Servants of the Map
Servants of the Map
Andrea Barrett
A national hardback bestseller in the US – another magnificently imagined and executed book of historical fiction with a contemporary twist, from one of the masters of the form. ‘These stories possess a wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers.' New York TimesRanging across two centuries, and from the western Himalayas to an Adirondack village, Servants of the Map travels the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.A mapper of the highest mountain peaks, engaged on the trigonometrical measurement of British India, realizes his true obsession while in deflationary correspondence with his far-off wife. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Barrett’s most characteristic theme – the happenings in that borderland between science and desire – unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings.
SERVANTS
OF THE MAP
Andrea Barrett
FOR MY FAMILY
Contents
Cover (#ua6ea49cd-3edd-5939-840e-5b140e15069f)
Title Page (#u1757a32b-c7f5-5869-b82b-88a2c0f27f36)
Servants of the Map (#u4e0dd712-aae8-5c0e-9a22-f302eb9c4dab)
The Forest (#ua7864d39-7246-50bd-ab75-45ba3c899951)
Theories of Rain (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Rivers (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mysteries of Ubiquitin (#litres_trial_promo)
The Cure (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Andrea Barrett (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Servants of the Map. (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Servants of the Map (#ulink_c6acff53-2c84-5368-ad13-6a9a9752815b)
1
HE DOES NOT WRITE to his wife about the body found on a mountain that is numbered but still to be named: not about the bones, the shreds of tent, the fragile, browning skull. He says nothing about the diary wedged beneath the rock, or about how it felt to turn the rippled pages. Unlike himself, the surveyor thinks, the lost man traveled alone. Not attached to a branch, however small and insignificant, of the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India. On this twig charged to complete the Kashmir Series, he is nothing. A leaf, an apricot, easily replaced; a Civil Junior Sub-Assistant in the Himalayan Service.
The surveyor, whose name is Max Vigne, reads through the diary before relinquishing it to his superiors. The handwriting trembled in the final pages, the entries growing shorter and more confused. Hailstorms, lightning storms, the loss of a little shaving mirror meant to send a glinting signal from the summit to the admiring crowds below—after noting these, the lost man wrote:
I have been fasting. Several weeks—the soul detaches from the flesh. The ills of spirit and body are washed away and here on the roof of the world, in the abode of snow, one becomes greatly strengthened yet as fresh as a child.
Although Max pauses in wonder over these lines, he still doesn’t share them with his wife. Instead he writes:
April 13, 1863
Dear Clara—
I can hardly understand where I am myself, how shall I explain it to you? Try to imagine the whole chain of the Himalaya, as wide as England and four times its length. Then imagine our speck of a surveying party tucked in the northwest corner, where the Great Himalaya tangles into the Karakoram—or not quite there, but almost there. We are at the edge of the land called Baltistan, or Little Tibet: Ladakh and Greater Tibet lie to the east. And it is so much more astonishing than we imagined. The mountains I wrote to you about earlier, which we crossed to enter the Vale of Kashmir—everything I said about them was true, they dwarf the highest peaks I saw at home. But the land I am headed toward dwarfs in turn the range that lies behind me. Last Wednesday, after breakfast, the low clouds lifted and the sun came out. To the north a huge white mass remained, stretching clear across the horizon. I was worried about an approaching storm. Then I realized those improbable masses were mountains, shimmering and seeming to float over the plains below.
How I wish you could see this for yourself. I have had no mail from you since Srinagar, but messengers do reach us despite our frequent moves and I am hopeful. This morning I opened an envelope from the little trunk you sent with me. Have any of my letters reached you yet? If they have, you will know how much your messages have cheered me. No one but you, my love, would have thought to do this. On the ship, then during our tedious journey across the plains to the Pir Panjal; and even more throughout the weeks of preparation and training in Srinagar, your words have been my great consolation. I wait like a child on Christmas Eve for the dates you have marked on each envelope to arrive: I obey you, you see; I have not cheated. Now that the surveying season has finally begun and we’re on the move, I treasure these even more. I wish I had thought to leave behind a similar gift for you. The letters I wrote you from Srinagar—I know the details about my work could not have been of much interest to you. But I mean to do better, now that we’re entering this astonishing range. If I share with you what I see, what I feel: will that be a kind of gift?
Yours marked to be opened today, the anniversary of that wonderful walk along the Ouse when I asked you to marry me and, against a background of spinning windmills and little boys searching for eels, you stood so sleek and beautiful and you said “yes”—it made me remember the feel of your hand in mine, it was like holding you. I am glad you plan to continue with your German. By now you must have opened the birthday gifts I left for you. Did you like the dictionary? And the necklace?
I should try to catch you up on our journeys of these last few weeks. From Srinagar we labored over the Gurais pass, still knee-deep in snow: my four fellow plane-tablers, the six Indian chainmen, a crowd of Kashmiri and Baiti porters, and Michaels, who has charge of us for the summer. Captain Montgomerie of the Bengal Engineers, head of the entire Kashmir Series, we have not seen since leaving Srinagar. I am told it is his habit to tour the mountains from April until October, inspecting the many small parties of triangulators and plane-tablers, of which we are only one. The complexities of the Survey’s organization are beyond explaining a confusion of military men and civilians, Scots and Irish and English; and then the assistants and porters, all races and castes. All I can tell you is that, although we civilians may rise in the ranks of the Survey, even the most senior of us may never have charge of the military officers. And I am the most junior of all.
From the top of the pass I saw the mountain called Nanga Parbat, monstrous and beautiful, forty miles away. Then we were in the village of Gurais, where we gathered more provisions and porters to replace those returning to Srinagar. Over the Burzil pass and across the Deosai plateau—it is from here that I write to you, a grassy land populated by chattering rodents called marmots. The air is clear beyond clearness today and to the north rises that wall of snowy summits I first mistook for a cloud: the Karakoram range, which we are to map. Even this far away I can see the massive glaciers explored by Godfrey Vigne, to whom I am so tangentially related.
I wonder what he would have thought of me ending up here? Often people ask if I’m related to that famous man but I deny it; it would be wrong of me, even now that he’s dead, to claim such a distant connection. My eccentric, sometimes malicious supervisor, Michaels (an Irishman and former soldier of the Indian army), persists in calling me “Mr. Vaahn-ya,” in an atrocious French accent. This although I have reminded him repeatedly that ours is a good East Anglian family, even if we do have Huguenot ancestors, and that we say the name “Vine.”
All the men who’ve explored these mountains—what a secret, isolated world this is! A kind of archipelago, sparsely populated, visited now and again by passing strangers; each hidden valley an island unto itself, inhabited by small groups of people wildly distinct from each other—it is as if, at home, a day’s journey in one direction brought us to Germany, another’s to Africa. As if, in the distance between the fens and the moors, there were twenty separate kingdoms. I have more to tell you, so much more, but it is late and I must sleep.
What doesn’t he tell Clara? So much, so much. The constant discomforts of the body, the hardships of the daily climbs, the exhaustion, the loneliness: he won’t reveal the things that would worry her. He restrains himself, a constant battle; the battle itself another thing he doesn’t write about. He hasn’t said a word about the way his fellow surveyors tease him. His youth, his chunky, short-legged frame and terribly white skin; the mop of bright yellow hair on his head and the paucity of it elsewhere: although he keeps up with the best of them, and is often the last to tire, he is ashamed each time they strip their clothes to bathe in a freezing stream or a glacial tarn. His British companions are tall and hairy, browning in the sun; the Indians and Kashmiris and Baltis smoother and slighter but dark; he alone looks like a figure made from snow. The skin peels off his nose until he bleeds. When he extends his hat brim with strips of bark, in an effort to fend off the burning rays, Michaels asks him why he doesn’t simply use a parasol.
Michaels himself is thickly pelted, fleshy and sweaty, strong-smelling and apparently impervious to the sun. They have all grown beards, shaving is impossible; only Max’s is blond and sparse. He gets teased for this and sometimes, more cruelly, for the golden curls around his genitals. Not since he was fourteen, when he first left school and began his apprenticeship on the railway survey, has he been so mocked. Then he had his older brother, Laurence, to protect him. But here he is on his own.
The men are amused not only by his looks, but by his box of books and by the pretty, brass-bound trunk that holds Clara’s precious gift to him: a long series of letters, some written by her and others begged from their family and friends. The first is dated the week after he left home, the last more than a year hence; all are marked to be opened on certain dates and anniversaries. Who but Clara would have thought of this? Who else would have had the imagination to project herself into the future, sensing what he might feel like a week, a month, a year from leaving home and writing what might comfort him then?
His companions have not been so lucky. Some are single; others married but to wives they seem not to miss or perhaps are even relieved to have left behind. A Yorkshireman named Wyatt stole one of Clara’s missives from Max’s camp stool, where he’d left it while fetching a cup of tea. “Listen to this,” Wyatt said: laughing, holding the letter above Max’s head and reading aloud to the entire party. “Max, you must wear your woolly vest, you know how cold you get.” Now the men ask tauntingly, every day, what he’s read from the trunk. He comforts himself by believing that they’re jealous.
A more reliable comfort is his box of books. In it, beyond the mathematical and cartographical texts he needs for his work, are three other gifts. With money she’d saved from the household accounts, Clara bought him a copy of Joseph Hooker’s Himalayan Journals. This Max cherishes for the thought behind it, never correcting her misapprehension that Sikkim, where Hooker traveled in 1848, is only a stone’s throw from where Max is traveling now. At home, with a map, he might have put his left thumb on the Karakoram range and his right, many inches away to the east, on the lands that Hooker explored: both almost equally far from England, yet still far apart themselves. Clara might have smiled—despite her interest in Max’s work, geography sometimes eludes her—but that last evening passed in such a flurry that all he managed to do was to thank her. For his brother Laurence, who gave him a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, he’d had only the same hurried thanks. On the flyleaf, Laurence had written: “New ideas, for your new life. Think of me as you read this; I will be reading my own copy in your absence and we can write to each other about what we learn.”
