Chapter 22 Chapter 22 Irving

Seventy degrees five minutes north latitude, ninety-eight degrees twenty-three minutes west longitude December 13, 1847 3rd Lieutenant John Irving wondered how Silence got on and off the ship without being seen.Tonight, exactly a month after he first discovered the Eskimo woman's shelter, he would solve the mystery, even if he had to pay the price with frozen toes and fingers. Irwin reported to the captain the next day after he found her that the Eskimo woman had moved her nest to the anchor-cable locker forward of the hold.He didn't mention the fact that she seemed to be eating fresh meat there, mainly because, in that second of amazed stare at the flames lighting up the small room, he wasn't very sure of what he saw.Nor did he report to the captain what appeared to be a sodomy operation in the bilge by the mate Hedge the caulker and the sailor Munson.Irwin knew he had strayed from his professional duty as a member of the Royal Naval Exploration Corps by keeping his captain from this astonishing and important event, but...

but how?The only reason John Irwin could think of to acquit this serious breach of discipline was that there were enough rats on HMS Terror. However, Lady Silence can miraculously come and go on the ship without a trace. In the eyes of the superstitious crew, it is the ultimate evidence of the identity of the witch, but in the eyes of Captain Crozier and other officers, it is just a myth and not worth noting.But it was much more important to young Irwin than whether the mate and the idiot on board could satisfy each other in the stinking, dark hold. And the darkness stinks, Irwin thought.For three hours he had been crouching on the crate out of the slush, behind a post near the bow anchorage.The stink in this cold, dark hold was getting worse every day.

For now, at least, there were no plates of leftovers, glasses of rum or some pagan talisman on the low platform outside the hawser.Shortly after Mr. Blanche's miraculous escape from the thing on the ice, an officer told Crozier what the crew had done.The captain flew into a rage, and threatened that the next foolish, superstitious, foolish, un-Christian man who left food or rum diluted with water for the native women to eat and drink, would never have rum to drink again. drink.She was a pagan child, and although she had the chance to see the Silent Lady naked or hear the doctors talk about her sailors, she knew she was not a child and whispered the story to others.

Crozier also made his position very clear that no one should ever be allowed to wear a white bear talisman.He announced it during the previous day's service, and actually only read a paragraph of the ship's regulations.While many crew members would love to hear him read the Leviathan Book again, if he sees any bear tooth, claw, tail, new tattoo, or other talisman on any hapless crew member, he will call He works an extra night shift or does two toilet bowl cleaning jobs.Suddenly the superstition of pagan fetishes disappeared aboard the Terror, though Lieutenant Irwin heard from his friends on the Erebus that it was still quite popular there.

Irwin tried several times to follow the Eskimo and find out her furtive movements on the boat at night, but he lost track of her, unwilling to let her know that he was following her.Tonight he knew that Lady Silence was still in her closet.Three hours before the crew had had their dinner, she had quietly (hardly seen) receive her ration of "poor John" from Mr Digger: cod, a biscuit and a glass of water.He followed her down the main ladder as she descended to the bottom hold with the food.Irwin put a man on the forward hatch, just in front of the big fire, and told another curious sailor to keep an eye on the main stairway.His arrangement was that the two guards would switch every four hours.It was past ten o'clock at night, and if the Eskimo woman climbed one of the two ladders tonight, Irwin would know where she was and when she would go.

But three hours had passed, and the door of the hawser room was still shut.The only light in the bow of the hold was a sliver of light seeping in through the low, wide door slit in the storeroom.The woman still has a light source inside, a candle or an open flame.That alone was enough for Captain Crozier to pull her out of the hawser within a minute and send her back to her little lair in the storage area in front of the main cabin bed area...or dump her outside. on ice.The captain, like other experienced sailors, was terribly afraid of fire on board, and he did not like the Eskimo guest. Suddenly, the rectangle of dim light around the not-so-tight door disappeared.

