The Collection

It is pure luck that I see it at all. And in truth, I’m not sure, not sure that it’s anything more than light bouncing in a playful way off the ancient, blue-tinted glacier. I am sure of one thing, however, and that is I don’t want to tell anyone about it.

It’s there for a few seconds only, and this because the early-morning sun touches the ice in a certain way, reaching in rather than bouncing off. And only in that tiny spot where a recent calving has opened a vein of blue ice, the deep blue of ice long under pressure—it will return to a cloudy-white condition before long. But even though brief and slight, the sighting is enough to convince me that I was right in coming here. What I see is human; it’s got to be. Equally as certain, it is the missing partner of the corpse found floating down the river yesterday morning, an explorer lost since the twenties and now given back to us by glacial ice that cannot make up its mind whether to advance or retreat.

Once the sun ends its tease, I can no longer be sure, but I know my calculations are correct. That corpse came from here, not only from this glacier (there are a dozen in the area) but from the blemish I just saw. Inside it the poor fellow’s partner waits. Waits for me.

To insure that I remember its location, I line the spot up with the crest of the mountain from which the sun, peaking mischievously over the top, first revealed it to me. I match this with an irregular outcrop of rocks on the northernmost edge of the river, the river on which I and the cruise ship I share primarily with tourists ride. I take care to keep these tourists from picking up on my quickened interest--they know about the corpse, and are themselves speculating on where it came from. I do nothing to enlighten them.

The boat moves on and the blur again takes on meaning, not to my fellow tourists but to me, who had seen it as it was momentarily bathed in sunlight. I guess it to be a foot into the ice, if even that, and fifteen feet from the top of the two-hundred-foot glacier wall. I also guess that it will not be long before it breaks off to join the other bergs floating down the river.

I do not want that to happen, not until I get what I came for.

There was a notebook found with the floating corpse, badly abused by water, ice and time but still readable, at least in part. The words are vague to the others but less so to me. They claim the discovery of an "ancient treasure," which in Alaska means gold, either raw or crafted by some primitive Indian culture—I am the only one to figure that out. If I am right, there is a better-than-equal chance that the entirety of it lies within that block of ice, guarded by a frozen corpse.

I am on the tale end of a reconnaissance trip to the Dirt Glacier, part of the Stikine Glaciers in the Coastal Mountains of southeastern Alaska, east of the town of Wrangell. The glacier gets its "Dirt" name from the accumulation of silt trapped within it, which gives it the look of dirty snow, the kind one sees along highways days after a storm. The ice wall is better than two miles wide, and it attracts tourists because of its size--second largest in the area--and because it suffers violent flood outbursts. Doubtless my companions are hoping one such outburst occurs while they are here to see it.

I think hard all the way back to Wrangell, think about what I saw and about what it might be if not human—time tests a person’s memory, makes one doubt what was irrefutable only a short time before. The wiser part of me says I should take time to do research, learn more about the lost man, about the Dirt Glacier and about the calving or splitting of ice--the latter scares me to death. But while I am seeking perfection in a library, another might get the riches that rightly belong to me. It is only a matter of time before someone shares my idea and my find, some lucky schoolboy staring at just the right spot with just the right angle of sun. (The mindless little snot will likely yell it to the world!)

No, I have to get out there, and I have to do it right away.

Two hours after landing in Wrangell, I think myself prepared, having in hand all the comforts of a reluctant ice climber: an ice axe, crampons, ice screws, ropes, even cleats for my boots. Transportation I arrange through local Tlingit Indians, not by canoe as was the choice of early explorers, but by modern speedboat. We set out just ahead of dawn the following day.

The trip is cold and hours long, but once there I warm myself by helping the Indians set up camp on a little outcrop of land a few hundred yards from the face of the glacier. I make sure I am high enough up on the beach to avoid a soaking should a large chunk of ice calve off and fall into the water. When camp is established I make known my desire to be alone then request of my Indian guides that they return to this site in three day’s time. Although they ask the question, I say only that I intend to walk out on the glacier and "take pictures." I get uncertain looks but shrugs of acceptance as well.

