The Left Hand of Darkness: Chapters 16-20

To our east a smaller glacier comes down to a frozen lake, but it runs curving and even from here the great crevasses in it can be seen; it is impassable to us, equipped as we are.

Eskichwe rem ir Her hypothesized that the volcanic activity in N.W. Orgoreyn and the Archipelago has been increasing during the last ten or twenty millennia, and presages the end of the Ice, or at least a recession of it and an interglacial period.

Ai says that similar theories have been propounded by Terran scholars to explain the still incomplete recession of their last Age of Ice.

Worms of fire crawl down its black sides, seen when wind clears off the roil and seethe of ash-cloud and smoke-cloud and white steam.

Worms of fire crawl down its black sides, seen when wind clears off the roil and seethe of ash-cloud and smoke- cloud and white steam.

Continuously, with no pause, a hissing mutter fills the air, so huge and so long a sound that one cannot hear it when one stops to listen; yet it fills all the interstices of one’s being.

It was dark all day, as the wind veering around from the west again blew the pall of Drumner’s smoke on us.

The waxing moon is low, dull as dry blood; a great brownish, iridescent halo surrounds it.

It’s extremely hard to separate the innate differences from the learned ones.

We eat, Ai says, ethereally.

We had to haul the sledge up and over each knife-edged or fantastically corniced top, then slide her down, and up over the next one: for they never seemed to run parallel to our course.

I hated the harsh, intricate, obstinate demands that he made on me in the name of life.

When there was a blizzard, needles of icy air blew in through the vents, elaborately protected as they were, and an impalpable dust of snow-motes fogged the air.

As he did so he murmured a short and charming grace of invocation, the only ritual words I had ever learned of the Handdara: “Praise then darkness and Creation unfinished,” he said, and there was darkness.

He assented, and kept his word.

But after dinner Estraven grew taciturn, and cut my talk off short.

I said at last after a direct rebuff, “Harth, I’ve said something wrong again, please tell me what it is.”

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love.

I recalled what I could of how I had been educed, at age twelve.

So it was with my people for thousands of years. A few natural Sensitives, not comprehending their gift, and lacking anyone to receive from or send to. All the rest latent, if that.

Young children, and defectives, and members of unevolved or regressed societies, can’t mindspeak. The mind must exist on a certain plane of complexity first.

I felt his sleep as if it were my own: the emphatic bond was there, and once more I bespoke him, sleepily, by his name—”Therem!”

I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily.

I knew he could: the rapport was there, or as the experts have it, the phases were consonant, and of course he had as yet no idea of how to raise the barrier voluntarily.

So that intimacy of mind established between us was a bond, indeed, but an obscure and austere one, not so much admitting further light (as I had expected it to) as showing the extent of the darkness.

But a few weeks after these exchanges, the Envoy appears in North Karhide, having escaped from Pulefen Farm. Consternation in Mishnory, indignation in Erhenrang. Loss of face for the Commensals, caught lying.

Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political: it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical.

I thought my eyes were fooling me, as they had been doing often, and paid scant attention to the dim meaningless commotion of the air until, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of a small, wan, dead sun overhead.

As the ice was heavily corrugated, I was pushing while Estraven pulled; I had my eyes on the sledge and was shoving away, mind on nothing but how best to shove, when all at once the bar was nearly wrenched out of my grip as the sledge shot forward in a sudden lunge.

For hours one of us hauled while the other guided, mincing along like a cat on eggshells, sounding every step in advance with the stick.

It lightened the heart, though we were too rundown to be able to show our relief in alacrity or zest of movement.

Benighted, contentious, passionate, ignorant souls, countryfolk of a poor land, their generosity gave a noble ending to that hard journey.

Benighted, contentious, passionate, ignorant souls, countryfolk of a poor land, their generosity gave a noble ending to that hard journey.

If Estraven’s own clan had cast him out he would be a suspect character, but the king’s strictures were unimportant.

On our journey Estraven had lost all the smooth, compact solidity that marks the Gethenian physique; he was gaunt and scarred, and his face was burned by cold almost as by fire.

His voice, when he spoke very softly as now, did have much the timbre of a woman’s voice, husky and unresonant.

He told it as only a person of an oral-literature tradition can tell a story, so that it became a saga, full of traditional locutions and even episodes, yet exact and vivid...

When Estraven asked him if he had any idea as to a hiding place, some deserted or isolated farm where a banished man might lie low for a month or two in hopes of a revocation of his exile, Thessicher at once said, “Stay with me.”

Estraven’s eyes lit up at that, but he demurred; and agreeing that he might not be safe so near Sassinoth, Thessicher promised to find him a hideout.

The rising sun, small and cold in a bright sky, sent shadows westward from every break and hummock in the snow.

I can’t recall those nights, but do remember saying to him, and hearing the querulous keening note in my own voice, “He could have stopped. He saw the guards. He ran right into the guns.”

It is the abdication from option, the act of betrayal itself.

Secrecy in Karhide is to an extraordinary extent a matter of discretion, of an agreed, understood silence—an omission of questions, yet not an omission of answers.

In Karhide the fall of a government is most likely to mean the disgrace and replacement of a prime minister along with a reshuffling of the kyorremy; although assassination, abdication, and insurrection are all frequent alternatives.

Political careers in Karhide are abrupt, precipitous.

Everything was arranged expeditiously, with ease.

“Why the devil did he cheat me?” he demanded in his high strident voice, and for the first time looked straight at me.

A queer lot to vie for the honor of receiving...Tell Lord Gorchern, the chamberlain, how they expect to be received. See to it that there’s no offense or omission.

She came down in a roar and glory, and steam went roaring up white as her stabilizers went down in the great lake of water and mud created by the retro; down underneath the bog there was permafrost like granite, and she came to rest balanced neatly, and sat cooling over the quickly refreezing lake, a great, delicate fish balanced on its tail, dark silver in the twilight of Winter.

She was frosted already by the interhull coolants, and as I approached the high port slid open and the exitway was extruded, a graceful curve down onto the ice.