Repeatedly Max has tried to keep up his end of this joint endeavor, only to be frustrated by the book’s difficulty. For now he has set it aside in favor of a more unexpectedly useful gift. Clara’s brother, far away in the city of New York, works as an assistant librarian and sometimes sends extra copies of the books he receives to catalog. “Not of much interest to me,” he wrote to Max, forwarding Asa Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology. “But I know you and Clara like to garden, and to look at flowers in the woods—and I thought perhaps you would enjoy this.”
At first, finding his companions uncongenial, Max read out of boredom and loneliness. Later Gray’s manual captured him. The drawings at the back, the ferns and grasses and seedpods and spore capsules: how lovely these are! As familiar as his mother’s eyes; as distant as the fossilized ferns recently found in the Arctic. As a boy he’d had a passion for botany: a charmed few years of learning plants and their names before the shock of his mother’s death, his father’s long decline, the necessity of going out, so young, to earn a living and help care for his family. Now he has a family of his own. Work of his own, as well, which he is proud of. But the illustrations draw him back to a time when the differences between a hawkweed and a dandelion could fascinate him for hours.
Charmed by the grasses of the Deosai plateau, he begins to dip into Dr. Hooker’s book as well. Here too he finds much of interest. When he feels lost, when all he’s forgotten or never knew about simple botany impedes his understanding, he marks his place with a leaf or a stem and turns back to Gray’s manual. At home, he thinks, after he’s safely returned, he and Clara can wander the fields as they did in the days of their courtship, this time understanding more clearly what they see and teaching these pleasures to their children. He copies passages into his notebook, meaning to share them with her:
Lesson I. BOTANY AS A BRANCH OF NATURAL HISTORY
The Organic World, is the world of organized beings. These consist of organs., of parts which go to make up an individual, a being. And each individual owes its existence to a preceding one like itself, that is, to a parent. It was not merely formed, but produced. At first small and imperfect, it grows and develops by powers of its own; it attains maturity, becomes old, and finally dies. It was formed of inorganic or mineral matter, that is, of earth and air, indeed; but only of this matter under the influence of life; and after life departs, sooner or later, it is decomposed into earth and air again.
He reads, and makes notes, and reads some more. The Himalayan Journals, he has noticed, are “Dedicated to Charles Darwin by his affectionate friend, Joseph Dalton Hooker.” What lives those men lead: far-flung, yet always writing to each other and discussing their ideas. Something else he hasn’t told Clara is this: before leaving Srinagar, in a shop he entered meaning only to buy a new spirit level, he made an uncharacteristically impulsive purchase. A botanical collecting outfit, charming and neat; he could not resist it although he wasn’t sure, then, what use he’d make of it. But on the Deosai plateau he found, after a windstorm, an unusual primrose flowering next to a field of snow. He pressed it, mounted it—not very well, he’s still getting the hang of this—and drew it; then, in a fit of boldness, wrote about it to Dr. Hooker, care of his publisher in England. “The willows and stonecrops are remarkable,” he added. “And I am headed higher still; might the lichens and mosses here be of some interest to you?” He doesn’t expect that Dr. Hooker will write back to him.
In his tent made from blankets, with a candle casting yellow light on the pages, Max pauses over a drawing of a mallow. About his mother, who died when he was nine, he remembers little. In a coffin she lay, hands folded over her black bombazine dress, face swollen and unrecognizable. When he was five or six, still in petticoats, she guided him through the marshes. Her pale hands, so soon to be stilled, plucked reeds and weeds and flowers. Remember these, she said. You must learn the names of the wonderful things surrounding us. Horsetails in her hands, and then in his; the ribbed walls and the satisfying way the segments popped apart at the plump joints. Pickerel rush and mallow and cattail and reed; then she got sick, and then she died. After that, for so many years, there was never time for anything but work.
2
May 1, 1863
Dearest Clara—
A great day: as I was coming down an almost vertical cliff, on my way back to camp, a Baiti coming up from the river met me and handed me a greasy, dirty packet. Letters from you, Laurence, and Zoe—yours were marked “Packet 12,” which I had thought lost after receiving 13 and 14 back in Srinagar. From those earlier letters I knew you had been delivered safely of our beloved Gillian, and that Elizabeth had welcomed her new sister and all three of you were well: but I had no details, and to have missed not only this great event but your account of it made me melancholy. How wonderful then, after five long months, to have your description of the birth. All our family around you, the dawn just breaking as Gillian arrived, and Elizabeth toddling in, later, to peer at the infant in your arms: how I wish I had been with you, my love.
And how I wish I knew what that long night and its aftermath had really been like; you spare my feelings, I know. You say not a word about your pains and trials. In Packet 13 you mentioned recovering completely from the milk fever, but in 12 you did not tell me you had it, though you must have been suffering even then. Did we understand, when I took this position, how hard it would be? So many months elapse between one of us speaking, the other hearing; so many more before a response arrives. Our emotions lag so far behind the events. For me, it was as if Gillian had been born today. Yet she is five months old, and I have no idea of what those months have brought. Zoe says Elizabeth is growing like a cabbage, and Laurence says he heard from your brother in New York and that the family is thriving; how fortunate that the wound to his foot, which we once so regretted, has saved him from conscription.
I am well too, though terribly busy. But what I want, even more than sleep, is to talk to you. Everything I am seeing and doing is so new—it is nothing, really, like the work I did in England—so much is rushing into me all at once—I get confused. When I lie down to sleep everything spins in my brain. I can only make sense of my new life the way I have made sense of everything, since we first met: by describing it to you. That great gift you have always had of listening, asking such excellent questions—when I tell you enough to let you imagine me clearly, then I can imagine myself.
So, my dearest: imagine this. If this were an army (it almost is; three of Montgomerie’s assistants are military officers, while others, like Michaels and his friends, served in the military forces of the East India Company until the Mutiny, then took their discharge rather than accept transfer to the British Army), I’d be a foot-soldier, far behind the dashing scouts of the triangulating parties who precede us up the summits. It is they who measure, with the utmost accuracy, the baseline between two vantage points, which becomes the first side of a triangle. They who with their theodolites measure the angles between each end of that line and a third high point in the distance: and they who calculate by trigonometry the two other sities of the triangle, thus fixing the distance to the far point and the point’s exact position. One of the sides of that triangle then becomes the base for a new triangle—and so the chain slowly grows, easy enough to see on paper but dearly won in life. In the plains these triangles are small and neat. Out here the sides of a triangle may be a hundred miles or more.
Is this hard to follow? Try to imagine how many peaks must be climbed. And how high they are: 15,000 and 17,000 and 19,000 feet. My companions and I see the results of the triangulators’ hard work when we follow them to the level platforms they’ve exposed by digging through feet of snow, and the supporting pillars they’ve constructed from rocks. Imagine a cold, weary man on the top of a mountain, bent over his theodolite and waiting for a splash of light. Far from him, on another peak, a signal squad manipulates a heliotrope (which is a circular mirror, my dear, mounted on a staff so it may be turned in any direction). On a clear day it flashes bright with reflected sunlight. At night it beams back the rays of a blue-burning lamp.
The triangulators leap from peak to peak; if they are the grasshoppers, we plane-tablers are the ants. At their abandoned stations we camp for days, collecting topographical details and filling in their sketchy outline maps. You might imagine us as putting muscle and sinew on the bare bones they have made. Up through the snow we go, a little file of men; and then at the station I draw and draw until I’ve replicated all I see. I have a new plane-table, handsome and strong. The drawing-board swivels on its tripod, the spirit level guides my position; I set the table directly over the point corresponding to the plotted site of my rough map. Then I rotate the board with the sheet of paper pinned to it until the other main landscape features I can see—those the triangulators have already plotted—are positioned correctly relative to the map.
As I fill in the blank spaces with the bends and curves of a river valley, the dips and rises of a range, the drawing begins to resemble a map of home. For company I have the handful of porters who’ve carried the equipment, and one or two of the Indian chainmen who assist us—intelligent men, trained at Dehra Dun in the basics of mapping and observation. Some know almost as much as I do, and have the additional advantage of speaking the local languages as well as some English. When we meet to exchange results with those who work on the nearby peaks and form the rest of our group, the chainmen gather on one side of the fire, sharing food and stories. In their conversations a great idea called “The Survey” looms like a disembodied god to whom they—we—are all devoted. Proudly, they refer to both themselves and us as “Servants of the Map.”
I will tell you what your very own Servant of the Map saw a few days ago. On the edge of the Deosai plateau, overlooking Skardu, I saw two faraway peaks towering above the rest of the Karakoram, the higher gleaming brilliant blue and the lower yellow. These are the mountains which Montgomerie, seven years ago, designated K1 and K2. K2 the triangulators have calculated at over 28,000 feet: imagine, the second highest mountain in the world, and I have seen it! The sky was the deepest blue, indescribable, sparkling with the signals which the heliotropes of the triangulating parties twinkled at one another. Do you remember our visit to Ely Cathedral? The way the stone rose up so sharply from the flat plain, an explosion of height—it was like our first glimpse of that, magnified beyond reason and dotted with candles.
We have thunderstorms almost every day, they are always terrifying; the one that shook us the afternoon I saw K2 brought hail, and lightning so close that sparks leapt about the rocks at my feet and my hair bristled and crackled. The wind tore my map from the drawing board and sent it spinning over the edge of the plain, a white bird flying into the Indus valley below. But I do not mean to frighten you. I take care of myself, I am as safe as it is possible to be in such a place, I think of you constantly. Even the things I read remind me of you.