As soon as they are out of sight, I grab my ice axe, attach cleats to my shoes then take off toward my discovery, aware that time is not my friend. It takes an hour to overcome all two-hundred feet of the glacier—the rocky approach is smooth and slippery--then another hour to pinpoint the spot where I had seen the frozen figure. Everything looks so different from up here; the ice, merely lumpy as seen from the tourist boat, is marked with dangerously-jagged knolls and deep crevasses, some of the latter deep enough to kill a man should he be unlucky enough to fall in. Worst of all, there are no clear spots such as I thought I had seen from the water, nothing but the impenetrable milky white of a glacier surface. I review my calculations again, my desperation increasing in direct proportion to the waning sunlight.

I line up the mountain top with the river bank then inch my way toward the glacier’s edge, fearing as I do so that a calving will take place right under me, dragging me down some two hundred feet to a nasty death—just thinking about this brings me to a momentary halt. I muster a determination that is more bluster than confidence, then resume my crawling to within five feet of the edge, there to scratch out an "X" in a nearby plateau of ice. I have no idea what good this will do me, but having determined where my prize must be, it seems the thing to do to stake it out. Afterward I beat a hasty retreat backward some twenty yards, only there able to relax enough to consider how I might gain an opening through fifteen feet of ice, a weak spot or a covered-over crevasse--I wonder whether this would also mean a greater possibility of spontaneous calving.

Tuned into my fears, the gods decide at that moment to torment me. A large clap of thunder, louder than anything I have ever heard before, resonates across the ice, followed by the shaking of ice all around me--were I not sitting, I would have fallen hard. The fearful calving is happening, a large chunk of it judging by the volume of sound and the way it shakes the glacier it no longer wishes to be part of. Aware that I am only twenty yards from the edge and that the calving cannot be far away, I scramble to all fours then scratch my way like a startled cat toward safety, abandoning axe and supplies in my haste. Behind me, and encouraging greater speed, there is a second clap of thunder, this time followed by the collapse of a mountainous piece of ice—it makes a frightening sound as it comes in contact with the water far below.

My zest for treasure totally shattered, I push to my feet then run flat out toward the spot where ice meets land. Once there I do not stop, my trauma keeping me going until, some ten minutes later and bruised in a number of places from repeated falls, I am clawing at the front of my tent desperate to reach the inside. For most of the night, I lie wrapped in blankets, unable to sleep and barely able to think. I tell myself that calving happens all the time but that on a two-mile-wide glacier the odds are always in favor of avoiding it. I tell myself that even if a calving did occur, I might still survive, that the river is energy-absorbing and that it and the berg’s natural buoyancy would combine to soften the impact. But with the reality of what happened still so much in my mind, it is a hard sell.

Time permits me to relax the worst of my fears, and by morning I feel again the tug of adventure and the thrill of discovery. I make my decision; I will go back, and this time I will stay.

My legs show reluctance as I near the place I left in such haste the previous evening. My nerves are on a knife’s edge as is proven to me when an eagle flying overhead lets loose with a sharp cry. But I get there and even find my backpack and ice axe, the latter closer to the edge than I would like but retrievable. I find something else as well, something that fills me with mixed emotions: a large crack has appeared along the path of my discovery.

The bad is that this suggests a weakness in the ice, that although this was not part of last night’s calving, it will soon be part of another. (I have a moment of shakes and try to convince myself that it is the cold.) The good is that it is a way down through the ice, and this I verify by approaching the edge on all fours and noting that it travels down some thirty feet, well beyond my goal.

Further inspection shows it passes within a few feet of what I can now see clearly: the body of a sitting man—for a moment I can do nothing but stare at this macabre conformation of my theory. He is dressed much the same as the corpse I glimpsed three days ago, corduroy pants and a heavy woolen shirt, both of them dark in color. Confusing to me at the moment, in one hand he holds a tablet and in the other a pencil.

The shivers return as I realize his eyes are open. And although he is facing forward, toward the edge of the glacier, his glance is to one side, my side. He is staring up at me.

I tell myself it is a coincidence, that he died in that position, and that I am unlucky enough to be coming in at the wrong angle. Harder to believe is that the fortunate appearance of this crack is also a coincidence, that it is not a product of some mischievous god of the ice who, for reasons of his own, wants me to keep coming.

