The ice sphinx
The Eissphinx (also Lost in the Arctic Ocean , The Adventure of Tom Jeorling or The South Pole Reached ) is a fantastic novel by the French author Jules Verne . The original edition appeared in 1897 in the Pierre-Jules Hetzel publishing house in Paris under the French title Le Sphinx des glaces . Volume I appeared on June 24, 1897 and volume II on November 11, 1897. The German-language edition appeared in 1898 under the title Die Eissphinx .
The book is the "sequel" of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket . In this, Pym and the seaman Dirk Peters are shipwrecked as a result of a mutiny with their ship Grampus , are forced to cannibalism and finally reach the Southern Ocean with a second ship, the Jane Guy , where they come into contact with natives on the island of Tsalal everything white is alien. The crew of the Jane is ambushed by the natives and mostly killed, only Pym and Peters manage to escape in a boat of the natives. They get further and further south and, as they approach the South Pole, come across a mysterious wall of smoke and a gigantic, snow-white figure - at this point Arthur Gordon Pym's report breaks off.
action
1st volume
The action takes place in 1839, a year after Poe's book was published and eleven years after the Antarctic disaster.
Jeorling , a wealthy American , has done private studies on the Kerguelen and, annoyed by boredom, is waiting for a ship to take him back home. Len Guy , the captain of the first sailing ship to call at the archipelago after winter, is reluctant to give Jeorling a passage on his half-raft to Tristan da Cunha . On the way there they find the corpse of a sailor on a drifting iceberg, whom his notes identify as a member of the Jane's crew . Apparently, their captain William Guy and a few of his men survived the attack on Tsalal.
Len Guy, who previously mentioned Poe's book to Jeorling, identifies himself as William's brother and wants to use the half-crane for a rescue expedition . Jeorling stays on board when the crew calls at the Falkland Islands to equip the ship. A certain Hunt , a mestizo , joins the crew here and wants to join the trip to the south.
Favorable weather allows the Halbrane to quickly break through the pack ice belt, behind which they find ice-free water and a mild climate, as described by Pym. They find Bennet's island and finally Tsalal himself without any major problems.
The island has changed a lot from Pym's description. After an apparently recent natural disaster, it appears as if it had been plowed up and is uninhabited. There is also nothing left of the rock carvings that Pym reported. There is no trace of the Jane Guy people except the collar and the remains of Pym's dog, Tiger. Numerous skeletons that can be found on the island come from natives, but they must have died long before the catastrophe.
2nd volume
Guy decides not to give up, but to look for his brother further south. Part of the crew with a certain Hearne as spokesman wants to refuse and can only be changed by the prospect of a high bonus.
As the Halbrane drives further south, it turns out that Hunt is none other than Dirk Peters : He and Pym were separated on their journey south, and only Peters returned with Pym's diary, which was eventually published heavily embellished by Poe. Peters definitely wants to find Pym again. He assumed the false identity out of shame about the cannibalism committed on the Grampus .
The half-crane eventually runs into an iceberg and is lost. With only one boat left, too small to take all the survivors, but enough supplies, Guy and his people are doomed to passively drift with the iceberg. After they even passed the South Pole and drifted north again, the iceberg was stranded within the pack ice belt on a previously unknown land mass. On this coast, the sailors prepare for a winter break when Hearne and his men steal the remaining boat and want to escape on their own.
A little later a boat in the style of the natives drifts past the camp of the half-crane men . Peters reacts first, jumps into the water and secures the boat. To everyone's surprise, he finds William Guy and his people, exhausted and half-starved, making a desperate attempt to escape north.
They say that soon after the attack on Tsalal (but only after Pym and Peters had escaped), Pym's dog, Tiger, who had obviously become rabid, reappeared. He bit the natives aggressively, among whom the previously unknown disease quickly spread. The surviving natives fled to the neighboring islands so that William Guy and his crew could live undisturbed on Tsalal until an earthquake devastated the island. Since the neighboring islands were also devastated, Guy's people had no choice but to try the drive north.
The Jane's men are nursed to health, then they all decide to venture north on the native boat. Along the way, they encounter strange magnetic phenomena that culminate in the “ice sphinx ”, a boulder similar to a sphinx that has been immensely “charged” by the sun's particle streams focused on the poles by the earth's magnetic field .
Here you will find the corpses of Hearne and his men, for whom the incredibly strong magnetic field of the ice sphinx was their undoing: The iron parts of their boat were attracted by the sphinx until it shattered on their rocks. Guy and the others only avoid this fate because their native boat was built without any metal parts.
At the feet of the ice sphinx you will also find the body of Pyms, who died after the metal of the musket he was wearing was magnetically attracted. Pym could no longer free himself from the ice sphinx and died miserably. Peters literally dies of grief on the spot.
The survivors continue the voyage without major further incidents, finally reach the open sea and are rescued by the American three-master Tasman , which brings them to Melbourne .
"Plot Hole"
Pym's dog, Tiger , is no longer mentioned in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket after Pym and Peters overpowered the mutineers on the Grampus ; it can be assumed that he was killed in the storm that followed.
Since he appears again in this book on Tsalal, he must have survived with Pym and Peters. That would in turn mean that the castaways - when the supplies on the wreck of the Grampus ran out - would rather sacrifice and eat one of their own than kill and eat the dog.
literature
- Heinrich Pleticha (ed.): Jules Verne manual . Deutscher Bücherbund / Bertelsmann, Stuttgart and Munich 1992.
- Volker Dehs and Ralf Junkerjürgen: Jules Verne . Voices and interpretations of his work. Fantastic Library Wetzlar, Wetzlar 2005.
- Volker Dehs: Jules Verne . Jules Verne. A critical biography. Artemis & Winkler, Düsseldorf 2005. ISBN 3-538-07208-6
Web links
- The Eissphinx as an e-book in HTML on zeno.org
- The ice sphinx in Andreas Fehrmann's Jules Verne Collection