In Asa Gray’s manual, I read this today, from
Lesson VII: MORPHOLOGY OF LEAVES—
We may call foliage the natural form of leaves, and look upon the other sorts as special forms,—as transformed leaves … the Great Author of Nature, having designed plants upon one simple plan, just adapts this plan to all cases. So, whenever any special purpose is to be accomplished, no new instruments or organs are created for it, but one of the three general organs of the vegetable, root, stem, or leaf, is made to serve the purpose, and is adapted by taking some peculiar form.
Have I told you I have been working my way through this manual, lesson by lesson? I forget sometimes what I have written to you and what I have not. But I study whenever I can and use what I learn to help make sense both of my surroundings and of what I read in the Himalayan Journals: which I treasure, because it’s from you. As the book Laurence gave me requires more concentration than I can summon, I’ve set it aside for now (my guilty secret; don’t tell him this): but Dr. Hooker I think even more highly of since my arrival here. The rhododendron that Zoe, my thoughtful sister, gave us as a wedding present—do you remember how, when it first flowered, we marveled at the fragrant, snowy blossoms with their secret gold insides? It was raised in a greenhouse in St. John’s Wood, from seeds sent back by Dr. Hooker. I wish I could have been with you this spring to watch it bloom.
I am drifting from my point, I see. Forgive me. The point, the reason I copy this passage, is not to teach you about leaves but to say these words brought tears to my eyes; they made me think of our marriage. When we were together our lives were shaped like our neighbors’, as simple as the open leaves of the maple. Now we are apart, trying to maintain our connection over this immense distance. Trying to stay in touch without touch; how that effort changes us. Perhaps even deforms us.
To an outsider we might now look like the thick seed leaves of the almond or the bean, or the scales of buds or bulbs; like spines or tendrils, sepals or petals, which are also altered leaves. Do you know that, in certain willows, pistils and stamens can sometimes change into each other? Or that pistils often turn into petals in cultivated flowers? Only now do I begin to grasp the principles of growth and change in the plants I learned to name in the woods, those we have grown at home—there is a science to this. Something that transcends mere identification.
I wander, I know. Try to follow me. The point, dear heart, is that through all these transformations one can still discern the original morphology; the original character is altered yet not lost. In our separation our lives are changing, our bond to each other is changing. Yet still we are essentially the same.
I love you. So much. Do you know this?
It is raining again, we are damp and cold. I miss you. All the time.
Max regards the last page of his letter doubtfully. That business about the alteration of leaves; before he sends it, he scratches out the line about the effects of his and Clara’s separation. Deform: such a frightening word.
His days pass in promiscuous chatter, men eating and drinking and working and snoring, men sick and wounded and snow-blind and wheezing; always worries about supplies and medicines and deadlines. He is never alone. He has never felt lonelier. There are quarrels everywhere: among the Indian chainmen, between the chainmen and the porters, the porters and his fellow plane-tablers; between the plane-tablers and the triangulators; even, within his own group, among the parties squatting on the separate peaks. Michaels, their leader, appears to enjoy setting one team against another. Michaels takes the youngest of the porters into his tent at night; Michaels has made advances toward Max and, since Max rebuffed him, startled and furious, has ceased speaking with him directly and communicates by sarcastic notes.
Wyatt has approached Max as well; and a man from another party—the only one as young as Max—with a shock of red hair as obtrusive as a kingfisher’s crest. Now all three are aligned against him. When the whole group meets he has seen, in the shadows just beyond the ring of light sent out by the campfire, men kneeling across from each other, britches unbuttoned, hands on each other … He closed his eyes and turned his back and blocked his ears to the roar of laughter following his hasty departure. Yet who is he to judge them? So starved for love and touch is he that he has, at different times, found himself attracted to the middle-aged, stiff-necked wife of an English official in Srinagar, a Kashmiri flower-seller, a Tibetan herdsman, the herdsman’s dog. He has felt such lust that his teeth throb, and the roots of his hair; the skin of his whole body itching as if about to explode in a giant sneeze.
In the act of writing to Clara, Max makes for himself the solitude he so desperately needs. He holds two strands of her life: one the set of letters she writes to him now—or not now, but as close to now as they can get, four months earlier, five, six—and the other the set of letters she wrote secretly in the months before he left, trying to imagine what he might need to hear. Occasionally he has allowed himself the strange pleasure of opening one letter from each set on the same day. A rounded image of Clara appears when he reads them side by side: she is with him. And this fills him with a desire to offer back to her, in his letters, his truest self. He wants to give her everything: what he is seeing, thinking, feeling; who he truly is. Yet these days he scarcely recognizes himself. How can he offer these aberrant knots of his character to Clara?
He tries to imagine himself into the last days of her pregnancy, into the events of Gillian’s birth, the fever after that. He tries to imagine his family’s daily life, moving on without him. Clara is nursing Gillian, teaching Elizabeth how to talk, tending the garden, watching the flowers unfold; at night, if she is not too weary, she is bending over her dictionary and her German texts, and then … He wonders what would happen if he wrote, Tell me what it feels like to lie in our bed, in the early morning light, naked and without me. Tell me what you do when you think of me. What your hands do, what you imagine me doing.
He doesn’t write that; he doesn’t write about what he does to himself on a narrow cot, in a tent made from a blanket strung over a tree limb, the wind whistling as he stifles his groans with a handkerchief. Even then he doesn’t feel alone. Close by, so near, his companions stifle noises of their own. His only truly private moments are these: bent over a blank page, dreaming with his pen.
3
June 11, 1863
Dearest, dearest Clara:
The packet containing this letter will follow a very zigzag course on its way to you; a miracle that my words reach you at all. Or that yours reach me—how long it has been since the last! A ship that sailed from Bordeaux in March is rumored to have arrived at Bombay and will, I hope, have letters from you. Others from England have reached me—yet none from you—which is why I worry so. But already I hear your voice, reminding me that the fate of mail consigned to one ship may differ so from that consigned to another. I know you and the girls are well.
I am well too, although worried about you. I do what I can to keep busy. Did I tell you that I received, in response to some modest botanical observations I had sent to Dr. Hooker, a brief reply? He corrected my amateur mistakes, suggested I gather some specimens for him, and told me his great love of mosses dated from the time he was five or six. His mother claims that when he was very tiny he was found grubbing in a wall, and that when she asked what he was doing, he cried that he had found Bryam argenteum (not true, he notes now), a pretty moss he’d admired in his father’s collection. At any age, he says—even mine—the passion for botany may manifest itself.
I found this touching and thought you would too. And I’m honored that he would answer me at all. In the hope of being of further use to him, I plan to continue my observations. Where I am now—deep in the heart of the Karakoram—nothing grows but the tiny lichens and mosses that are Dr. Hooker’s greatest love. I can classify hardly any of them, they’re extremely difficult. Except for them the landscape is barren. No one lives here: how would they live? Yet people do pass through from the neighboring valleys, the glaciers serving as highways through the mountains: I have met Hunzakuts, Baltis, Ladakhis and Nagiris and Turkis. But so far no travelers from home, although I hear rumors of solitary wanderers, English and German and French. One elderly adventurer has apparently haunted these mountains for decades, staying at times in Askole and Skardu; traveling even on the Baltoro Glacier and its branches—can this be true? If he exists, no one will tell me his name.
Around me is a confused mass of rock and glacier and mist, peaks appearing then disappearing beyond the curtains of clouds. The glaciers, covered with rocks and striated like frozen rivers, you would never mistake for snowfields or for anything else; the porters fear them and have their own names for them, while the chainmen claim that, deep within them, are the bodies of men who died in the mountains and are now being slowly carried down the stream of ice. Some decades from now, at the foot of the glacier, a glove or a couple of bones may be spit out.
I have seen wild sheep the size of ponies. I have slept ten nights at a stretch above 15,000 feet; I have woken buried in snow, lost in clouds; days have passed when I could make no sightings and sketch no maps, when we have nothing to eat and huddle together forlornly, watching avalanches peel down the side of the peaks. The weather here is beastly. At the snout of the Baltoro we were nearly swept away by a river leaping from an ice cave. There are no vistas when one travels the glaciers, more a sense of walking along a deep corridor, framed by perpendicular walls. I have a headache nearly all the time, and my neck aches from always gazing upward. The mornings are quiet, everything frozen in place by the frosts of the night. By afternoon the landscape has come alive, moving and shifting as rocks fall, walls of mud slide down, hidden streams dammed by the ice break free with a shout. No place for men.
I travel now in a party of six. Me in charge, the sole Englishman (the others lead similar parties, on other glaciers, on their way to other peaks); two Indian assistants who aid me with the measurements and mapping; three porters. We are on the Baltoro itself as I write. So frequent are the crevasses, and so deceitfully covered with snow, that we tie ourselves together with ropes and move like a single long caterpillar. Yesterday we stopped by the edge of a huge open fissure and, while the other men rested, I tied all our ropes together and sounded the depth; 170 feet of rope failed to reach bottom. Framing us, on both sides of the glacier, are some of the world’s highest peaks.
My task has been to map where Montgomerie’s K2 lies in relation to the Karakoram watershed. And this I have done, though there is no clear sight of it from the glacier itself. With my men I climbed the flank of an enormous mountain called Masherbrum. My men—I ought to try and tell you what it’s like to live in such enforced companionship. They … I will save this for another letter. You know how awkward I have always been. With my own family, with you, I can be myself but here, with strangers—it is terrible, the old shyness seizes me. Without you by my side, to start the conversation and set everyone at ease, I am so clumsy. I do try, but it does no good. Especially with the porters and the chainmen I am at a loss. The barriers of language and our very different circumstances and habits and religions—I ought to be able to break through these, given the bonds of our shared work. Somewhere they too have wives and children, families and homes but I can’t imagine them, I can’t see these men in any other setting and I think they can’t see me any more clearly. For them, I am simply the person who gives orders. In my early days surveying seemed like a perfect career for such a solitary creature as myself. I didn’t understand that, out here, I would be accompanied ceaselessly by strangers.