With the growth of excitement comes the waning of fear, and I retrieve my supplies then go about constructing a rope ladder that will lower me to my find, securing it in place with ice screws—memories of shaking ice encourages me to add extras. When satisfied that it will hold, I shoulder my pack, tie my axe to my belt then descend to where I am level with my enigmatic new acquaintance. Gratefully, his eyes do not follow me down.

I stare for a long time before finally I can bring myself to begin chipping away at the two feet of ice that separates us, the delay because I can see more of what is in there with him. It is not gold but another body, this one dissimilar in dress to the first--more costume than clothing. He is on a downward sloping angle only a few feet away from his neighbor, and his arms are reaching out as if seeking help.

As I chip my way toward the sitting corpse, careful in this to avoid coming so close that I will disturb him as I brush by, I notice a difference in coloration between his upper and lower halves—the upper is clearer, easier to see. The reason for this soon becomes apparent as, without expectation that it is there, I burst through to a cave in the ice no more than eighteen inches from my starting point. I hang there on the rope ladder, eyes wide and uncertain and arms stiff and slow to cooperate. I have a momentary feeling that I have violated an ancient tomb and am now about to suffer its curse.

But then I calm myself enough to think it through. The fact of an opening will make it easier, much easier. I have only to break a thin ice wall to get through. I elevate myself on the rope ladder then begin attacking the ice above the sitting corpse’s waist, my effort keeping pace with my growing enthusiasm—I try not to listen to the occasional rumbling that speaks of another calving taking place. Once I enlarge the opening enough to do so, I poke my head inside and begin to take measure of the cave’s size. It is narrow and confining, no more than a dozen feet wide and less than that in length. It stretches ahead of the sitting corpse by only a foot and in the other direction downward some four feet to the second corpse, his reaching arms the only part of him not buried in ice. By now impatient to get in there for a closer look, I enlarge the opening to where I can wrestle myself through.

Because of the cold, the expected odor of death is not present, but the silence and the ghostly atmosphere more than make up for the lack of goulish smell. The body lower down now appears to be reaching out to me while the sitting one stares at the sky as if expecting someone else. Shaking my head at such foolishness, I move with deliberate purpose toward the reaching arms, only then realizing how old a corpse it is, seventy-five to a hundred years judging from his late nineteenth-century clothing. He wears a long coat with fur circling the collar and lining the opening in front. And a furry hat like Russian noblemen wore in Czarist times. Unlike the siting corpse, this one’s eyes are closed, and for this I am grateful--I am already too close to another bout of the shakes. He has no more than two days growth of beard, thus I can see much of his skin, which has more purple in it than is suggested by the cold alone—this one drowned, of this I’m sure. His corpse is lodged in what looks to be older ice slanting downward and away. I can see a clear delineation between it and the ice that sits just above it.

I can also see another corpse.

The cold eats away at me as I stare into my latest discovery’s eyes, open like the sitting corpse, although I do not imagine this one’s eyes are pointed at me. He looks to be an Indian, in his clothing as well as his features--the former, though more ancient, is similar in style to that worn by the Tlingits. I figure he has to be older than the man in front of him, the reaching-arms corpse, but by how much I can only guess—I am not familiar enough with Tlingit history to make the determination.

I search my backpack for a flashlight, the task made difficult by my shaking hands. They are shaking not only from the cold but from the enormity of my discovery. Whereas I was looking for one corpse, now I have found many, a collection of humanity, each from a different time. When I have the flashlight in hand, I begin searching again, pausing for an anxious moment when another rumbling occurs, this one closer than the others—I look to the opening and wish I had made it larger, not only in case it becomes necessary to save myself but to extricate the treasure I am still determined to find.

With the flashlight penetrating the ice in front of me, I see no hint of treasure but the faint outline of another corpse, this one in Russian clothing that I estimate to be late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Below him, only slightly this time, stands what I assume to be yet another, an Eskimo although I cannot tell from what I can see of his clothing from what era he comes. From the looks of the tools on and around him, he was in the process of digging out an even earlier body when he himself was caught. I stretch my eyes beyond him but now the thick ice will permit me to see only vague shadows, some probably human but one as large as a grizzly. My chain of corpses does not easily end.