She's asleep, Irwin thought.He could imagine her naked, like he'd seen him before, in the room with the fur pulled up over her body.Irwin could also imagine some officer coming to him the next morning and finding his lifeless body curled up on some crate in the slush-flooded hold.He was clearly an ungentlemanly scumbag who froze to death while spying on the only woman on board.It was certainly not the report of a heroic death that the poor parents of Lieutenant John Irving would have found comforting. At this moment, a gust of really cold air blew into the already frozen bilge, as if an evil spirit with malicious intentions brushed past him in the dark.For a moment, Irwin felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, but then a simple thought occurred to him: it was a draft, like someone had opened a door or a window.

He knew how the Lady of Silence had magically entered and exited the Terror. Irving lit the lantern, jumped from the crate, and stepped through the splashing slush to pull the door of the anchor cable locker.The door is secured from the inside.Irwin knew there was no lock in the bow hawser, and no lock on the outside, because no one had any reason to steal the hawser.Apparently, the Aboriginal woman found a way to secure the door herself. Irving was already ready.He carried a thirty-inch pry bar in his right hand, and he knew he would have to explain the damage he had done to Lieutenant Liddell and even Captain Crozier.He stuffed the narrower end of the pole into the three-foot gap in the door and pried it hard.The door creaked and groaned, but opened only an inch or two.Holding the pry bar in place with one hand, Irwin reached under the oilskin coat, coat, inner coat, and vest with the other, and drew the boat knife from his belt.

Lady Silence had nailed nails into the back of the two doors in the anchor cable room somehow, and used a stretchy rawhide material—gut?tendon? —rewinding the nails repeatedly until the two doors are held in place like white cobwebs.It was now impossible for Irving to get in without leaving marks, such as the pry bar marks, so he slashed at the multiple-wrapped tendon with the knife.It was no easy job, and a strand of femoral tendon would hold up better to a sharp edge than rawhide or ship's cables. When the tendons finally fell off, Irving thrust the hissing lantern into the low space.

The cavelike dwelling he had seen four weeks earlier was exactly as he remembered it, except now there was no fire other than his lantern.In a small chamber with a slightly raised floor, the coiled anchor cable is pushed back and the upper end is pulled forward to create the appearance of a cave.There are also signs of her recent meal here: a pewter plate from the Terror on the floor with crumbs from "Poor John" on it; a pewter mug of liqueur and what appears to be the Storage bag sewn from discarded canvas strips.There is also a small ship's oil lamp on the floor of the cabin, which contains only enough oil for the crew to use when they go to the deck at night to use the toilet.The hot tubing was still quite warm when Irwin took off his mittens and inner gloves to touch the lamp.