Yet one does not need to talk all the time. And some things are beyond conversation—several thousand feet up the flank of Masherbrum, as we were perched on a sharp bleak shoulder, there it suddenly rose: K2, sixteen or seventeen miles away, separating one system of glaciers from another. We believe the reason it has no local name is that it isn’t visible from any inhabited place; the nearest village is six days’ march away and the peak is hidden by others, almost as large. I cannot tell you how it felt to see it clearly. I have spent two days here, mapping all the visible peaks and their relationships to each other and the glaciers.
I will entrust this to the herdsman I met, who is on his way to Skardu; may it find its way to you. One of our porters speaks a language somewhat familiar to this herdsman. The pair had a discussion involving much pointing at Masherbrum, an insistent tone on the part of the porter, violent head-shakings from the herdsman. Later I asked the porter what they’d been talking about. The herdsman had asked where we’d been; the porter had shown him the shoulder from which we saw K2. “You have never been there,” the herdsman apparently said. “No one can go there. It is not for men.”
He does not write to Clara about his glacial misadventures. Walking along on a hazy day with his party strung out behind him, he had seen what resembled a small round rock perched on the ice in the distance. Fresh snow had fallen the night before and the glare was terrible; over his eyes he’d drawn a piece of white muslin, like a beekeeper’s veil, which cut the worst of the blinding light but dimmed the outlines of everything. One of his companions had bound a sheet of slit paper over his eyes, while others had woven shades from the hair of yaks’ tails or had unbound their own hair and combed it forward until it screened their eyes. Max was nearly upon the round rock before he recognized it as a head.
A narrow crevasse, its opening covered by drifted snow; a wedge-shaped crack the width of a man at the top, tapering swiftly to a crease: inspecting it, with his veil raised, Max could imagine what had happened. The testing step forward, the confident placement of the second foot; and then one last second of everyday life before the deceitful bridge crumbled and the man plunged down, leaving his head and neck above the surface. The slit would have fit as intimately as a shroud, trapping the man’s feet with his toes pointed down. No room to flex his knees or elbows and gain some purchase—but his head was free, he was breathing, he wasn’t that cold, and surely—surely?—he could pull himself out.
The man had a name, although it would take a while to determine it: Bancroft, whom Max had met only once, a member of one of the triangulating parties, disappeared three days before Max arrived. The ice inside the crevasse, warmed by the heat it stole from Bancroft’s body, would have melted and pulled him inch by inch farther down, chilling him and slowing his blood, stealing his breath as fluid pooled in his feet and legs and his heart struggled to push it back up. By nightfall, with the cold pouring down from the stars, the cold wind pouring down from the peaks, the slit which had parted and shaped itself to Bancroft’s body would have frozen solid around him. After hours of fruitless work, Max and his companions had reluctantly left Bancroft in the ice.
Max had not told Clara any of this: it would have frightened her. It frightened him. And yet despite that he went walking alone, ten days later. The sun was out, the sky was clear; the men had stopped in the middle of the afternoon, refused to go farther without a rest, and set up camp against his wishes. Irritated, he’d refused to waste the day. He’d mapped this section already, but wanted more detail for his sketches: how the ice curved and cracked as it ground past the embracing wall of the mountain. In Wales, when he was being trained, he and Laurence had seen erratic boulders and mountains with deeply scored flanks which were caused, said the bookish young man who led them, by a glacial period that covered all Europe with ice. Now it was as if he’d walked backward into that earlier time.
He fell into a fissure, forty feet deep. A thick tongue of ice, like the recalcitrant piece of heartwood bridging two halves of a split log, stretched between the uphill and downhill walls of the crevasse and broke his fall. He landed face down, draped around a narrow slab, arms and legs dangling into empty space. Feebly he said his own name, calling himself back to life. Then Clara’s, and his daughters’, his sister’s, and his mother’s. Above him he found a ceiling of snow, with a narrow slit of blue sky where his body had broken through. He could move his feet, his hands, his shoulders; apparently nothing was broken. Slowly, hugging the ice with his thighs, he sat upright. Before him the uphill wall of the crevasse glimmered smooth in the blue shadows. Slim ribs of ice, bulges and swellings reminiscent of Clara’s back and belly. Behind him the downhill wall was jagged and white and torn. To his right the crevasse stretched without end, parallel faces disappearing into darkness. But to his left the walls appeared to taper together.
He might make of himself a bridge, he thought. A bridge of flesh, like the bridge of ice. With his back pressed against the wet uphill wall, his legs extended and his hobnailed boots pressed into the crunching, jagged downhill wall, he suspended himself. He moved his right foot a few inches, then his left; sent all his strength into the soles of his feet and then slid his back a few inches, ignoring the icy stream that chattered so far below. Again and again, right foot, left foot, heave. Time stopped, thinking stopped, everything stopped but these small painful motions. The walls drew closer together and he folded with them, his legs bending at the knees, then doubled, until finally he hung in a sideways crouch.
He reached the corner without knowing what he’d do when he got there. The crevasse was shaped like a smile; where the two lips met, the bottom also curved up. He released his right leg and let it slide down, touching some rubble on which he might balance. He stood, he straightened partway. Soaked, scared, exhausted, and so cold. Above him was not the sky, but a roof of snow. Like a mole he scratched at the bottom surface. He tore his fingernails and ripped his hands. When he realized what was happening he stopped digging with his right hand and dug only with his left.
He dug himself out. He hauled himself up. How many hours did this take? His left hand was bloody and blue, his right torn but still working; how lucky he had been. On the surface of the glacier, under the setting sun, he closed his eyes and fixed in his mind the dim, shadowed, silent grave he’d known for a few hours. Among the things he would not mention to Clara—he would never write a word of this—was how seductive he’d found the cold and quiet. How easy he would have found it to sleep on the leaf of ice, his head pillowed on his arm while snow drifted over the broken roof, sealing him in silent darkness. Nothing would have been left of him but his books and maps, and the trunk with Clara’s letters. So many still unopened, dated months in the future, a year in the future. It was the thought of not getting to read them that made him wake up.
4
July 21, 1863
Dear heart—
This week I received your Packet 15, from March; you cannot know what a relief it is to hear from you. But why do I say that when I know you suffer the same torments? It is very upsetting to hear that none of my letters have reached you, and that you have as yet no news of my travels across the country to Kashmir, never mind news of my journeys in the mountains. Although perhaps by now you do: it was still March, I remind myself, when you hadn’t heard from me. It may be September or December before you receive this, and you will be in possession of all my other letters by then, smiling to see me worry in this.
We heard a ship leaving Calcutta was burnt down to the waterline just after it embarked; all the passengers were saved but everything else on board was lost and I wonder if some of my letters were on it, now bits of ash on the sea. When I think about the hands through which these must pass, to find their way to you: a passing herdsman to another party of the Survey, to another messenger, to some official in Srinagar; perhaps to Calcutta, perhaps to Bombay; through a merchant’s hands, or a branch of the military: hand to hand to hand, to a ship, or several ships, and the hazards of weather and human carelessness every inch of the way … My dear, you must keep these accidents in mind, when you worry about me. It grieves me to think of your suffering. Remember the promise we made to each other, to consider not just the accidents that might happen to us, but to our correspondence. Remember how tough I am. How prudent.
Thank you for the story about Elizabeth and the garden. I love to think about the three of you, bundled up and watching the birds as they flick within the branches of the hedgerow. Gillian in your arms, Elizabeth darting along the hawthorns, pursuing the sparrows: these glimpses of your life together keep me going. If you knew how much I miss you … but I have promised myself I will write sensibly. I want you to think of me as I am, as you have always known me, and not as a stranger perpetually complaining. I’m glad Mrs. Moore’s nephew—Gideon?—has been so helpful during his stay with his aunt and has been able to solve the problem with the drains. When next you see him, please tell him I am grateful. Do you see him often.?
I received with the letters from you and our family two more letters from Dr. Hooker. He has received mail from me, from as late as April; how is it my letters are reaching him but not you? When I get home I will let you read what he writes, you will find it fascinating. He is in touch with botanists and collectors all over the world; involved with so many projects and yet still he takes the time to encourage an amateur such as myself. On his own journey, he said, as he climbed from the terai to the snowline he traversed virtually the entire spectrum of the world’s flora, from the leech-infested, dripping jungle to the tiny lichens of the Tibetan plateau. I have a similar opportunity, he says. If I am wise enough to take it. I copy for you here a little paragraph, which he included with questions about what is growing where, and requests for a series of measurements of temperature and altitude.
“When still a child,” he writes, “my father used to take me on excursions in the Highlands, where I fished a good deal, but also botanized; and well I remember on one occasion, that, after returning home, I built up by a heap of stones a representation of one of the mountains I had ascended, and stuck upon it specimens of the mosses I had collected, at heights relative to those at which I had gathered them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany. It pleases me greatly that, though you have started your botanizing as a grown man, you may come to share a similar passion.”
Is that not a lovely tale? The mountain was small, by our standards here, less than 4,000 feet. He has been very encouraging of my efforts and with his help I have set myself a study plan, as if I’m at university. I would like to make myself worthy; worthy to write to such a man as Dr. Hooker, and receive a response. Worthy of seeking an answer to the question that now occupies everyone: how the different forms of life have reached their present habitats. When else will I have a chance like this?
What draws me to these men and their writings is not simply their ideas but the way they defend each other so vigorously and are so firmly bound. Hooker, standing up for Darwin at Oxford and defending his dear friend passionately. Gray, in America, championing Darwin in a series of public debates and converting the world of American science one resistant mind at a time. Our group here is very different. Although the work gets done—the work always gets done, the maps accumulate—I have found little but division and quarrels and bad behavior.
