The Left Hand Of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4) - Ursula K. Le Guin Page 0,102

for only seven days more.

‘The wheel turns,’ he said with serenity. ‘To make a good run, we’ve got to eat.’

‘Eat, drink, and be merry,’ said I. The food had got me high. I laughed inordinately at my own words. ‘All one – eating-drinking-merrymaking. Can’t have merry without eats, can you?’ This seemed to me a mystery quite on a par with that of the yin-yang circle, but it did not last. Something in Estraven’s expression dispelled it. Then I felt like crying, but refrained. Estraven was not as strong as I was, and it would not be fair, it might make him cry too. He was already asleep: he had fallen asleep sitting up, his bowl on his lap. It was not like him to be so unmethodical. But it was not a bad idea, sleep.

We woke rather late next morning, had a double breakfast, and then got in harness and pulled our light sledge right off the edge of the world.

Below the world’s edge, which was a steep rubbly slope of white and red in a pallid noon light, lay the frozen sea: the Bay of Guthen, frozen from shore to shore and from Karhide clear to the North Pole.

To get down on to the sea-ice through the broken edges and shelves and trenches of the Ice jammed up amongst the Red Hills, took that afternoon and the next day. On that second day we abandoned our sledge. We made up backpacks; with the tent as the main bulk of one and the bags of the other; and our food equally distributed, we had less than twenty-five pounds apiece to carry; I added the Chabe stove to my pack and still had under thirty. It was good to be released from forever pulling and pushing and hauling and prying that sledge, and I said so to Estraven as we went on. He glanced back at the sledge, a bit of refuse in the vast torment of ice and reddish rock. ‘It did well,’ he said. His loyalty extended without disproportion to things, the patient, obstinate, reliable things that we use and get used to, the things we live by. He missed the sledge.

That evening, the seventy-fifth of our journey, our fifty-first day on the plateau, Harhahad Anner, we came down off the Gobrin Ice on to the sea-ice of Guthen Bay. Again we travelled long and late, till dark. The air was very cold, but clear and still, and the clean ice-surface with no sledge to pull, invited our skis. When we camped that night it was strange to think, lying down, that under us there was no longer a mile of ice, but a few feet of it, and then salt water. But we did not spend much time thinking. We ate, and slept.

At dawn, again a clear day though terribly cold, below –40° at daybreak, we could look southward and see the coastline, bulged out here and there with protruding tongues of glacier, fall away southward almost in a straight line. We followed it close inshore at first. A north wind helped us along till we skied up abreast a valley-mouth between two high orange hills; out of that gorge howled a gale that knocked us both off our feet. We scuttled farther east, out on the level sea-plain, where we could at least stand up and keep going. ‘The Gobrin Ice has spewed us out of its mouth,’ I said.

The next day, the eastward curve of the coastline was plain, straight ahead of us. To our right was Orgoreyn, but that blue curve ahead was Karhide.

On that day we used up the last grains of orsh, and the last few ounces of kadik-germ; we had left now two pounds apiece of gichy-michy, and six ounces of sugar.

I cannot describe these last days of our journey very well, I find, because I cannot really remember them. Hunger can heighten perception, but not when combined with extreme fatigue; I suppose all my senses were very much deadened. I remember having hunger-cramps, but I don’t remember suffering from them. I had, if anything, a vague feeling all the time of liberation, of having got beyond something, of joy; also of being terribly sleepy. We reached land on the twelfth, Posthe Anner, and clambered over a frozen beach and into the rocky, snowy desolation of the Guthen Coast.

We were in Karhide. We had achieved our goal. It came near being an empty achievement, for our packs were empty. We had