town that had once shone whitely among green parks and avenues was now hard to map, for the grey sheltering hoods merged with the tundra so that we were looking down at an agglomeration of humps and protuberances that seemed as if the earth had grown them. Some of the taller buildings stood up sharp and dark, but the upper parts had collapsed in the blizzards, and had a splintered appearance. There were only small movements in the streets; few of the people went out of their dwellings now unless they had to. They had become a passive huddling population, sullen with inactivity, sullenly patient. They were waiting.
They waited for the moment when we would all be swept up and away from our dour frigid land to the paradise of Rohanda. Crouching inside low, dark, ill-smelling buildings, where all effort had become slowed and difficult with the cold, they waited. And, standing high there on that ice cliff above them, we peered through the dim skies and searched for Canopus, for the wonderful spaceships of our Saviour and Maker Canopus.
Where was Canopus? Why did they delay so, and make us wait and suffer and wonder, and doubt our survival? Make us disbelieve in ourselves and in them? What was the reason for it? Yes, they had warned us, and made us prepare ourselves, and they had prescribed our barrier wall, and they had taught us how to change our habits – it seemed sometimes as if this was a change to our very beings, our inner selves – and they had flown in this amazing substance that could clothe towns as if they were people. But we were not saved, not being rescued; and everywhere our peoples degenerated and became thieves and sometimes murderers, and there seemed no end to it all.
We voiced what we were thinking, that shivering morning, up on the ice cliff, we Representatives … fifty of us there were, and every activity or duty or work that we did (that was left to us now) was delineated there, by us. And as we stood there, looking into faces that were only just visible behind deep edges of shaggy fur, we could see the manifold purposes and uses of the old time, where now was –over and over again – Representative for Housing and Sheltering, Representative for Food, Representative for Conserving Warmth. And variations on these basic needs.
For we were keeping, and in a conscious effort, our knowledge of our own possibilities, our potential for the future, which had been so amply demonstrated in the past. We were not merely these shivering animals, concerned only with how to keep ourselves warm, keep ourselves fed – not just what we could see as we huddled there, trying to keep our footing as the wind tugged and shoved at us. No, we were still what we had been, and would be again … and where was Canopus, who would restore us to ourselves?
Again we made the journey around our planet, this time at the foot of the wall or cliff, not on it, as this was no longer possible because of its load of pressing ice. We stumbled through snowdrifts or over frozen earth, and our eyes were turned always to the right, for we kept the sun in front of us as much as we could – our poor weakened pallid sun which seemed now almost to be absorbing heat from us, rather than warming and nurturing us. Our eyes were at work at every moment on the surface of the wall, or cliff, for we feared very much that it would give way altogether. But so far, while every little part of it was crazed and crumbling, there were no large cracks in it. It was holding. This journey took us twice as long as when we had travelled with Canopus, and we were cold and torpid, and felt the need to sleep. Sleep … sleep … our minds found refuge there, and the need to lose ourselves in oblivion was a torment. We would sit pressed together, as soon as the light went, in some place where the snowdrifts were not so deep, with our backs to the great barrier, and we ate our tasteless and disagreeable dried meat, or roots of the half-frozen rushes: and we dozed there as if we were one organism, not many – as if our separate unique individualities had become another burden that had to be shed, like unnecessary movement. Yet we were in movement … alone of our peoples we felt some kind of restlessness, which had made us take this journey. While they dozed and dreamed away this long waiting time heaped together in their dark and frigid homes, we were still feeling a need to press on from place to place, as if elsewhere we could come on something that might aid us.
It was on that journey, while we huddled together as the light went, that one of us – Marl, he who had once been the expert breeder of now extinct animals – did not settle down immediately with the rest of us, but piled a snowdrift higher with his hands, making a windbreak that would save us from some discomfort. Marl had always been a strong and well-built man, and even now was able to move with some lightness and purpose, his movements precise, a pleasure to watch. We were watching: saw in that face, thinned as all our faces were, a concentration and an effort that brought us all up again to our feet – to determination, to self-discipline. And that night and the succeeding nights we all built walls, which grew higher, so that we sheltered deep inside a circle of piled snow that grew inwards at its top; and soon we spent our nights inside domes of packed snow. These on calmer nights remained firm above and around us, but when the blizzards came they blew away into the storm. And so we learned to pack the snow hard into massive pieces and piled them up; and knew that we had found a way of making some kind of dwelling for our homeless ones, who could not any longer stay in the tall buildings, and who were so unwelcome in the overcrowded households. Masson, the chief of the Representatives for Housing and Sheltering, was at work throughout the journey, mostly with Marl, packing snow this, way and that way, using chunks of ice as strengtheners, experimenting with apertures and placing them high and low – finally making short tunnels that we crept along into the snowhouses, so that our bodies’ heat would not be wasted.
So that journey accomplished more than only making sure our wall still stood firm and whole. And we were reminded that effort of one kind often brings as a reward accomplishments and knowledge that have not been envisaged at all. And we returned to our various hometowns and settlements with the determination to rouse our torpid peoples to effort – effort almost of any sort.
I, and Marl, and Klin, he who had once brought into being so many delightful varieties of fruit, and the girl Alsi, went around and about and in and out of dwellings and households, exhorting and talking, and pleading.
How many times did I enter a dark building, where a small glow of light lit up what seemed like a herd of beasts asleep on the floor. But they were our people, deep inside the animal pelts; and faces lifted unwillingly from under covering arms, or out of hoods of fur, and eyes watched me as I strode about, trying to impress on them that vigorous movement was indeed still possible. The eyes moved slowly, their gleam being extinguished at every moment as sleep closed them, then I saw them glitter again … it was like coming at dusk on a hillside where a herd of our great beasts had lain down to rest and, seeing us come near, they lifted their heads and stared, wondering if this time we were a danger, and then, deciding not, the shine of many pairs of eyes vanished as they turned away the great heavily horned heads. Oh, it was so stuffy and unpleasant in our dwellings now! How I disliked having to make my way into them, and stand there, trying to look alert and awake, when the foetid atmosphere, the general torpor, the cold, dulled my mind and made me want only to lie down with them all and sleep away my life – until Canopus came.
‘Is Canopus here yet?’ – I heard, everywhere, from these dark smelly interiors, and this anxious needy cry seemed to ring in my ears all the time as I went about my work.
We had managed to arouse enough young and strong people to extend the sheds and runs where Alsi was breeding the snow animals. These covered a large area near our town; and the system Alsi had worked out was in operation in all our towns. Being creatures of the cold, they did not need much shelter. We provided for them something like the caves which we believed were their original breeding places, made out of rock and piled with lichens and moss. The animals were kept in bounds by walls of the half-frozen earth of the tundra. They were now as important a source of food as the herds of great beasts. Feeding them was a problem we did not expect to solve. Vegetable matter of some sort was what they had to have, and their need for it competed with ours. They had learned to accept a diet of lichens, mosses, and the new kinds of low-growing tough plants that now were the planet’s chief vegetation. But these were what we too were eating, made into broths and stews of all kinds, when we could not stand for one more minute the monotony of meat.
