An Old Captivity (3 page)

The elderly maid came out again, and closed the door softly behind her. “Mr. Lockwood will see you in a little while,” she said primly. “Now, will you wait in here? No, leave your bag there.” She led him to a drawing-room, opened the door, and showed him in. The door was closed carefully behind him.

The drawing-room was unoccupied, and a little cold. It was a large, white room opening with french windows on to a garden. Deep brocaded chairs and settees stood about the room, each cushion uncreased and most beautifully smooth. Ross felt that it would be a social blunder to sit down on any of those chairs. The room itself seemed hardly meant for use. It was too precious. A fine gilded clock under a glass bowl swung a low pendulum upon a pure white marble mantelpiece; in a corner a white marble head of Justinian stood five feet from the ground on a white marble column. A long case of Sèvres china stretched along one wall. A fine oil painting of the Colosseum at sunset occupied another wall. It was a fine, wealthy room, furnished in advanced Victorian taste. It was a room in which one could have entertained royalty, and it looked as if it had never been used for anything else.

The pilot moved over to the window, and looked out into the garden. It was a large suburban garden between high brick walls, with a couple of fine old beech-trees at the end of it. It was infinitely neat and tidy. The flowers stood regimented in the beds in neat array. The lawn was mown and trimmed as primly as a tablecloth. In the shade of the beech-trees two cane chairs and a cane table stood mathematically arranged upon the lawn, with a polished brass ash-tray precisely in the middle of the table. The centre of the lawn was laid out for clock golf, the figures beautifully white.

Ross turned away depressed. He was sensitive to atmosphere, and this atmosphere was far removed from that of flying seaplanes in the north. However, he took a small grain of comfort from one feature of the place. It might be frigid and schoolmasterly, but it was not a poor house. Seaplane-flying cost a lot of money. No one knew that better than Ross.

He waited for some time, puzzled and a little worried.

Presently there was a sound of movements in the hall outside; a door opened and closed. A few minutes later the elderly parlourmaid came to him.

“Would you kindly step this way?”

He followed her out into the hall. She knocked at the study door, waited for a moment, and then showed him in.

Ross went forward into a large room. The walls were lined with books and the furniture was dark, but the room was light and airy from very large windows opening on to the garden. A man got up from the desk and came to meet him, a man about fifty-five or sixty years of age. For his years he was a well-set-up man, tall and broad-shouldered, with iron-grey hair thin on the top but still not bald. He was clean-shaven, with a firm, slightly humorous expression; he wore rimless glasses.

He came towards Ross, holding the glasses in one hand.

“Ross? Good afternoon—I’m sorry you had to wait so long. It’s Captain Ross, I suppose?”

The pilot shook his head. “Plain Mr. Ross,” he replied. “I was only a flying officer.”

Lockwood said vaguely: “Oh, really? I thought all you flying people were captains.” He motioned to a chair. “You’ve been very prompt in coming down. I only wrote to the—the—er—the Guild or something or other yesterday. Or was it the day before? No, it was yesterday.”

Ross smiled. “I was very interested when I heard what you had written to them.”

“Capital—capital. Have you had tea, Mr. Ross?”

The pilot hesitated. “Well, I haven’t. But don’t bother about that for me. I don’t often take it.”

The other pulled a watch, a silver hunter, from the pocket of his rather shabby waistcoat, opened it in his palm, and looked at it. “Oh, it’s only six o’clock.” He rang the bell; the parlourmaid appeared almost immediately. “Tea,” he said. He turned to Ross. “Do you like Indian or China tea, Mr. Ross?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I like Indian. But it really doesn’t matter.”

“Indian for Mr. Ross, Emily, and China for me.”

He made the pilot sit in a deep leather chair, and sank
down himself into the chair at his desk. “I understand that you know all about aeroplanes, Mr. Ross,” he said conversationally.

The pilot said cautiously: “I’ve been messing about in them for quite a while. I was in the Air Force for five years, mostly in Iraq. Since then I’ve been flying for the last four years in Canada.”

“In Canada? How interesting.”

Ross had nothing to say to that.

