kind of waking dream, his fingers bury themselves in the leather of the chair’s arms, his legs twitch involuntarily and drops of cold sweat break out on his temples.
32°W 51°S
‘DYNAMOES ON FULL POWER! DYNAMOES ON FULL POWER!’ roars the captain into the telephone, but nobody in the engine room answers.
There is nobody in the engine room.
Guðmundur Berndsen throws the telephone away and straps himself tightly to the leather chair.
Outside the sea has got rough and the only thing the captain can do is drive the ship into the waves by using the electrically driven bow thruster.
‘Great God above!’
The captain battles heroically against the forces of nature, which in this part of the world are associated with Cape Horn, Drake’s Passage and Antarctic winds. He is, of course, very fearful as to the fate of the ship and its crew, but while he struggles with these ancient enemies of all seafarers, his mind empties of all thought.
A hero’s death is a good deal more acceptable than insanity, suicide or starvation.
The waves break over the ship, which shudders all along its length. He can see virtually nothing through the windows, the wind screams like a siren, the bow cleaves the waves and the weather deck is more or less underwater.
33°W 66°S
The ship…
The ship is still moving, damaged, rusty, weather-beaten yet afloat, though the hold is half full of water that has forced its way under the hatches. The only thing that has changed is that it no longer lists to starboard but has rolled over to port. The bow, in other words, no longer faces east but west. It’s left leaning now, not right leaning, which changes nothing because the ship is still drifting south, athwart the waves.
Sæli is standing in the middle of the radar mast up on the roof of the wheelhouse, attempting to reconnect the aerials for the radio. He hooks his left arm around the frame of the mast and exposes the ends of the cut wires by cutting off their insulation with his pocketknife and scraping salt and residue off the copper. Then he tries to work out which wire is supposed to attach to which, twists them together and winds insulation tape around them.
He’s wearing a thick parka and windproof trousers because the weather has been getting steadily colder over the past few days. His fingers are red and stiff with cold, but Sæli is so engrossed in his task that he hardly notices.
However, when a black shadow falls on the roof of the wheelhouse he loses his concentration, looks up and –
‘CHRIST ALMIGHTY!’
Sæli is so startled that he almost loses his balance, but a moment before the soles of his shoes slip off the slick metal he comes to this senses and throws his arms around the radar mast like a little child running to his mother’s embrace.
What should he do? The shadow moves over the ship and suddenly the sun disappears behind –
He has to warn the captain! He has to –
Sæli moves along the mast, stretches out his right arm and uses the blade of the knife to force open the lid of a break-out box on the outside of the mast, just above his head.
Which wire is…? And which ones are live?
There is a blow to the ship as the bottom collides with –
Boom, boom, boom…
Hurry!
He loosens two blue wires and two yellow ones, using the point of his knife as a screwdriver, then he switches the wires and screws them back on.
Suddenly the foghorn wails.
MBAHHHHHHH!!
The noise is so deep and so loud that the mast vibrates like a gigantic brass instrument.
Saturday, 1 December 2001
Every day is like the day before, never-ending, empty and boring, and that’s how time is going to pass or stand still forever, right?
Until the last of them succumbs to starvation or an accident, right?
And then they would sail on and on and on as phantoms in a ghost ship until the curse was lifted from them, right?
Until the curse was lifted from him, that is, right?
As in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by that eighteenth-century Englishman Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Right?
Jónas is sitting on the edge of his bed in his starboard cabin on E-deck, staring at nothing, with his rosary between his fingers.
The curse…
No, he hadn’t killed an albatross, lucky bird of seafarers, like the sailor in the poem; rather, he struck his wife in the head with a hammer and buried her body on the beach before joining the ship.
She who had been the mainstay of his life, if not the ship itself…
The ship.
What should he do? Nothing? Take his own life? Or wait for a sign from above?
‘The Lord is my shepherd, my strength, my light,’ he murmurs.
My light…
He is wearing nothing but a brown bathrobe; his hair is dirty and unkempt, and his eyes are cloudy and swollen after several days without sleep. His left wrist is bandaged. It’s still quite sore after his fall, but the broken bone has healed.
But what does the condition of your body matter, when your soul is writhing in the fires of hell?
‘The fires of hell,’ mutters Jónas, blinking his tear-filled eyes. He rubs the black beads of the rosary, which are beginning to lose their colour, and watches it swing back and forth.
Where is it all going to end? And when? Will the ship sink before they die of disease or hunger or will divine providence direct it…
Boom, boom, boom…
What was that?
Jónas straightens his back and listens.
Silence.
Is he imagining things or is it getting colder in –
MBAHHHHHHH!!
Jónas clenches the fingers of his right hand around the rosary and crawls on his knees onto the bed.
The foghorn!
He pulls the curtains aside and puts his ghostly face against the icy glass. What he sees is so dreadful and at the same time so beautiful that he doesn’t know whether to despair or rejoice.
‘Oh my God,’ whispers the second mate, crossing himself with trembling fingers. ‘It’s happening!’
The Almighty is watching him. Of course He’s watching him! He’s been called to meet Him…
13:31
The captain wakes in his chair when the bottom of the ship hits something.
Boom, boom, boom…
‘What was that?’ Guðmundur Berndsen wonders aloud. He sits up straighter in the chair, shakes off the chill of his catnap and yawns as he rubs the sleep from his bloodshot eyes.
Did the ship just…?
MBAHHHHHHH!!
When he hears the foghorn the captain comes to life with such a jolt that he almost loses that life at the same moment.
His mind goes empty, his eyes bulge and his heart contracts into a hard knot.
He looks out the salt-covered windows and sees white.
‘HOLY MARY!’
The captain turns on the bow thruster, then he turns the ship to port and just barely manages to avoid a collision with an iceberg the size of an eight-storey building.
13:45
He has turned off the foghorn and climbed down from the radar mast.
Silence.
Sæli stands at the front of the wheelhouse roof and looks across the Weddell Sea, which is covered with broken ice as far as he can see. The ocean is dark blue and so cold it moves like syrup. There are a few dozen metres between the icebergs, but that space gets narrower as they get closer to Antarctica. The wind is picking up out of the north-west. There’s a whirlwind in the offing.