You may find my handwriting difficult to decipher; I have suffered much from snow-blindness. And a kind of generalized mountain sickness as well. We are so high, almost all the time; the smallest effort brings on fatigue and nausea and the most piercing of headaches. I sleep only with difficulty; it is cold at night, and damp. Our fires will not stay lit. But every day brings new additions to our map, and new sketches of the topography: you will be proud of me, I am becoming quite the draughtsman. And I manage to continue with my other work as well. I keep in mind Hooker’s travails in Nepal and Sikkim: how, in the most difficult of circumstances, he made excellent and detailed observations of his surroundings. I keep in mind Godfrey Vigne, and all he managed to note. Also a man I did not tell you about before, whose diary passed through my hands: how clearly he described his travels, despite his difficulties! By this discipline, and by my work, I hold myself together.
This week my party climbed a peak some 21,000 feet high. We were not the first ones here: awaiting us was the station the strongest and most cunning of the triangulators built last season. I have not met him, he remains an almost mythical creature. But I occupied his heap of stones with pride. He triangulated all the high peaks visible from here and the map I have made from this outline, the curves of the glaciers and the jagged valleys, the passes and the glacial lakes—Clara, how I wish you could see it! It is the best thing I have ever done and the pains of my body are nothing.
I have learned something, these past few months. Something important. On the descent from such a peak, I have learned, I can see almost nothing: by then I am so worn and battered that my eyes and mind no longer work correctly; often I have a fever, I can maintain no useful train of thought, I might as well be blind.
On my first ascents, before I grasped this, I would make some notes on the way up but often I would skip things, thinking I would observe more closely on the way down. Now I note everything on the way up. As we climbed this giant peak I kept a note-book and pencil tied to my jacket pocket and most of the time had them right in my hand: I made note of every geological feature, every bit of vegetation or sign of a passing animal; I noted the weather as it changed over the climb, the depth of the snow, the movements of the clouds. This record—these records, I do this now with every ascent—will I think be invaluable to subsequent travelers. When I return I plan to share them with Dr. Hooker and whoever else is interested.
It’s an odd thing, though, that there is not much pleasure in the actual recording. Although I am aware, distantly, that I often move through scenes of great beauty, I can’t feel that as I climb; all is lost in giddiness and headache and the pain of moving my limbs and drawing breath. But a few days after I descend to a lower altitude, when my body has begun to repair itself—then I look at the notes I made during my hours of misery and find great pleasure in them. It is odd, isn’t it? That all one’s pleasures here are retrospective; in the moment itself, there is only the moment, and the pain.
I must go. A messenger from Michaels came by the camp this morning with new instructions and leaves soon to contact three other parties; if I put this into his hands it will find its way down the glacier, out of the mountains, over the passes. To you.
After relinquishing the letter to Michaels’s messenger, he thinks: What use was that? For all those words about his work, he has said little of what he really meant. How will Clara know who he is these days, if he hides both his worries and his guilty pleasures? He still hasn’t told her about the gift he bought for himself. A collecting box, like a candle box only flatter, in which to place fresh specimens. A botanical press, with a heap of soft drying paper, to prepare the best of his specimens for an herbarium; and a portfolio in which to lay them out, twenty inches by twelve, closed with a sturdy leather strap and filled with sheets of thin, smooth, unsized paper. Always he has been a man of endless small economies, saving every penny of his pay, after the barest necessities, for Clara in England. He has denied himself warm clothes, extra blankets, the little treats of food and drink on which the other surveyors squandered their money in Srinagar, and before. But this one extravagance he couldn’t resist: not a dancing girl, not a drunken evening’s carouse, but still he is ashamed.
A different kind of shame has kept him from writing about the doubts that plague his sleepless nights. He knows so little, really—why does he think his observations might be useful? He ought to be content with the knowledge that the work he does each day is solid, practical, strong; these maps will stand for years. In Dehra Dun, and in Calcutta and back in England, copyists and engravers will render from his soiled rough maps clean and permanent versions. In a year the Series will be complete: Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Baltistan, caught in a net of lines; a topographical triumph. Still he longs to make some contribution more purely his.
He dreams of a different kind of map, in shades of misty green. Where the heads of the Survey see the boundaries of states and tribes, here the watershed between India and China, there a plausible boundary for Kashmir, he sees plants, each kind in a range bounded by soil and rainfall and altitude and temperature. And it is this—the careful delineation of the boundaries of those ranges, the subtle links between them—that has begun to interest him more than anything else. Geographical botany, Dr. Hooker said. What grows where. Primulas up to this level, no higher; deodar here, stonecrops and rock jasmines giving way to lichens. Why do rhododendrons grow in Sikkim and not here? He might spend his life in the search for an answer.
When he and his crew gather with the other small parties, he’s reminded that no one shares his interests—at night his companions argue about the ebb and flow of politics, not plant life. The Sikh Wars and the annexation of the Punjab, the administration of Lord Dalhousie, the transfer of power from the East India Company to the Crown, the decisions of the regional revenue officers—it is embarrassing, how little all this interests him. Among the surveyors are military men who have served in the Burmese War, or in Peshawar; who survived the Mutiny or, in various mountains, that stormy year when supplies to the Survey were interrupted and bands of rebels entered Kashmir. He ought to find their stories fascinating. Germans and Russians and Turks and Chinese, empires clashing; Dogras and Sikhs, spies and informants—currents no one understands, secrets it might take a lifetime to unravel. Yet of all this, two stories only have stayed with him.
The first he heard on a snow bench carved in a drift on a ridge, from an Indian chainman who’d served for a while in the Bengal army, and who worked as Max’s assistant for two weeks, and then disappeared. They were resting. The chainman was brewing tea. At Lahore, he said, his regiment had been on the verge of mutiny. On a June night in 1857, one of the spies the suspicious British officers had planted within the regiment reported to the brigadier that the sepoys planned an uprising the following day. That night, when the officers ordered a regimental inspection, they found two sepoys with loaded muskets.
There was a court-martial, the chainman said. He told the story quietly, as if he’d played no part in it; he had been loyal, he said. Simply an observer. Indian officers had convicted the two sepoys and sentenced them to death. “There was a parade,” the chainman said. His English was very good, the light lilting accent at odds with the tale he told. “A formal parade. We stood lined up on three sides of a square. On the fourth side were two cannon. The sepoys—”
“Did you know them?” Max had asked.
“I knew both of them, I had tried to talk them out of their plan. They were … The officers lashed those two men over the muzzles of the cannons. Then they fired.”
Below them the mountains shone jagged and white, clean and untenanted. Nearby were other Englishmen, and other Indians, working in apparent harmony in this landscape belonging to neither. Yet all this had happened only six years ago.
“There was nothing left of them,” the chainman said. He rose and kicked snow into the fire; the kettle he emptied and packed tidily away. “Parts of them came down like rain, bits of bone and flesh, shreds of uniforms. Some of us were sprinkled with their blood.”
“I …” Max had murmured. What could he say? “A terrible thing.” The chainman returned to work, leaving Max haunted and uneasy.
The other story was this, which Michaels encouraged a triangulator to tell one night when three different surveying teams gathered in a valley to plan their tasks for the next few weeks. An Indian atrocity to match the British one: Cawnpore, a month after the incident reported by the chainman. Of course Max had heard of the massacre of women and children there. No one in England had escaped that news, nor the public frenzy that followed. But Michaels’s gruff, hard-drinking companion, who in 1857 had been with a unit of the Highlanders, told with relish certain details the newspaper hadn’t printed.
“If you had seen the huts,” said Michaels’s friend: Archdale, Max thought his name was. Or maybe Archvale. “A hundred and twenty women and children escaped the first massacre on the riverboats—the mutineers rounded them up and kept them in huts. We arrived not long after they were butchered. I saw those huts, they looked like cages where a pack of wild animals had been set loose among their prey.”
“Tell about the shoes,” Michaels had called from the other side of the fire. All the men were drinking; Michaels had had a case of brandy carried in from Srinagar. His face was dark red, sweating, fierce. That night, as always, he ignored Max almost completely.
“The shoes,” Archdale said. He emptied his glass and leaned forward, face shining in the firelight. “Picture this,” he said. “I go into one hut and the walls are dripping with blood, the floor smeared, the smell unthinkable. Flies buzzing so loudly I thought I’d go mad. Against one wall is a row of women’s shoes, running with blood, draped with bits of clothing.” The Indian chainmen and the Baiti porters were gathered around their separate fires, not far away. Could they hear Archdale? Max wondered. Was it possible Archdale would say these things within earshot of them? “Against the other wall, a row of children’s shoes, so small, just like those our children wear at home. And”—he leaned farther forward here—“do you know what was in them?”
No one answered. Was Gillian wearing shoes yet? “What?” Max said, unable to stop himself.
“Feet!” Archdale roared. “Feet! Those filthy animals, those swine, they had lopped off the children’s feet. We found the bodies in the well.”
That terrible story had set off others; the night had been like a night in hell; Max had fled the campfire soon after Archdale’s tirade and rolled himself in a blanket in a hollow, far from everyone, carved into the rocky cliffs. When he woke he’d been surprised not to find the campground littered with bodies.
Since hearing those tales he has wondered how there could be so much violence on both sides; and how, after that, Englishmen and Indians could be up in these mountains working so calmly together. How can he make sense of an empire founded on such things? Nothing, he thought after hearing those stories. And still thinks. I understand nothing.
