And the waif that I found on the bank was frail and forlorn. Why? First her parasol displeased me; then her shawl; then all her books irritated me. Yet one does not travel to recover one’s old thoughts; and then she cried when I brought these things to her attention. First I said to myself: ‘Oh! How she has changed!’ but I see clearly now that she is not the same person. And this is still the most absurd episode of the voyage. As soon as I saw her on the bank, I felt that she was misplaced. But what shall I do now? This is all very distracting, Morgain, and I dislike sentimental states of dejection.”

But Morgain seemed not to understand; then I started over in a milder manner.…

It was on the same day, a little after this serious conversation, that thin sheets of ice first appeared on the horizon. A current was carrying them toward temperate waters; they came from frozen seas. They were not melting, I suppose, but dissolving into the blue air, imperceptibly more fluid; They subtilized like fog. And the first sheets encountered, because the water was still almost warm, had become so thin, so diaphanous and diluted that the boat had moved along without our noticing them until alerted by the sudden coolness.

Toward evening their numbers kept increasing, as did their size. We moved through them; as they became even more dense, the boat would strike them and scarcely cut through them. Night fell, and we would have lost sight of them completely had not the light from the stars shone through them pale, purified and magnified. Thus through an imperceptible transition that defies narration, after the splendid shores and sunlit gardens, we were finally to pass through a morose climate and frozen seas and come to arid polar shores.

And imperceptibly also, languishing from her sickness, each day Ellis grew paler, giddier and more blond; she was becoming less and less real, and seemed to be fading away.

“Ellis,” I said to her finally, by way of preparing her for what was to come, “you are an obstacle to my union with God, and I can love you only if you too are fused in God himself.” *

And when the felucca reached a boreal region where wisps of smoke rose from the huts of the Eskimos, when we left her on the shore and immediately set sail for the Pole, she had already lost almost every vestige of reality.

And we also left there Yvon, Hélain, Aguisel and Lambègue—who were sick with boredom and seemed about to die from drowsiness—and sailed calmly on toward the Pole.

* The grotesque figure of Ellis recalls Gide’s inability to fuse in a normal manner the physical and the spiritual. Ellis appears in his Journals as Em, and elsewhere as Alissa, Emmanuèle or Madeleine. “All purity, love, and tenderness” in his other works, she is really his cousin (later his wife) Madeleine Rondeaux.

* We learn from his Journals that Gide frequently suffered embarrassment over his inability to say the right words at the right time.

* * Up to this point the narrator has used the familiar pronoun tu in addressing Ellis. Here he uses the polite form vous.

* Urien continues to use the polite form vous in addressing Ellis. Gide revealed the ambivalent nature of his love for Madeleine, and her patient suffering because of it, in Et nunc manet in te, written in 1947 and issued publicly in 1951.

VOYAGE TO A FROZEN SEA

A rather dilatory auroral sky; purple flashes on the sea where pale blue sheets of ice became iridescent. A rather chilling awakening because the limpid air was no longer pursued by warm breezes. The boreal region where we had left wan Ellis and our four sick companions the day before, though still visible in the distance, was on the verge of disappearing; a delicate buoy far out on the horizon linked the sky to the last waves and seemed to lift and lull the vanishing land. All eight of us assembled on the deck for a morning prayer, serious but not sad; then we raised our solemn voices and felt once more the tide of seraphic joy that had surged through us on the day when we drank crystalline spring water. Then aware of our joyous wills and wishing to seize them and sense them rather than to allow them to vanish, I said to them:

“The hard trials are over. Far from us now are the morose banks where we thought we would die of boredom, farther still the shores with their forbidden pleasures; let us acknowledge that we are happy to have known them. For one can reach this point only through them; the loftiest cities are reached by the most perilous routes; we are going toward the divine city. Yesterday’s tarnished sun is tinged with rose. Resistance first quickened our wills; nor was our idleness on the gray swards futile, for when the landscape disappeared, we were left with our wills completely free; because of our boredom, our indeterminate souls managed in those regions to become sincere. And when we act, now, it will surely be in keeping with our aims.” *

The sun was rising as we began our prayers; the sea radiated with reflected splendors; rays shot across the waves, and the illuminated sheets of ice, vibrant and responsive, shuddered.

Toward midday some whales appeared; they were swimming in a flock; they would dive under the sheets of ice and reappear farther away; but they stayed at a distance from the ship.

It was now necessary to steer clear of mountains of ice; as their bases were slowly melted away by waters still not very cold, they would suddenly capsize; their prismatic peaks crumbled and disappeared in the agitated sea, churned the water like a tempest, shot up again with cascades all around them, and kept oscillating for a long time in the tumultuous waters, uncertain of their posture. The majestic impact of their fall echoed across the sonorous waves. Sometimes walls of ice fell into the spouts of foam, and all these moving mountains were incessantly transformed.

Toward evening we saw one so large that it was no longer transparent; at first we mistook it for a new territory covered with immense glaciers. Rivulets plummeted from its summits; white bears ran along its edges. The ship came so close to it that its main yard brushed against a snag and shattered some delicate icicles.

We saw some in which were imbedded huge stones torn from the natal glacier and which therefore carried over the waves fragments of alien rock.

We saw others which had imprisoned whales when drawn together by some mysterious force; above the level of the ocean, they seemed to be swimming in the air.