The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,91
itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness.’
18: ON THE ICE
Sometimes as I am falling asleep in a dark, quiet room I have for a moment a great and treasurable illusion of the past. The wall of a tent leans up over my face, not visible but audible, a slanting plane of faint sound: the susurrus of blown snow. Nothing can be seen. The light-emission of the Chabe stove is cut off, and it exists only as a sphere of heat, a heart of warmth. The faint dampness and confining cling of my sleeping-bag; the sounds of the snow; barely audible, Estraven’s breathing as he sleeps; darkness. Nothing else. We are inside, the two of us, in shelter, at rest, at the centre of all things. Outside, as always, lies the great darkness, the cold, death’s solitude.
In such fortunate moments as I fall asleep I know beyond doubt what the real centre of my own life is, that time which is past and lost and yet is permanent, the enduring moment, the hearth of warmth.
I am not trying to say that I was happy, during those weeks of hauling a sledge across an ice-sheet in the dead of winter. I was hungry, overstrained, and often anxious, and it all got worse the longer it went on. I certainly wasn’t happy. Happiness has to do with reason, and only reason earns it. What I was given was the thing you can’t earn, and can’t keep, and often don’t even recognize at the time; I mean joy.
I always woke up first, usually before daylight. My metabolic rate is slightly over the Gethenian norm, as are my height and weight; Estraven has figured these differences into the food-ration calculations, in his scrupulous way which one could see as either housewifely or scientific, and from the start I had had a couple of ounces more food per day than he. Protests of injustice fell silent before the self-evident justice of this unequal division. However divided, the share was small. I was hungry, constantly hungry, daily hungrier. I woke up because I was hungry.
If it was still dark I turned up the light of the Chabe stove, and put a pan of ice brought in the night before, now thawed, on the stove to boil. Estraven meanwhile engaged in his customary fierce and silent struggle with sleep, as if he wrestled with an angel. Winning, he sat up, stared at me vaguely, shook his head, and woke. By the time we were dressed and booted and had the bags rolled up, breakfast was ready: a mug of boiling hot orsh, and one cube of gichy-michy expanded by hot water into a sort of small, doughy bun. We chewed slowly, solemnly, retrieving all dropped crumbs. The stove cooled as we ate. We packed it up with the pan and mugs, pulled on our hooded overcoats and our mittens, and crawled out into the open air. The coldness of it was perpetually incredible. Every morning I had to believe it all over again. If one had been outside to relieve oneself already, the second exit was only harder.
Sometimes it was snowing; sometimes the long light of early day lay wonderfully gold and blue across the miles of ice; most often it was grey.
We brought the thermometer into the tent with us, nights, and when we took it outside it was interesting to watch the pointer swing to the right (Gethenian dials read counterclockwise) almost too fast to follow, registering a drop of twenty, fifty, eighty degrees, till it stopped somewhere between zero and –60°.
One of us collapsed the tent and folded it while the other loaded stove, bags, etc., on to the sledge; the tent was strapped over all, and we were ready for skis and harness. Little metal was used in our straps and fittings, but the harnesses had buckles of aluminium alloy, too fine to fasten with mittens on, which burned in that cold exactly as if they were redhot. I had to be careful of my fingers when the temperature was below minus twenty, especially if the wind blew, for I could pick up frostbite amazingly fast. My feet never suffered – and that is a factor of major importance, in a winter-journey where an hour’s exposure can, after all, cripple one for a week or for life. Estraven had had to guess my size and the snowboots he got me were a little