The don put on his glasses. “Well, now let’s get to business.” He bent down, pulled open one of the drawers of his desk, and took out a large, untidy portfolio. He put this on the desk before him and opened it; it was stuffed with a great mass of manuscript. He turned these papers over talking half to himself as he did so. “There are several things here that I must show you presently. But this—no, this—and where is the other one? Where can it be? Here we are. These two will do to start with.”

He thrust two large photographs across the desk to Ross. “Now, what do you make of those?”

The pilot took them in silence. One was an air view of a field, taken vertically downwards from about two thousand feet, with a bit of a wood across one corner of the area. There was nothing on the photograph to show where it was. The other was an oblique downwards view taken from a lower altitude, possibly from a hill-top, of a barren-looking stretch of land running into the sea at a little promontory. Again there was no information on the print.

The pilot looked at these two photographs in silence, and his heart sank. It was clear that he was expected to say something intelligent, and at first glance he could think of nothing to say. They were just photographs. He was no good at puzzle pictures, but he couldn’t say that. He scrutinised them in silence; there must be something in the prints to connect them with each other, or they would not have been given to him together. Presently he remarked:

“I don’t know what these are of course, I see there seems to be a similar pattern here. The lumps and ridges in this
field make a sort of cross in double lines with a circular thing in the middle. And in this other one there seems to be the same pattern, in a kind of way. Is that what you mean?”

Lockwood smiled gently, and took the photographs from him, scrutinising them himself. “You have remarkably sharp eyes, Mr. Ross. But I suppose you must be very well accustomed to air photography?”

Ross hesitated. “I’ve done about a hundred hours of survey flying. But I’m not a skilled photographer—I only did the flying. I’ve seen a good bit of it, of course.”

The other nodded. “You must have done. Very few people see the connection between these photographs at first sight.”

He raised his head, and stared at the pilot over the top of his glasses. He held up one of the photographs. “This one of the field is the remains of the Celtic monastery of Imchuin, near Galway, in Ireland.” He held up the other. “This one is a part of Brattalid.”

Ross asked: “Where is that?”

“It was the original centre of the Eastern Settlement of the Norwegians, in Greenland.”

He mused over the photographs. “Imchuin was completed in the year 932,” he said. “According to the Landnamabok the Norwegians went to Greenland fifty years later.”

There was a silence. Ross hesitated to break it, afraid of speaking foolishly. He had never heard of the Landnamabok. He sat in his chair trying to work out what the don was driving at; presently he ventured:

“Do you mean that there is a connection between Galway and Greenland? Is that what these photographs show?”

The don stared at him over his glasses. “It may be so. But what sort of connection?”

The pilot shook his head. “I don’t know anything about these things. But I suppose these marks in the field in the one print, and on the moor-in the other—I suppose those are the walls of ruined buildings, aren’t they?”

“So I think.”

“I don’t know if I’m speaking out of turn. But if the buildings are the same design, I suppose the same folks might have built the one as built the other.”

Lockwood eyed him keenly. “In a very few words, Mr. Ross, that is the suspicion.” He took up the Brattalid photograph and thrust it across the desk. “There’s nothing Nordic about that. Pure Celtic, every line of it. Look at it for yourself.”

The pilot took it diffidently. “I suppose that is so.”

The other leaned his arms upon the desk. “The early Irish, Mr. Ross, were very much greater travellers than is generally supposed. They had a civilisation, forms of religion, and a culture far in advance of this country at that time. Their literature—they had a great literature—is full of references to the Happy Lands. Aircthech, the beautiful place, which lay far out over the Atlantic to the west. The Elysian Fields, Mr. Ross—the land beyond the sunset, where everything was clean and good, and happy. It was a cardinal part of their beliefs that such a place existed. They were always trying to find it, always sailing out into the sea in search of it.”

He was silent for a moment; when he spoke again it was in a softer tone. “They never found it, Mr. Ross. They found Iceland. That was not the place they were looking for, but they built towns there, and monasteries, Mr. Ross—monasteries.” He paused. “Did they go further, and find Greenland? There’s our problem.”