But there was no sign of the Silent Lady. Irwin could actually try pulling and twisting the heavy anchor cable in different directions to see what was behind, but based on his experience, the remaining space in this triangular anchor cable storage room must still be densely packed Anchor cable.It had been two and a half years since they set sail, and the cables still stink of the Thames. But Lady Silence is gone.It was impossible for her to pass through the upper decks or beams, into the cabin above, or through the hull to get outboard.So the superstitious crew was right?Is she an Eskimo witch?A witch?Pagan medium? 3rd Lieutenant John Irwin didn't believe this.He noticed that the breeze just now was no longer flowing around him, but the flame in his lantern was still dancing with the weak current. Irving stretched his arms to move the lantern.In this cramped, cramped anchor cable locker, that was the only space left.Then stop at the place where the lantern flame dances most loudly: just off the tip of the bow to starboard. He lowered the lantern and began to move the anchor line.Owen immediately discovered that the way she arranged the many anchor cables was very ingenious. It looked like a large mass of coiled anchor cables, but the bottom was actually hollow, and the anchor cables on top were pulled from another mass. Comes here and can be easily pulled apart and placed into her empty den.Behind the false anchor cables were the broad, curved ribs of the hull. Again, she was careful to make the best choices.A few months before the expedition set sail, when the Terror was refurbished for ice missions, a complex network of beams and columns of wood or iron had been erected above and below the anchor cables.Near the bow, there are iron straight beams, oak beams, triple-thick pillars, iron tripods, and huge oak beams intertwined front and back, some even as thick as the main ribs of the hull, forming the ship. A modern fortified design to combat arctic ice.Lieutenant Irving knew that a London correspondent had described tons of wood or iron reinforced beams and columns and African oak, Canadian elm, and more African oak affixed to the English oak on the sides of the hull, Enough to make a "massive beam about eight feet thick." Irving knew that the comment about the bow and hull was spot on.But here, where the last five feet or so of the hull ribs meet at the bow (in and over the hawser-room), there is only the six-inch English oak that was originally the hull plank, unlike the rest of the sides. There is ten inch thick laminated solid wood in place.The basic idea of ​​this design is that there should be fewer layers of handguards on the port and starboard areas within a few feet of the greatly strengthened bow, so that the boat will have the elasticity it needs when it is severely squeezed during icebreaking. Indeed, the bow is really bouncy.The five horizontal bars on both sides of the hull, together with the iron and oak reinforced bow and cabin area, have created a miracle of modern icebreaking technology that no other navy or civilian expedition team in the world can match.The Terror and the Erebus have been to places on Earth where no other icewalker would survive. The bow area is a marvel, but it's no longer solid now. Irwin held out his lantern to feel the draft, felt with his ungloved fingers, and ran his knife to check for loose ribs in a three-foot-long, one-and-a-half foot-and-a-half wide rib.It took him a few minutes to find the outlet.right there.The aft end of the curved rib was held in place by two spikes, but the nails now functioned like some kind of hinge.The fronts of the ribs were simply tucked in place, just a few feet from the massive tip and keel that ran from bow to stern. Irwin used the pry bar to loosen the rib and let it fall, wondering how the young woman could do it with just her fingers.He felt a rush of cold air and found himself looking out into the darkness through a hole three feet by eighteen inches in the hull. This is impossible.The young lieutenant knew that the Terror's bow was specially armored with an inch-thick forged and rolled iron plate for twenty feet aft of the tip.Even if the beams in the cabin fell, the bow area, which accounted for one-third of the rear length, was still armored. This is not the case now.The cold wind blows in from the ice-black cave behind the dismantled crossbar.Because the ice piled up under the stern of the Terror, the ship kept leaning forward, and the bow had been pressed under the sea ice. Lieutenant Irwin's heart was beating violently.If tomorrow, by a miracle, the Terror can float again, the ship will sink into the sea immediately. Is it possible that Ms. Silence did it?This thought frightened Lieutenant Irving even more than the superstitious belief that she could magically appear and disappear at will.A young woman not yet twenty years old can tear off the iron plates of the hull, remove the heavy bow ribs that need to be bent with shipyard equipment and fastened with spikes, and know exactly where to remove them, Will it not attract the attention of the sixty crew members who are more familiar with this ship than their mother's face? Irving was on his knees in the low space, and he found himself breathing with his mouth open and his heart beating wildly. In these two summers of fierce confrontation with the ice, the Terror crossed Baffin Bay, crossed Lancaster Sound, and all the way around Cornwallis Island to Beach Island for the winter; We are now called Franklin's Strait.He could only be sure that by the end of the following summer some of the iron bow