I stare into the gently descending void for a long time, my mind agonizing over the reason for it all. Is this the "ancient treasure" the explorer wrote about, this collection of frozen corpses? To me it is nothing more than the icy version of a fly trap, pulling people and animals into its grip then using the poor devils to tempt others.

The way it tempted me.

The sudden realization of what this place is brings me to my feet with such force that I bang my head on the ceiling of ice. It is the last thing I remembered for God knows how long.

I awake to a madhouse. The walls are rumbling and all around me are deafening sounds as if I were trapped in the hollow of a wooden frame above which is a moving roller-coaster. Pieces of ice shake loose and fall on or around me. I am in the center of another calving.

I realize with a start that I cannot see a thing. It is dark and so dense is this that I am not even sure I’m awake, that this place, with its collection of corpses, is not just an improbable dream. When enough of my senses return to assure me it is not a dream, I search for the flashlight, aware that it would have fallen as I did and must therefore be nearby. The world around me rumbles and crashes as I feel for it, the horror of this tempting me to get up and run even as I cannot see where I would run to. But soon I have the flashlight in hand and am switching it on.

As if in response to the light, the sound of approaching water begins to challenge the rumbling, faintly at first, but then with unmistakable purpose and fury. My understanding is slow and reluctant, a part of me saying it could not be happening, that this is the product of an imagination stretched by the sharing of an unlikely icebox with a variety of ancient corpses. But the fact of it overwhelms me as water comes crashing against ice and rock just above my head, seconds later pouring into the opening I created for myself. It fills all of my evil tomb, stopping only when a pocket of air prevents it from going further--it brings such pressure to my ears that for a moment I am distracted by pain. When finally I can examine my situation, I find the water has stopped just below my chest.

It is cold, terribly cold, and I can now shiver for reasons other than fear.

The rumbling becomes muted and constant, and I know immediately what this means. I have not fallen into the river in a calving incident, I am still high up on the glacier. A giant waterfall has appeared above my head, the magnitude of it evident in the richness of sound as it scrapes by my cave then crashes two hundred feet to the river below. This is one of Dirt Glacier’s periodic flood outbursts, millions of tons of water, all of it trying to get to me. I imagine I hear laughter, long-dead people taking delight in my fix.

I have no feel for how long it takes the water to pass. To me it would seem longer in any event, considering how much I am suffering from both the cold and the goulish horror of my unlikely companions. I keep the flashlight going, this even while knowing it might be needed later on, that it serves no purpose other than to calm the worst of my considerable fear. I point the beam upward, because the one time I do otherwise, a trick of light bounces off water and ice and makes the corpses appear to be advancing toward me. I even imagine I feel a hand touch my ankle.

There is a hint of daylight by the time the flood ends and the waterfall returns to being a glacier, and I know by this that my period of unconsciousness must have been hours. I turn to the embryonic daylight as a drowning man turns to a lifeboat; I am cold and it represents warmth, however unreachable that warmth is to me. With the lessening of pressure from above, the water drops, but not so much that it offers me an easy escape. Water still fills to two feet above the small entrance I made to get in, and likely it has filled the entire crevasse above that. I will have to dive under icy water, squeeze through an opening that was small to begin with, then swim to the top of the glacier, a feat that is wrought with impossibilities. As cold as the water is, I will have trouble holding my breath even as long as it takes to push through the hole. And the water around me is even now beginning to freeze, which tells me I must expect that the entrance is trying to heal itself, become what it once was, a solid block of ice.

But I have no better idea. And I will not allow myself to be trapped as have those tragic others.

I am so cold. And it is so difficult to move as I would like to move, as the situation demands I move. It is the cost of being so long unconscious then immersed in icy water—even now, it covers my knees, and I am barely able to feel where I place my feet. For a moment I hope for the calving I so feared in the beginning. Perhaps I would fare better as an iceberg.

Aware that time is my enemy, I make myself move down the slope toward the entrance hole, ignoring the biting cut of the water as it creeps higher up my body--already I feel a dizziness that spells doom if I pause to think about it. Once in place, I stretch my lungs as far as the cold will permit then dive for the opening.

