Washington’s meeting with Peter Haas in Amsterdam turns a search for Titch into a second, uncertain pursuit. Peter confirms that Titch survived the Arctic and had visited him, but he is gone again; the encounter offers Washington not the reunion he sought, but a destination, a device, and renewed reason to travel.

Arrival and Recognition

Peter’s appearance makes the northern past suddenly present. His eyes are stark grey, his thin hands marked by dark veins, and the brown moles on his pale face are the same ones Washington remembers from the cold plains. When Peter embraces him, the old man’s hold is weak, his clothes smell of wet wool, and the contact carries Washington back to the snow and its obliterating whiteness. Recognition here is bodily as much as visual: the familiar face collapses the distance between Amsterdam and the Arctic.

Peter does not speak aloud. He signs with urgent movements, while his son voices his words in a thick Dutch accent: Washington has survived. The mediation unsettles Washington, who hears Peter’s meaning coming from across the room through another person’s voice. The scene thus makes reunion inseparable from change: Peter is recognizable, yet his means of communicating have altered, and the younger Haas now stands between father and visitor as interpreter.

News of Titch

The meeting does not produce the long-awaited reunion with Titch. Peter explains that he came to Amsterdam about a year and a half earlier and stayed for several weeks, but has since gone. The absence is sharpened by the failed correspondence: Peter says he received no letters and finds it strange that they should all have gone astray. Neither side can explain their disappearance, leaving the lost messages as a practical and emotional gap between the men.

Washington asks specifically where Titch went in the snow on the day he disappeared and how he survived. Peter says they finally discussed it during Titch’s visit, but the recollection does not provide a complete account of the Arctic disappearance. Instead, it leads to Titch’s later preoccupation: he had become absorbed in capturing images on paper, speaking about sunlight burning faces onto paper and calling the results shadow grams. Peter found the ideas frenzied and not entirely intelligible, and thought Titch exhausted. The explanation gives Washington evidence of Titch’s continuing scientific fixation without resolving what happened to him or why he left.

Peter’s latest letter places Titch in Morocco, on the outskirts of Marrakesh. It had arrived some eight weeks earlier, and Peter believes Titch may still be there because he had calculated carefully where the project should be undertaken. The destination is concrete, but the prospect remains uncertain: Peter cannot promise that Titch is in a state of mind to reply, and Washington and Tanna initially say they are not going to Morocco.

The Instrument and the Unfinished Search

Peter nevertheless gives Washington a large wooden case, asking him to take it if he seeks Titch. He says it might help with the work, though he only partly understood Titch’s plans. Washington resists, pointing out that they have no intention of going to Morocco and suggesting that Peter keep it. Peter insists that the instrument would be wasted in his own care, and that his son is no man of science. The case turns Peter’s account into a tangible handoff: the visit does not reunite Washington and Titch, but leaves Washington holding an object meant for the absent man.

The event therefore advances the search by stages rather than completing it. Peter confirms that Titch survived the Arctic, establishes that he later returned to Amsterdam, and supplies Morocco as his last known destination. At the same time, lost letters and Peter’s uncertain grasp of Titch’s plans preserve substantial gaps. The instrument carries those gaps forward, making the next encounter possible without guaranteeing it.

Narrative Significance

The Amsterdam episode binds survival to absence. Peter’s body and his recollections give Washington a living connection to the northern ordeal, but the man he most wants to find has already passed through and disappeared again. The repeated movement from recognition to missing information keeps the search unresolved: Washington finds one survivor, learns that another has left, and receives only a provisional lead.

The exchange also brings communication and observation into focus. Peter’s son gives voice to his father’s signs, lost letters have failed to connect the characters, and Titch’s image-making project is reported secondhand as a difficult-to-follow pursuit of light and faces. The wooden case, entrusted to Washington despite his refusal, becomes the scene’s most concrete promise: a means of carrying knowledge toward Titch even when his whereabouts and intentions remain uncertain.