armor had come off below sea level.The thick hull ribs only began to dislodge inwards later when the ship was caught in ice. But is it possible that something other than ice caused the oak ribs to fall off?Could it be something else, something that just wants to come in? It doesn't matter now.The Silent Lady had been away only a few minutes at most, and John Irving was intent on following her, not only to find out where she was out in the dark, but also to find out if she was finding and hunting fresh fish or game herself.The ice here is so thick and terribly cold, it should be impossible, otherwise it would be too much like a miracle. If so, Irving knew, that fact could save everyone.Lieutenant Irving, like everyone else, had heard that some of the cans Gardner supplied had gone bad.Everyone on board the two ships had also heard rumors that their food stores would run out before next summer. He couldn't get into the hole. Irwin used a crowbar to pry off the side ribs, but, except for this half-hanging plank, everything else was solid as a rock.This eighteen-inch by three-foot gap in the hull was the only exit.But he was too bloated. He took off his oilskin coat, heavy overcoat, warm towel, hat, and Welsh wig, and put them in the front hole first... Although he was one of the thinnest officers on board, his shoulders and upper body were still too large. width.Even though he was shivering from the cold, Irwin still unbuttoned his vest, took off the woolen jacket inside, and stuffed them into the black cave together. If he couldn't get out of the hull now, it would take a lot of effort to explain why the outer layers of clothing were missing when he came up from the hold. He went in, very reluctantly.Complaining and swearing, Irwin squeezed into the cramped space, knocking out the buttons of his woolen shirt. I'm overboard now, under the ice, he thought.This idea seems unreal. He was in a narrow cave in the sea ice that covered the bow and bowsprit.There wasn't enough room inside for him to put his coat and clothes on, so he pushed them forward.He considered going back to the hawser room for the lantern, but remembering that there was still a full moon in the sky when he was an officer of the watch on deck a few hours ago, he chose to take the crowbar with him. The hole in the ice appeared to be at least as long as the bowsprit, more than eighteen feet, and was probably caused by the shifting of the bowsprit's long battens back and forth during the brief thaw-freeze cycles of the previous summer.When Irwin finally emerged from the tunnel, he crawled for several seconds before realizing he was overboard.The curtain of the slender bowsprit, the cables tied to it, and the frozen secondsprit shrouds still hung over his head, and he found that it blocked not only the view of the sky, but also the bow guard. line of sight so that the guards could not see him.Beyond the bowsprit, the Terror appeared to be only a huge black shadow floating above him, only a few faint lights appeared on the ice field, and the road ahead continued to lead to the ice tower made of ice blocks and seracs. In a mess. Irving was shaking so badly that he began to put on the thermal clothes one by one.His hands trembled too much to button the woolen vest, but that didn't matter.Big coats are hard to put on, but at least it has more buttons.By the time he had put on his oilskin coat, the young lieutenant was freezing to the bone. Where did you go? Fifty feet from the bow of the ship, the ice pile was a forest of ice rocks and wind-eroded seracs, and Silence could go in either direction.But from the exit of the tunnel, there seemed to be a relatively straight and relatively low road leading to the ice field outside the ship.If you want to leave the ship, at least this path has the least obstacles and the highest concealment.Irwin stood up, holding the pry bar in his right hand, and walked westward along the slippery ice groove. He could not have found her if he had not heard voices that were not of this world. He was now hundreds of yards from the ship, lost in the ice maze.The blue ice groove under the feet has long since disappeared, or it has been mixed with many similar grooves. Although the full moon and stars illuminate everything as if it is daytime, I can't see anything moving, and there is no movement on the snow. no footprints. Then came the cries that were not of this world. No, he stopped on the road, trembling all over.He had been shivering for a while from the cold, and now he was shaking even more.He found that this was not a cry, not a cry that humans can make.It was some grotesque instrument... part bagpipe, part horn, part oboe, part flute, part voice, making notes without melody.It was so loud that he could hear it a few dozen yards away, but he was almost sure no one on deck could hear it, especially with the unusual wind blowing from the southeast tonight.All sounds are still synthesized sounds from a single instrument.Irving had never heard a sound like this before. The performance seems to start suddenly, the rhythm is getting faster and faster like a sex march, and then the whole song stops abruptly, as if it has reached a physical orgasm, not at all like someone is playing from the score.The sound came from a wasteland of ice towers. There was a tall ice ridge beside the ice tower, just north of the road with torch road markers on both sides that Crozi insisted on keeping open between the Terror and the Nether. to thirty yards away.No one was repairing the road marker tonight, and Irwin was alone with this sea of ​​ice.He, and whoever or what