The shock threatens to rob me of what little breath I am able to hold, but I think only of the opening and feel for its sides, positioning myself when I find it directly in its center then kicking my legs as hard as I can, hoping in this to propel my body through. As predicted, the hole has begun to close in, and I get no further than my shoulders before it becomes obvious to me that I will lose consciousness before I come close to succeeding.

My lungs are on fire by the time I return to the air pocket, but I am so consumed by panic that I barely notice. I scramble for my axe, intending to use it to enlarge the rapidly-closing hole—I try not to consider how little my lungs are up to the task. But the axe is nowhere to be found, and the flashlight that might help me find it is only a ghost of what it once was—a poor choice of words, considering where I am.

I look around for my frozen companions, now uncomfortably aware of how they had met their fate. The one with arms reaching above the ice has now lost even that much freedom—he is completely submerged. The sitting one, only a step down the slope from where I stand in momentary indecision, has only the upper part of his head revealed. His eyes are still staring at the ceiling but the water makes them appear to be laughing, laughing at me.

The thought renews my panic, and I force my increasingly lethargic body to get moving again, at first in fruitless search of the axe, then in diving at the entrance in the hope that I will prove myself wrong, that I can yet pass through. But all I accomplish is to demonstrate how quickly my body is shutting down. When inevitably I can go no further, I see images of myself as another element of this macabre collection, eventually to calve off into an iceberg and float on to a watery grave.

There is still the hope of a tourist boat. The sun continues its rise; those boats that push all night to be here at first light will soon begin to arrive. I look through the thin wall of ice separating me from the glacier’s edge, willing them to be there even as I know they could not yet be. With no hope of finding the axe, I go at the ice with my fingernails, hoping to gain enough of an opening to force a hand through to wave at the boat when finally it comes. At first I work with a purpose born of panic, but soon the effort dwindles to what can only be described as failing. Around my feet, the water is beginning to crust, although I feel the bite of it less and less--my legs, even while submerged in freezing water, feel warmer than the rest of me. My breathing appears to follow my legs in giving up, slowing even as my upper body continues to shiver. When the crusting of ice builds to such an extent that I am in danger of again feeling pain in my legs, I stop the scraping of ice, not having moved more than an inch of it anyway. Then I halt movement altogether in favor of watching the water below. Watching and waiting.

Then I remember that the sitting corpse was in the process of writing, and I am driven to find out what he was trying to say. It takes me a number of minutes to understand his note, this as much the result of my poor physical condition as the deterioration of his tablet, but soon I am able to interpret his one-word message to a future discoverer: "Run!" My face stretches into a smile of irony even as the rest of me wants only to cry.

I have no time to dwell on this as, when I turn to avoid looking any longer on the dead, I see my long-awaited tourist boat glide into place, the place where I was when I first laid eyes on my sitting corpse. The sun is in place as well; it shines with purpose into my cave, bouncing off not only the walls but off my frozen face—a small part of me is illuminated; if someone is looking, I can yet be saved.

Then I see someone on the upper deck, a middle-aged man staring through binoculars with what I imagine to be quickened interest. It sparks life into my frozen soul, and I try to lift what I can of my arm to wave at him and thus let him know that he is staring at a living being. But I find I can not; I am as immobile as the corpse I had seen from that same boat only a few days ago. I can only watch as the man lowers his binoculars then raises them again quickly, the move leading me to believe he has seen me and will now sound the alarm. But while the former might be true, the latter is not. Instead, he looks around to see how many others have witnessed either the sight of me or his reaction to it--he is pleased when it appears that he has escaped on both counts. I see all this in him as he stares in growing anticipation, the binoculars once again in position. I know exactly what he is thinking: He will do what I so foolishly did--there is space in here for one more specimen.

I watch as a smile creeps over his face.

And I smile in return.

Noel Carroll is a published husband and wife team writing novels and short stories in two genres, Suspense/Thriller and Science Fiction (the latter is soft science with the emphasis being on a good story). Noel, prior to taking up writing full time, served as President and CEO of two U.S. corporations. Carol was first a nurse then an executive in a medically-oriented corporation. They share a love of blue-water sailing and this is often reflected in their writings.

E-mail: noelcarroll@worldnet.att.net

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