suppose he came from there.'
'Ivan Ivanovich, have you got his diaries here? In this house?'
'Yes.'
'Let me see them.'
These diaries had been on my mind for so long that I had begun to see
them as thick books bound in black cloth. But the doctor went out and
reappeared a few minutes later with two thin copybooks such as
155
children use in school. I could hardly suppress my excitement as I
opened one of them at random. 'To Navigator Iv. Dm. Klimov.
'I order you and all those listed below, in accordance with your wishes
and theirs, to leave the ship with the aim of reaching inhabited land...'
'Why, Doctor, he had an excellent hand! I can read it quite easily.' 'It's
my excellent hand you're reading,' the doctor said. 'I have written out
the parts I have been able to decipher on separate sheets. The rest is like
this-look.'
Saying which, he opened the copybook at the first page. I had seen some
poor handwriting in my day, Valya Zhukov's, for instance; he used to
write in such a way that the teachers for a long time thought he was
doing it to annoy them. But handwriting such as this I had never seen in
my life. It was like so many fishhooks the size of pinheads scattered
higgledy-piggledy all over the page. The first few pages were smeared
with some kind of grease and the pencil marks were barely visible on the
yellow parchment-like paper. Further on came a hodgepodge of
unfinished words, then a rough-drawn map, followed by another jumble
of words, which no graphologist could have made head or tail of.
'All right,' I said, closing the notebook. 'I'll read this.' The doctor
looked at me with admiration. 'I wish you success,' he said earnestly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I READ THE DIARIES
I would not call myself an impatient person. But I think that only a
genius of patience could have waded through those diaries. Obviously,
they had been written during halts, by the light of smoky wicks burning
seal oil, in forty-five degrees of frost, with a frozen and tired hand. In
some places the hand could be seen to have slipped, tracing a long,
drooping, meaningless line.
But I had to read them!
Again and again I tackled this arduous job. Every night-and on flight-
free days from early morning-I sat down at the table with a magnifying
glass, engaged in the slow, painful task of transforming the fish-hooks
into human words-now words of despair, now of hope. At first I went
straight through, just sat down and read. And then I hit on a bright idea.
I started to read whole pages at a time instead of trying to decipher the
separate words.
In going through the diaries I noticed that some of the pages were
written much more legibly than others-the order, for example, which
the doctor had copied out. I copied from these passages all the letters
from a to z and compiled a 'Navigator's ABC' in which I reproduced
exactly all the variants of his handwriting. With the aid of this alphabet
the work proceeded much more rapidly. Very often a correct guess of
one or two letters -made with the help of this alphabet would make all
the rest clear.
And so, day after day, I deciphered these diaries.
156
The Diaries of Navigating Officer Ivan Klimov
Wednesday, May 27. Started out late and did 4 versts in 6 hours.
Today is a red-letter day for us. We reckon that we have covered a
distance of 100 versts from the ship. Of course, this is not much for a
month's trek, but the going has been much harder than we had
expected. We celebrated the occasion by cooking a soup from dried
bilberries seasoned with two tins of condensed milk.
Friday, May 29. If we do reach the shore, may those men—1 do not
want even to name them—remember May 29th, the day of their
deliverance from death, and mark it every year. But though the men
were saved, they lost a double-barrelled gun and the stove on which we
did our cooking. As a result we had to eat raw meat yesterday and drink
cold water diluted with milk. May God help me to reach the shore safely
with this bunch of gaw-gaws!
Sunday, May 31. Here is the official document authorising me to
leave with part of the crew:
'To Navigating Officer Ivan Klimov.
'I hereby order you and all those listed below, in accordance with
your wishes and theirs, to leave the ship with the aim of reaching
inhabited land, and to do this on the 10th inst., setting out across the ice
on foot and taking with you sledges and kayaks as well as provisions for
two months. On leaving this ship you are to head south until you sight
land; on sighting which you are to act according to circumstances, but
preferably try to make the British Channel between the islands of Franz-
Josef Land, following it, as being best known, down to Cape Flora where
you are likely to find food and' shelter. After that, time and
circumstances permitting, you are to head for Spitsbergen. On reaching
Spitsbergen you will be confronted with the difficult task of finding
people there, as we do not know where they are to be located, but hope
that you will be able to find people in the southern part of the island or
at least some fishing vessel off the coast. You are to be accompanied by
thirteen men of the crew, who have expressed their wish to go with you.
Captain of the schooner St. Maria
Ivan
Tatarinov'
'April
10,1914 Arctic Ocean.'
God knows how hard it was for me to go, leaving him in such a
difficult, almost hopeless plight.
Tuesday, June 2. On board ship Engineer Komev had improvised four
