The Solitude of Thomas Cave Read Online Free PDF

landscape, clump by clump, bending low or sometimes on his knees, looking up at last in surprise to see how the sky has
turned colour, how suddenly the sun seems to have slipped down to meet the sea of the bay. It aches to straighten up. He puts
downs the sickle and stretches, turns his head in a circular motion to loosen his neck, rubs the muscles of his back where
they run down to his waist. His body has become stiff, it is not as supple as it once was. The colour softens and builds,
a pink glow that reaches right across the sky and the sea by the time he returns to the tent, the good of the day of labour
like a prayer in his heart.
    This first day of my sojourn broke clear and fine, for which the Lord be thanked, and I rose early and set about to gather
     scurvy grass from where I have seen it grow in the lee of the mountain to the south. This I have brought in to the tent and
     spread for drying there.
    No sweetness to its scent as he lays it out but a pungent, sulphurous tang against the smokiness of the atmosphere, the evening
air harsh with frost. When night comes the air is cold, the sky stark and with an icy shimmer to it. I do not expect that I shall find much further
     opportunity for forage.
    He closes his eyes, yawns, the quill in his hands. What more is he to write? Life is very plain when it is reduced to one
day at a time and to that one day's routine of survival. He has worked, returned, begun the arrangement of his stores. On
some pages at the back of the log he sets out a list of the quantity of the stores and begins a calculation of the amounts
to be consumed each week.
    Only three days more the fine weather holds. The last of those days he allots himself for exploration. He has noted how visibility
has become startlingly greater than even on the clearest days of summer, when a party of the whalers had gone inland and followed
the river course back to the falls and climbed the southern of the two sharp peaks that overlooked the bay. He sets himself
the other, northern peak, which is the more rugged, the spinier of the two. So sheer it rises from the beach that he cannot
imagine making an ascent from that side, but only from behind, if he is to walk first to the falls and then along the ridge
above. He has studied this south-eastern face closely, looking for the possibility of a path, thankful for the angle and sharpness
of the morning light which defines and shades each incline, rock and feature of the mountainside as if it were engraved with
a fine point.
    All is so clear. Distance, foreground, everything has detail. The colours in the stones, the green and yellow blooms of lichen,
the stems and reddened leaves of tiny scant plants. The grain of the rock, its cracks and the sharp edges that he can feel
even through his boots and that graze the fingers when he must scramble. The mountainside marbled with black ravines, silvery
watercourses, snowfields of polished whiteness. The valley falling away beneath him, the blackness of the bog and the glistening
of the streams running into it, a tangle of white streaks that weave out and back into one another like the boughs and twigs
of a tree.
    At the summit there is a wind that stings his eyes to tears. The peak is so sharp that he dare not stand full upon it for
more than a second for fear the wind will blow him away. He crouches instead in the lee of a rock, the elation in him holding
him taut as a leopard waiting to pounce. Or a watching eagle. Before his eyes an eagle view: throughout his field of vision,
mountains in the form of flames, burning white with the sun upon them, and beyond in all directions, smooth and blue-white,
a frozen sea.
    It is my opinion that this cannot be East Greenland but an island, a place for which we have no name. Our ships had sailed
     the southern coast and we had thought the land to be a promontory or projection from a greater mainland but yesterday I climbed
     the mountain to the north and discovered