makes the music, is with the sea of ​​ice tonight. He walked carefully in the blue ice labyrinth composed of huge ice rocks and towering ice towers, and when he was not sure of the direction, he raised his head and watched the bright moon.The yellow ball resembled the largest planets that had suddenly appeared in the sky, unlike the moons that Irving had seen during his short missions on land or at sea over the years.The air beside the moon seemed to shake with the cold, as if the air itself was on the verge of freezing.Ice crystals in the upper air created a large double halo surrounding the moon, the two circles below being blocked by ice ridges and adjacent icebergs.On the outermost halo, there are three brightly shining crosses, like diamonds in a silver ring. In this place near the North Pole, the lieutenant had seen such phenomena several times before in winter nights.Blanji, an ice and snow expert, explained that this is simply the refraction of moonlight in ice crystals, just like light is refracted in diamonds.But when the strange instrument rang and groaned again, now less than a few yards behind the ice, the rhythm accelerated to an almost ecstatic level, and then stopped suddenly, which made Irwin, who was on the ice field emitting blue light, feel a little more. Religious awe and wonder. Irving tried to imagine Lady Silence playing some Eskimo instrument that no one had ever seen before, like a Bavarian horn made of reindeer horn.But he immediately dismissed this ridiculous idea.First, she and her dead companion came without musical instruments.Second, Irwin had a strange intuition that the person playing the unknown instrument was not the Silent Lady. Now only a low ridge of ice remained between Irwin and the ice tower from which the music came. The sound of crushing on the snow was heard. The chirping seemed to be just behind the next blue-glowing serac, eroded by the wind like a thick flag.The chirping started again, and it quickly became the loudest, most rapid, deepest, wildest sound Irwin had ever heard.To his surprise, he found he was getting an erection.The deep, booming, reed-vibrating sound of the instrument was so...primitive...that it made his genitals arouse, though his body was still shaking. He peeped from the side of the ice tower. The Lady of Silence was about twenty feet away from him on a smooth patch of blue ice, and the seracs and chunks of ice that surrounded the area made Irwin feel as if he were suddenly among prehistoric boulders.Moonlight with an ice crystal halo interspersed with starlight shone down from above.Even the shadows are blue. She is completely naked, kneeling on the fur of her tunic.With her back three-quarters to Irving, he could see the curve of her right breast, and he could see the bright moonlight illuminating her long, straight black hair and casting a silvery sheen on the firm flesh of her back.Irwin's heart was beating so hard that he was afraid she might hear him. Lady Silence is not alone.Just on the other side of the clearing, a little beyond where the Eskimo woman was, something filled the shadowy space between two huge Truitt rocks. Irwin knew it was the thing on the ice field.The white bear, or white demon, was with them, floating almost directly above the young woman.The lieutenant's eyes were wide open, and it was still hard to make out its shape: the blue-and-white fur on the blue-and-white ice, the strong muscles under the strong ice ridges and snow ridges, a pair of dark eyes that couldn't quite be distinguished from the darkness behind the thing. He saw a triangular-shaped head on an unusually long neck that was swaying and swaying like a snake six feet above and behind the kneeling woman.Irwin tried to estimate the size of the head as a reference for future hunting operations, but he couldn't determine the exact shape and size of the triangular head with two dark eyes because it kept making strange movements. But the thing was now appearing above the girl, its head almost directly above her. Irving knew he should yell, and rushed forward with the crowbar in his gloved hand.He carried no weapons except the ship's knife, which was sheathed.He tried to save the woman, but his muscles wouldn't obey.All he could do was read on with a mixture of sexual horror and fear. Lady Silence holds out her arms, palms up, like a Catholic priest reading Mass and expecting the miracle of the Eucharist.Irving had a cousin in Ireland who was Catholic, and he visited him once, and went to a Catholic service with him.That weird and magical ritual is being performed here under the blue moonlight.The tongueless Silent Lady made no sound, but her arms were wide open, her eyes were closed, her head was thrown back--Irwin had crawled forward a little further, and her face could now be seen--her mouth was wide open. Wide open, as if a supplicant were waiting to take communion. The creature's neck lunged forward and downward, as fast as a cobra could strike, and the thing's upper and lower jaws opened wide, as if to bite down on the lower half of the Silent Lady's face, eating half of her head. Irving almost cried out.The heaviness of the ritual at this moment and the fear of his impotence kept him silent. The thing didn't eat her.Irwin found himself looking at the blue-and-white head of the monster, which was at least three times larger than the woman's head.It brought its huge jaws together, and instead of clenching, it just engaged her open mouth and raised jaws.Her arms were still outstretched toward the night, almost ready to embrace the mass of fur and muscle that surrounded her.