Dr. Hooker wrote at great length, in a letter Max didn’t mention to Clara, about the problems of packing botanical collections for the journey home: the weight, the costs; the necessity of using Ward’s cases; the crating of tree ferns and the boats to be hired. How kind he was, to take such trouble in writing to Max, and to warn him of these potential hazards! And yet how little Dr. Hooker understands Max’s own situation. There is no possibility of paying for such things without depriving Clara and his daughters. His collections are limited to the scraps he can dry and preserve in his small press—bad enough he spent money on that; the herbarium sheets he can carry; the sketches and observations in his notebook. He can offer Dr. Hooker only these, but they are not nothing and he hopes his gifts will be received without disappointment.
The lost man whose skull he found—the first one, when he’d just entered these mountains—had at least left behind a record of the movements of his soul. What is he doing, himself? Supporting his family, advancing his career; when he returns to England, he’ll have no trouble finding a good position. But he would like also to feel that he has broadened himself. Hunched over his plane-table, his temples pounding as he draws the lateral moraines of the glacier below him, he hears his mother’s voice.
Look. Remember this. The ribbon of ice below him turns into a snow-covered path that curves through the reeds along the river and vanishes at the horizon; across it a rabbit is moving and his mother stands, her hand in his, quietly keeping him company. They watch, and watch, until the path seems not to be moving away from them, but toward them; the stillness of the afternoon pouring into their clasped hands. There is something special in you, she said. In the way you see.
A few days ago, on his twenty-eighth birthday, he opened the birthday greeting Clara had tucked in his trunk. She had written about the earlier birthdays they’d shared. And about this one, as she imagined it: Your companions, I know, will have made you a special birthday meal. Perhaps you’ll all share a bottle of brandy, or whatever you drink there. I am thinking of you, and of the birthdays in the future we will once more spend together.
Reading this, he’d felt for the first time that Clara’s project might fail. He is no longer the person she wrote to, almost a year ago now. She may have turned into someone else as well. That Gideon she mentions, that nice young man who prunes the trees and brings her wood and does the tasks Max ought to be doing himself: what other parts of Max’s life is he usurping? Max conjures up someone broad-shouldered, very tall—Max and Clara are almost the same height—unbuttoning his shirt and reaching out for Clara … Impossible, it makes him want to howl. Surely she wouldn’t have mentioned him if their friendship was anything but innocent. Yet even if it is, it will have changed her.
He himself has changed so much, he grows further daily from her picture of him. There was no birthday celebration; he told no one of this occasion. If he had, there would have been no response. It is his mother, dead so many years, who seems to speak most truly to the new person he is becoming. As if the years between her death and now were only a detour, his childhood self emerging from a long uneasy sleep. Beyond his work, beyond the mapping and recording, he is seeing; and this—it is terrifying—is becoming more important to him than anything.
5
October 1, 1863
Dearest Clara—
Forgive me for not writing in so long. Until I received your Packets 17, 18, and 19, all in a wonderful clump last week (16, though, has gone astray), I had almost given up hope of us being in touch before winter. I should have realized your letters couldn’t find me while we were among the glaciers. We are in the valley of the Shighar now, and from here will make our way back to Srinagar. I don’t yet know what my winter assignment will be. The triangulating parties will winter at the headquarters in Dehra Dun, recalibrating the instruments and checking their calculations and training new assistants. There is talk of leaving a small group of plane-tablers in Srinagar, to complete topographical maps of the city and the outlying areas and lakes. I will let you know my orders as soon as I get them.
At least you know I am alive now. Though how can you make sense of my life here on the evidence of one letter from when I first arrived in Kashmir, and one from deep in the mountains? The others—I must have faith they will find their way to you. Your description of your journey to London, trudging through those government offices as you tried to get some word of me—this filled me with sadness, and with shame. You are generous to say it is not my fault that you went so long without word of me, that you blame a careless ship’s captain, clumsy clerks, and accidents: but it is my fault, still. I am the one who left home. And that I have not written these last weeks—can you forgive me? I console myself with the thought that, since my earlier letters were so delayed, perhaps a trickle of them will continue to reach you during the gap between then and now. But really my only excuse is the hardships of these last weeks. I am so weary; the cold and the altitude make it hard to sleep. And when I do catch a few brief hours I am plagued by nightmares. The men I work with tell me stories, things I would never repeat to you; and though I try not to think about them they haunt me at night.
The season in the mountains is already over; we stayed too long. We crossed one high pass after another during our retreat. And Clara, you can’t imagine the weather. I couldn’t work on my maps, or keep up my notes, or even—my most cherished task—write to you; when I heated the inkpot, the ink still froze on its short journey to the paper. My hands were frozen, my beard a mass of icicles. I wore everything you packed for me, all at once, and still couldn’t stay warm. Lambs’ wool vest and drawers, heavy flannel shirt and lined chamois vest, wool trousers and shirt, three pairs of stockings and my fur-lined boots, thick woolen hat, flannel-lined kidskin jacket, over that my big sheepskin coat, and then a Kashmir shawl wrapped twice about me, binding the whole mass together—I sweated under the weight of all this, yet grew chilled the instant we stopped moving. Nights were the worst, there is no firewood in the mountains and we had already used up all wed carried. Food was short as well.
I shouldn’t tell you these things; never mind. Now that we are down in the valleys things are easier. And I am fine. Soon enough we’ll reach Srinagar, and whether I stay there or move on to Dehra Dun I am looking forward to the winter. Long quiet months of cleaning up my sketch maps, improving my drawings, fitting together the sections into the larger picture of the Himalayan system. From either place I may write to you often, knowing the chances of you getting my letters in just a few months are good: and I may look forward to receiving yours with some regularity. Still I have some of the letters in your trunk to look forward to, as well: I ration these now, I open one only every few weeks, sometimes ignoring the dates with which you marked them. Forgive me, I save them for when I most need them. This evening, before I began to write to you, I opened one intended for Elizabeth’s birthday. How lovely to be reminded of that happy time when you leaned on my arm, plump and happy as we walked in the garden and waited for her birth. The lock of Elizabeth’s hair you enclosed I have sewn into a pouch, which I wear under my vest.
What else do I have to tell you? So much has happened these last weeks that I don’t know how to describe it all; and perhaps it wouldn’t interest you, it is just my daily work. Yesterday I had a strange encounter, though. Camped by the edge of a river, trying to restore some order to my papers while my companions were off in search of fuel, I looked up to see a stranger approaching; clearly a European although he wore clothes of Kashmiri cut. When I invited him to take tea with me he made himself comfortable and told me about himself. A doctor and an explorer, elderly; he calls himself Dr. Chouteau and says he is of French birth, though his English is indistinguishable from mine. This he explains by claiming to have left home as a boy of fourteen; claiming also to have been exploring in these mountains for over forty years. We did not meet in Srinagar, he told me, because he lives in a native quarter there. I think he may be the solitary traveler of whom I heard such odd rumors earlier in the season, though when I asked him this he shrugged and said, “There are a few of us.”
We passed together the most interesting afternoon I’ve had in weeks. My own companions and I have grown weary of each other, we seldom speak at all; but Dr. Chouteau talked without stopping for several hours. A great liar, I would have to say. Even within those hours he began to contradict himself. But how intriguing he was. He is very tall, thin and hawk-nosed, with a skin burnt dark brown by years in the sun and deeply lined. His ragtag outfit he tops with a large turban, from which sprout the plumes of some unidentifiable bird. He showed me his scars: a round one, like a coin, on the back of one hand, and another to match on the front—here a bullet passed through, he said, when he was fighting in Afghanistan. A hollow in his right calf, where, in Kabul, a bandit hacked at him with a sword as he escaped by horse. For some time he lived among a Kafir tribe, with a beautiful black-eyed mistress; the seam running from eyebrow to cheekbone to chin he earned, he says, in a fight to win her. He has been in Jalalabad and the Kabul river basin; in the Pamirs among the Kirghiz nomads; in Yarkand and Leh, Chitral and Gilgit.
Or so he says. Myself, I cannot quite credit this; he is elusive regarding his travel routes, and about dates and seasons and companions. But perhaps he truly did all these things, at one time or another, and erases the details and connections out of necessity: I think perhaps he has been a spy. For whom?
I try to forget what you have said about the way you gather with our families and friends and pass these letters around, or read them out loud; if I thought of that I would grow too self-conscious to write to you at all. But I will tell you one peculiar thing about Dr. Chouteau if you promise to keep this to yourself. He has lived to such a robust old age, he swears, by the most meticulous attention to personal hygiene. And how has he avoided the gastric complaints that afflict almost all of us when we eat the local foods? A daily clyster, he says. The cleansing enema he administers to himself, with a special syringe. I have seen this object with my own eyes, he carries it with him and showed it to me. It looked rather like a hookah. Far better this, he said, looking at my bewildered countenance, than the calomel and other purgatives on which less wise travelers rely.
Some of the other things he told me I can’t repeat, even to you: they have to do with princes and dancing-girls, seraglios and such-like: when I am home again I will share these with you, in the privacy of our own bed.
Clara, I am so confused. Meeting this stranger made me realize with more than usual sharpness how lonely I am, how cut off I feel from all that is important to me. My past life seems to be disappearing, my memories grow jumbled. Who was the Max Vigne who went here or there, did this or that? It’s as if I am dissolving and reforming; I am turning into someone I don’t recognize. If I believed in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, I might suspect that the wind is blowing someone else’s soul in through my nostrils, while my old soul flies out my ears. In the mountains I lay awake in the cold, frozen despite my blankets, and my life in England—my boyhood, even my life with you—passed by my eyes as if it had been lived by someone else. Forgive these wanderings. The household details of which you wrote, the problems with the roof, the chimney, the apple trees—I know I should offer some answers in response to your questions but it feels pointless. You will have long since had to resolve these things before you receive my advice. I trust your judgment completely.
Good night; the wind is blowing hard. What a fine thing a house is. In my tent I think of you and the girls, snug inside the walls.
