The Broken Lands by Robert Edric Page B

piece of land?” Vesconte said without turning from the horizon. “Are they a single solid, undivided projection north from the mainland?”
    “You think otherwise?” Fitzjames said, turning to look, as though the answer lay visible before them.
    “Pure speculation.” Vesconte walked away from the edge to join the others.
    The island took shape in outline on the sheets of squared paper, and Vesconte showed it to them, pointing out its more easily identifiable features: a small indentation, a rocky promontory, an offshore islet, the partially submerged finger of land reaching out toward Devon.

    By the end of the afternoon almost half the coastline was in place. The rest might have been added with some degree of accuracy without any further measurement, but upon suggesting this, Irving was berated by Vesconte until he raised his hands in surrender.
    To guess, Vesconte told him, even at what they could actually see, would make them no better than those cartographers in the past who had invented islands, rivers, mountains, and even entire lands simply to fill an empty space and appease their own uncontrollable imaginations. Irving apologized, and Vesconte, realizing that he had responded too aggressively, made a quick sketch of him with his hands in the air and suggested that the precipice to which they were then so close should afterward be known as “Irving’s Drop.”
    Irving said he was honored, but declined the offer on the grounds that he would prefer not to have such a noble name associated with something over which a man might walk whistling to his death in a moment of carelessness.
    They ate the food they had brought with them in a sheltered hollow overlooking the ice-filled channel below. Ungloved, their hands were quickly numbed in the cold air of the peak, and when they had finished eating they rubbed grease on their lips. The dog sat at their feet and leapt for scraps. It had grown fat during the voyage and panted at the slightest exertion.
    As they were about to resume their work, Vesconte asked Irving for his mother’s name and then wrote this alongside the islet he had drawn, and which they could see beneath them. “My prerogative,” he said.
    Irving thanked him and said he would write to her about it later that evening.
    It became much cooler as they returned to the ships, walking in a straight line across the top of the island in the hope that a more direct path back down to the shore might reveal itself to them.
    Arriving at a vantage-point over the sea, Vesconte pointed out to them the distant ice which already blocked the channels they had recently sailed, a broad unbroken expanse of it, tinting the sky above with its reflected glare.

    “So soon?” Hodgson said, surprised to see that it had arrived so swiftly and so early.
    All around them the setting sun threw up sudden shadows like small disturbed animals, and as it fell lower they watched the lines of light retreat over the dull brown slope as though they were being mechanically reeled back to their source.
     
    The four men drew up the Articles of the society they had formed, named, at Goodsir’s insistence, the Arctic Quartet, determined to produce a weekly journal throughout the months of their confinement chronicling their shipboard activities and to inform all those who were new to the region on various diverse aspects of it.
    All the positions were self-appointed. Goodsir, the founder, was to be their naturalist; Vesconte was to contribute items of geographical and geological interest; Gore was to compose poetry and music to be read out and played at their meetings and at the lectures they proposed to give; and Fitzjames was to be purveyor of curiosities and penny-philosopher to the group. Reid was invited to become the fifth member of the society, but he declined, offering instead to produce anonymous articles for the journal on the history of the ice. A theater group was also set up, along with classes on reading and writing, to