He picked up the Brattalid print again. “And now we have this photograph. One little piece of evidence, taken almost by chance. It was by the merest chance it came to me. But there it is. It’s like a little chink of light in a dark room, seen through the crack of a door.” He eyed the pilot steadily. “I’m going to pull that door a little wider open, Mr. Ross. There’s something waiting here to be found out.”

There was a silence in the study after that. Absently the pilot took a cigarette packet from his pocket, pulled one out, and lit it mechanically. Suddenly he was confused.
“I’m so sorry,” he said awkwardly. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“By all means.” The older man picked up a battered half-smoked pipe himself and lit it.

Ross said: “What do you want to do?”

The don blew out his match, and puffed a cloud of smoke from his foul pipe. Presently he said: “Archæology to-day depends upon air photographs. I want an air survey made of the entire Brattalid district—say, forty miles long by fifteen miles wide. While that is going on I want to spend a month upon the site myself.”

“I see. Where is this place Brattalid?”

“About seventy miles north-west of Julianehaab. Not far from Cape Desolation.”

“Oh.” There was a momentary silence. “That’s on the south-west coast, isn’t it?”

“That is so.”

They sat and smoked in silence for a time; the pilot stared at the books upon the wall in front of him. It was not the job that he had thought it would be. There would be none of the good young fellowship that he had looked forward to, nor would there even be the comradeship of a commercial company. It would be a lone-hand expedition; he would be a sort of private pilot, engaged for a relatively short job. But what a job! Already he could see that the whole work of the expedition would inevitably fall on him. He would have to do everything—organisation, flying, photography—every single thing except the archaeology. He knew from his experience that the work would be immensely hard, the responsibility enormous, and the danger to life quite considerable. He had too long an experience of the north to undertake this lightly.

His mind went off at a tangent, and he said: “Didn’t you say this was the Eastern Settlement?”

“Yes.”

“Cape Desolation’s on the west side of Greenland.”

“I know. But the early Norwegians called it the Eastern Settlement, all the same. There was another up the coast to
the north-west, by Godthaab—they called that the Western Settlement.”

“I see.”

There was another silence. Presently Ross said: “When do you want to go?”

“This summer. I am told that August is the best month for weather. I want to be there for the whole of August.”

The pilot raised his eyebrows. “You’ve left mighty little time for preparation. It’s the middle of May now.”

“Is that so short a time? I should have thought that it was ample.”

The pilot shook his head. “It’s very short.” He thought about it for a minute. “How do you propose to get the machine out there? Put it on a boat, or fly it out?”

The don looked at him uncertainly. “I’m afraid I really hadn’t thought about it. The boats are so very irregular—I had assumed that we should fly out in the machine.”

Ross thought of the pack ice off the Greenland coast, and thought grimly to himself that this was going to be a lot of fun. He nodded slowly, and said aloud: “How many of us will there be?”

Lockwood hesitated. “I should like to take an assistant, but he isn’t really essential. The basic points are—I must go myself, and we must get a good set of photographs. Then, during the winter I can study the air photographs, in preparation for a digging party next year.” He paused. “This air survey is really a preliminary to the main work, which will be next year.”

Ross nodded. “I see.”

Presently he said: “Have you considered at all what a survey like this is going to cost?”

The archaeologist shook his head. “I really have very little idea. How much would it cost?”

Ross had to think quickly. He liked Lockwood, in spite of the fact that the don was grossly ignorant of what he was proposing. The pilot could see a mass of difficulties ahead already. Still, he liked the man and he liked the idea of the expedition; in spite of all the difficulties and dangers, he
would like to have a crack at it. He did not want to kill the proposition at this stage by giving an inflated cost. What would it run out to, now? He would have to have a single-engined cabin seaplane. He could pick up a Bellanca or a Cosmos second-hand in Canada for five or six thousand dollars in that time of slump—not much to look at, but sound enough, Petrol, oil, shipping the seaplane and erecting it, moorings to be laid at all the harbours they would visit—the camera, and all the photographic gear; the making up of the mosaic from a couple of thousand photographs. He calculated quickly in his head.