I love water madly—I love the sea, too great, too restless, impossible of possession though it be; the pleasant rivers which pass, hurrying on, and are gone; above all, the marsh quivering with the secret life of aquatic creatures. Marsh life is a world within a world, a world to itself—a world living its own life with its own home-keeping citizens, its passing travellers, voices, sounds, and, most of all, its own mysteriousness. Nothing is more disturbing, more agitating, more terrifying even than marsh lands. Whence comes this fear that lurks on these low water-covered plains? Is it the vague murmur of the rushes, the strange will-o’-the-wisp, the uncanny silence that wraps them round on calm nights? Or is it the peculiar mists that hang round the reeds like a shroud, or perhaps even more the vague lapping, so soft and gentle, but perhaps more terrifying than cannon of man or the thunder of God, that makes the marsh unreal, like a country in a dream, like some fearful land that hides an arcane fatal secret?
No. There is more in it than that: another mystery, more profound, more solemn, flows in its thick fog. It is, perhaps, the wonder of creation itself. For was it not in water, stagnant and muddy, in the dark mugginess of a world weeping under the heat of the sun, the first germ of life moved, stirred and saw the light of day?
I reached my cousin’s house in the evening. The very stones seemed frozen.
During dinner—in the great dining room whose sideboards, walls, and ceiling were covered with stuffed birds, some with their wings extended, some perched on branches supported by nails, among them sparrow-hawks, herons, owls, goatsuckers, buzzards, vultures, falcons and birds of prey of all sorts—my cousin, looking himself like a strange animal from some colder region, in his sealskin coat, was telling me the plans he had made for that very night. We were to start at half past three in the morning so that we should reach the point chosen for the morning’s shoot at about half past four. There was at this spot a hut that had been built of pieces of glass to afford us a little shelter against the terrible wind which comes at daybreak—that icy wind which tears the flesh like a saw; which cuts into one like the blade of a knife; pricking like a poisoned arrow, biting like forceps, burning like fire.
My cousin rubbed his hands together.
“I have never seen such a frost,” he said. “We were twelve degrees below zero at six o’clock this evening.”
I threw myself on my bed immediately the meal was over and fell asleep with the light from the great fire blazing in my chimney. As the clock struck three they woke me. I, too, put on a sheepskin and found my cousin Karl wrapt up in a bearskin. We both gulped down two cups of burning coffee and a couple of glasses of good champagne, and then set out accompanied by a keeper and our dogs Plongeon and Pierrot.
Directly I took the first step outside, I felt frozen to the marrow. It was one of those nights when the world seems to have died of the cold. The frozen air seems to become solid and tangible, so savagely cold it is. Not a puff of wind stirs: it is congealed, motionless. It bites, cuts, numbs, kills trees, plants, insects, even the little birds: they fall from the branches on to the hard soil, and become as if in the bitter clutch of the frost. The moon was in the last quarter: she lay on her back, pale and swooning in midair, so feeble that she could climb no further; as if she stayed there, arrested, paralysed by the harsh spaces of the sky.
She shed a barren, mournful light on the earth—that pale funeral light with which she celebrates each month the end of her resurrection.
We went side by side, Karl and I, our backs bent, hands in our pockets, and guns under our arms. Our boots, covered with felt to prevent our slipping on the frozen river, gave back no sound. I watched the breath of our dogs that was like a white smoke.
Soon we were at the edge of the marsh, and we followed one of the little paths which cut across this miniature forest.
Our shoulders, grazing long tattered leaves, left behind us a light rustling and I felt as I have never felt before that passionate and extraordinary emotion which marshy land begets in me. It was dead, that marsh, frozen to death while we were walking over it, among its crowd of withered reeds.
All at once, at a turn in the path, I discovered the small glass cabin that had been built to shelter us. I went in and as we had still nearly an hour to wait until these wild birds should be awake I rolled myself in my cloak to try to get warm.
Then, lying on my back, I began looking at the diminished moon; it had four horns seen through the dimly transparent walls of this polar house.
But the bitter cold of the frozen marsh, the cold of these walls, the cold dropping from the firmament affected me soon, so badly that I began to cough.
My cousin Karl became anxious.
“It will be a sell if we don’t shoot anything today,” he said. “I don’t want you to catch cold. We’d better make a fire.”
And he told the keeper to cut some rushes.
We made a heap in the middle of the hut that had a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. When the red flame leaped between the translucent crystal wells they began to run with water, gently, unperceptibly, as if these glassy stones were sweating. Karl, who had stayed outside, cried out to me: “Come here. Just come and see this.”
I went