After that, he does not write to Clara for a while.
The river valleys, the high plains, the dirt and crowds and smells and noise of Srinagar, where the surveying parties are reshuffled and he finds himself, with three other plane-tablers, left behind in makeshift quarters, with preliminary maps of the city and the valley and vague instructions to fill in the details while everyone else (Michaels too; at least he is finally free of Michaels!) moves on to Dehra Dun, not to return until spring: and still he does not write to Clara. He does not write to anyone, he does not keep up his botanical notes, he makes no sketches other than those required for the maps. He does his work, because he must. But he does no more. He cannot remember ever feeling like this.
6
If he could make himself write, he might say this:
Dearest Clara—
Who am I? Who am I meant to be? I imagine a different life for myself but how can I know, how can anyone know, if this is a foolish dream, or a sensible goal? Have I any scientific talent at all? Dr. Hooker says I do, he has been most encouraging. If he is right, then my separation from you means something, and the isolation I’ve imposed on myself, and the long hours of extra work. But if I have no real gift, if I am only deluding myself … then I am wasting everything.
There is something noble, surely, in following the path of one’s gifts; don’t we have a duty to use our talents to the utmost? Isn’t any sacrifice, in the pursuit of that, worthwhile? In these past months I have often felt that the current which is most truly me, laid aside when I was still a boy and had to face the responsibilities of family life, has all this time continued to flow the way water moves unseen beneath the glaciers. When I am alone, with my notes and plants and the correlations of weather and geology and flora springing clear before me, I feel: This is who I am. This is what I was born to do. But if in fact I have no real capacity for this work, if it is only my vanity leading me down this path—what then?
He has grown morose, he knows. Worse than morose. Maudlin, self-pitying. And self-deluding: not just about his possible talents, but in the very language with which he now contemplates writing Clara. Nobility, duty, sacrifice—whose words are those? Not his. He is using them to screen himself from the knowledge of whatever is shifting in him.
On the journey back to Srinagar, among the triangulators and plane-tablers led by Michaels and eventually joined by Captain Montgomerie himself, Max was silent, sullen, distant. If he could, he would have talked to no one. In Srinagar, once the crowd of officers and triangulators left for Dehra Dun, he felt still worse. Investigating the streets and alleys, the outlying villages and the limestone springs, he was charmed by what he saw and wished it would stay the same. But meanwhile he couldn’t help hearing talk of his government annexing Kashmir and turning the valley into another Simla: a retreat for soldiers and government officials, people he would prefer to avoid.
When he returns at night to the room he shares with three other plane-tablers, he flops on his cot and can’t understand why he feels so trapped. Didn’t he miss having walls and a roof? Perhaps it isn’t the dark planks and the stingy windows that make him grind his teeth, but his companions’ self-important chatter about measurements and calculations, possibilities for promotion. He shuts his ears to them and imagines, instead, talking with the vainglorious old explorer whose tales left him feeling lost, and full of questions.
The stories he wrote to Clara were the least of what happened that afternoon. Dr. Chouteau had been everywhere, Max learned. Without a map; maps meant nothing to him. Max’s work he’d regarded with detached interest, almost amusement. Looking down at the sheets of paper, the carefully drawn cliffs and rivers and glaciers, Dr. Chouteau had said, I have been here. And here. Here. And so many other places. He spoke of the gravestone, seen in Kabul, that marked the resting place of an Englishman who’d passed through there a century and a half ago. Of wandering Russians, Austrians, Chinese, Turks, the twists and turns of the Great Game, the nasty little wars. Godfrey Vigne, he’d said—Isn’t it odd, that you share that last name?—had been no simple traveler, but a British spy. Those forays into Baltistan a way of gathering information; and his attempts to reach Central Asia a way of determining that the only routes by which the Russians might enter India lay west of the Karakoram. I knew him, Dr. Chouteau said. We were in Afghanistan together. He was the one who determined that Baltistan has no strategic importance to the British plans for India.
More than anyone else, Dr. Chouteau made Max understand the purpose of his work. I never make maps, Dr. Chouteau said. Or not maps anyone else could read. They might fall into the wrong hands. Max’s maps, he pointed out, would be printed, distributed to governments, passed on to armies and merchants and travelers. Someone, someday, would study them as they planned an invasion, or planned to stop one. What can Max’s insignificant hardships matter, when compared to the adventures of such solitary travelers as Dr. Chouteau, or the lost man he saw when he first arrived in the mountains; of Godfrey Vigne or of Dr. Hooker? In Srinagar, Max understands that his journeys have been only the palest imitations of theirs.
He hasn’t heard from Dr. Hooker in months. And although he knows he ought to understand, from Clara’s trials, that accident may have been at work, he interprets this as pure rejection. The observations he sent weren’t worthy; Hooker has ceased to reply because Max’s work is of no interest. All he will leave behind are maps, which will be merged with all the other maps, on which he will be nameless: small contributions to the great Atlas of India, which has been growing for almost forty years. In London a faceless man collates the results of the triangulations into huge unwieldy sheets, engraved on copper or lithographed: two miles to an inch, four miles to an inch—what will become of them? He knows, or thinks he knows, though his imagination is colored by despair: they will burn or be eaten by rats and cockroaches, obliterated by fungus, sold as waste paper. Those that survive will be shared with allies, or hidden from enemies.
Max might write to Dr. Hooker about this; in Sikkim, he knows, Dr. Hooker and a companion had been seized while botanizing and held as political hostages. That event had served as excuse for an invasion by the British army and the annexation of southern Sikkim. Although Dr. Hooker refused to accompany the troops, he gave the general in charge of the invasion the topographical map he’d drawn. That map was copied at the surveyor general’s office; another map, of the Khasia Hills, made its way into the Atlas of India, complimented by all for its geological, botanical, and meteorological notes. Max has seen this one himself, though its import escaped him at the time. Dr. Hooker did it in his spare time, tossing off what cost Max so much labor.
But what is the point of tormenting himself? In the increasing cold he reads over Dr. Hooker’s letters to him, looking for the first signs of disfavor. The letters are imperturbably kind, he can find no hint of where he failed. For comfort he turns, not to the remaining letters in Clara’s trunk—those forward-casting, hopeful exercises make him feel too sad—but instead to the first of her letters to reach him. From those, still brave and cheerful, he works his way into the later ones. A line about Gillian’s colic, and how it lingered; a line about the bugs in the rhubarb: unsaid, all the difficulties that must have surrounded each event. The roof is leaking, the sink is broken, Elizabeth has chicken pox, Clara wrote. Zoe is bearing bravely her broken engagement, but we are all worried about her. What she means is: Where are you, where are you? Why have you left me to face this all alone?
Her packet 16, which failed to reach him in October with the rest of that batch, has finally arrived along with other, more recent letters. In early April she described the gardens, the plague of slugs, the foundling sparrow Elizabeth had adopted, and Gillian’s avid, crawling explorations; the death of a neighbor and the funeral, which she attended with Gideon. Gideon, again. Then something broke through and she wrote what she’d never permitted herself before:
Terrible scenes rise up before my eyes and they are as real as the rest of my life. I look out the window and I see a carriage pull up to the door, a man steps out, he is bearing a black-bordered envelope; I know what is in it, I know. He walks up to the door and I am already crying. He looks down at his shoes. I take the letter from him, I open it; it is come from the government offices in London and I skip over the sentences which attempt to prepare me for the news. I skip to the part in which it says you have died. In the mountains, of an accident. In the plains, of some terrible fever. On a ship which has sunk—I read the sentences again and again—they confirm my worst fears and I grow faint—hope expires in me and yet I will not believe. In the envelope, too, another sheet: The words of someone I have never met, who witnessed your last days. Though I am a stranger to you, it is my sad duty to inform you of a most terrible event. And then a description of whatever befell you; and one more sheet, which is your last letter to me. You see how I torment myself. I imagine all the things you might write. I imagine, on some days, that you tell me the truth; on others that you lie, to spare my feelings. I imagine you writing, Do not grieve too long, dearest Clara. The cruelest thing, when we think of our loved ones dying in distant lands, is the thought of them dying alone and abandoned, uncared for—but throughout my illness I have had the attentions of kind men. I imagine, I imagine … how can I imagine you alive and well, when I have not heard from you for so long? I am ashamed of myself for writing this. All over Britain other women wait, patiently, for soldiers and sailors and explorers and merchants—why can’t I? I will try to be stronger. When you read this page, know that it was written by Clara who loves you, in a moment of weakness and despair.
At least that is past now, for her; from her other letters he knows she was finally reassured. But that she suffered like this; that he is only hearing about it now … To whom is she turning for consolation?
Winter drags on. Meetings and work; official appearances and work; squabbles and work. Work. He does what he can, what he must. Part of him wants to rush home to Clara. To give up this job, this place, these ambitions; to sail home at the earliest opportunity and never to travel again. It has all been too much: the complexities and politics, the secrets underlying everything. Until he left England, he thinks now, he had lived in a state of remarkable innocence. Never, not even as a boy, had he been able to fit himself into the world. But he had thought, until recently, that he might turn his back on what he didn’t understand and make his own solitary path. Have his own heroes, pursue his own goals. But if his heroes are spies; if his work is in service of men whose goals led to bloodstained rooms and raining flesh—nothing is left of the world as he once envisioned it.
He wanders the city and its outskirts, keeping an eye out, as he walks, for Dr. Chouteau. He must be here; where else would he spend the winter? Stories of that irascible old man, or of someone like him, surface now and then; often Max has a sense that Dr. Chouteau hides down the next alley, across the next bridge. He hears tales of other travelers as well—Jacquemont and Moorcroft, the Schlagintweit brothers, Thomas Thomson, and the Baron von Hugel. The tales contradict each other, as do those about Dr. Chouteau himself. In one story he is said to be an Irish mercenary, in another an American businessman. Through these distorted lenses Max sees himself as if for the first time, and something happens to him.
That lost man, whose skull he found when he first arrived in the mountains—is this what befell him? As an experiment, Max stops eating. He fasts for three days and confirms what the lost man wrote in his diary: his spirit soars free, everything looks different. His mother is with him often, during that airy, delirious time. Dr. Chouteau strolls through his imagination as well. In a brief break in the flow of Dr. Chouteau’s endless, self-regarding narrative, Max had offered an account of his own experiences up on the glacier. His cold entombment, his lucky escape; he’d been humiliated when Dr. Chouteau laughed and patted his shoulder. A few hours, he said. You barely tasted the truth. I was caught for a week on the Stachen Glacier, in a giant blizzard. There is no harsher place on this earth; it belongs to no one. Which won’t keep people from squabbling over it someday. The men I traveled with died.
When Max hallucinates Dr. Chouteau’s voice emerging from the mouth of a boatwoman arguing with her neighbor, he starts eating again, moving again. The old maps he’s been asked to revise are astonishingly inaccurate. He wanders through narrow lanes overhung by balconies, in and out of a maze of courtyards. The air smells of stale cooking oil, burning charcoal, human excrement. He makes his way back and forth across the seven bridges of Srinagar so often he might be weaving a web. Temples, mosques, the churches of the missionaries; women carrying earthenware pots on their heads; barges and bakeshops and markets piled with rock salt and lentils, bottles of ghee—his wanderings he justifies as being in service to the map, although he also understands that part of what drives him into the biting air is a search for Dr. Chouteau. If Max could find him, if he could ask him some questions, perhaps this unease that has settled over him might lift.
As winter turns into early spring, as he does what he can with his map of the valley and, in response to letters from Dehra Dun, begins preparations for another season up in the mountains, his life spirals within him like the tendril of a climbing plant. One day he sits down, finally, with Laurence’s gift to him and begins working slowly through the lines of Mr. Darwin’s argument. The ideas aren’t unfamiliar to him; as with the news of Cawnpore and the Mutiny, he has heard them summarized, read accounts in the newspapers, discussed the outlines of the theory of descent with modification with Laurence and others. But when he confronts the details and grasps all the strands of the theory, it hits him like the knowledge of the use made of Dr. Hooker’s maps, or the uses that will be made of his own. He scribbles all over the margins. At first he writes to Laurence simply to say: I am reading it. Have you read it? It is marvelous. The world is other than we thought. But a different, more complicated letter begins to unfurl in his mind.
A mountain, he reads, is an island on the land. The identity of many plants and animals, on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where the alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points, without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one to another … the glacial period affords a simple explanation of these facts.
He closes his eyes and sees the cold sweeping south and covering the land with snow and ice, arctic plants and animals migrating into the temperate regions. Then, centuries later, the warmth returning and the arctic forms retreating northward with the glaciers, leaving isolated representatives stranded on the icy summits. Along the Himalaya, Mr. Darwin writes, at points 900 miles apart, glaciers have left the marks of their former low descent; and in Sikkim, Dr. Hooker saw maize growing on gigantic ancient moraines. The point of Dr. Hooker’s work, Max sees, is not just to map the geographical distribution of plants but to use that map in service of a broader theory. Not just, The same genus of lichen appears in Baltistan and in Sikkim. But, The lichens of the far ends of the Himalaya are related, descending from a common ancestor.
It is while his head is spinning with these notions that, on the far side of the great lake called the Dal, near a place where, if it was summer, the lotus flowers would be nodding their heads above their enormous circular leaves, by a chenar tree in which herons have nested for generations, he meets at last not Dr. Chouteau, but a woman. Dark-haired, dark-eyed: Dima. At first he speaks to her simply to be polite, and to conceal his surprise that she’d address him without being introduced. Then he notices, in her capable hands, a sheaf of reeds someone else might not consider handsome, but which she praises for the symmetry of their softly drooping heads. Although she wears no wedding ring, she is here by the lake without a chaperone.
The afternoon passes swiftly as they examine other reeds, the withered remains of ferns, lichens clustered on the rocks. Her education has come, Max learns, from a series of tutors and travelers and missionaries; botanizing is her favorite diversion. He eyes her dress, which is well cut although not elaborate; her boots, which are sturdy and look expensive. From what is she seeking diversion? She speaks of plants and trees and gardens, a stream of conversation that feels intimate yet reveals nothing personal. In return he tells her a bit about his work. When they part, and she invites him to call on her a few days later, he accepts. Such a long time since he has spoken with anyone congenial.
Within the week, she lets him know that he’d be welcome in her bed; and, gently, that he’d be a fool to refuse her. Max doesn’t hide from her the fact that he’s married, nor that he must leave this place soon. But the relief he finds with her—not just her body, the comforts of her bed, but her intelligence, her hands on his neck, the sympathy with which she listens to his hopes and longings—the relief is so great that sometimes, after she falls asleep, he weeps.
“I have been lonely,” she tells him. “I have been without company for a while.” She strokes his thighs and his sturdy smooth chest and slips down the sheets until their hipbones are aligned. Compactly built, she is several inches shorter than him but points out that their legs are the same length; his extra height is in his torso. Swiftly he pushes away a memory of his wedding night with long-waisted Clara. The silvery filaments etched across Dima’s stomach he tries not to recognize as being like those that appeared on Clara, after Elizabeth’s birth.
He doesn’t insult her by paying her for their time together; she isn’t a prostitute, simply a woman grown used, of necessity, to being kept by men. Each time he arrives at her bungalow he brings gifts: little carved boxes and bangles and lengths of cloth; for her daughter, who is nearly Elizabeth’s age, toy elephants and camels. Otherwise he tries to ignore the little girl. Who is her father, what is her name? He can’t think about that, he can’t look at her. Dima, seeming somehow to understand, sends her daughter off to play with the children of her servants when he arrives. Through the open window over her bed he sometimes hears them laughing.
Dima has lived with her father in Leh and Gilgit and here, in a quarter of Srinagar seldom visited by Europeans; she claims to be the daughter of a Russian explorer and a woman, now dead, from Skardu. For some years she was the mistress of a Scotsman who fled his job with the East India Company, explored in Ladakh, and ended up in Kashmir; later she lived with a German geologist. Or so she says. In bed she tells Max tales of her lovers, their friends, her father’s friends—a secret band of wanderers, each with a story as complicated as Dr. Chouteau’s. Which one taught her botany? In those stories, and the way that she appears to omit at least as much as she reveals, she resembles Dr. Chouteau himself, whom she claims to know. A friend of her father’s, she says. A cartographer (but didn’t he tell Max he never made maps?) and advisor to obscure princes; a spendthrift and an amateur geologist. Bad with his servants but excellent with animals; once he kept falcons. She knows a good deal about him but not, she claims, where he is now.
One night, walking back from her bungalow, a shadowy figure resembling Dr. Chouteau appears on the street before Max and then disappears into an alley. Although the night is dark, Max follows. The men crouched around charcoal braziers and leaning in doorways regard him quietly. Not just Kashmiris: Tibetans and Ladakhis, Yarkandis, Gujars, Dards—are those Dards?—and Baltis and fair-haired men who might be Kafirs. During this last year, he has learned to recognize such men by their size and coloring and the shape of their eyes, their dress and weapons and bearing. As they have no doubt learned to recognize Englishmen. If Dr. Chouteau is among them, he hides himself. For a moment, as Max backs away with his hands held open and empty before him, he realizes that anything might happen to him. He is no one here. No one knows where he is. In the Yasin valley, Dr. Chouteau said, he once stumbled across a pile of stones crowned by a pair of hands. The hands were white, desiccated, bound together at the wrists. Below the stones was the remainder of the body.
When he leaves the alley, all Max can see for a while are the stars and the looming blackness of the mountains. How clear the sky is! His mind feels equally clear, washed out by that moment of darkness.
During his next weeks with Dima, Clara recedes—a voice in his ear, words on paper; mysterious, as she was when he first knew her. Only when Dima catches a cold and he has to tend her, bringing basins and handkerchiefs and cups of tea, does he recollect what living with Clara was really like. Not the ardent, long-distance exchange of words on which they’ve survived for more than a year, but the grit and weariness of everyday life. Household chores and worries over money, a crying child, a smoking stove; relatives coming and going, all needing things, and both of them stretched so thin; none of it Clara’s fault, it is only life. Now it is Dima who is sick, and who can no longer maintain her enchanting deceits. The carefully placed candles, the painted screen behind which she undoes her ribbons and laces to emerge in a state of artful undress, the daughter disposed of so she may listen with utmost attention to him, concentrate on him completely—all that breaks down. One day there is a problem with her well, which he must tend to. On another her daughter—her name is Kate—comes into Dima’s bedroom in tears, her dress torn by some children who’ve been teasing her. He has to take Kate’s hand. He has to find the other children and scold them and convince them all to play nicely together, then report back to Dima how this has been settled. He is falling, he thinks. Headfirst, into another crevasse.
During Dima’s illness it is with some relief—he knows it is shameful—that he returns at night to his spartan quarters. Through the gossip that flies so swiftly among the British community, the three other surveyors have heard about Dima. Twice Max was spotted with her, and this was all it took; shunned alike by Hindus and Moslems, Christians and Sikhs, she has a reputation. That it is Max she’s taken up with, Max she’s chosen; to Max’s amazement and chagrin, his companions find this glamorous. They themselves have found solace in the brothels; Srinagar is filled with women and they no longer turn to each other for physical relief. But to them, unaware of Dima’s illness and her precarious household, Max’s situation seems exotic. The knowledge that he shares their weaknesses, despite the way he has kept to himself—this, finally, is what makes Max’s companions accept him.
They stop teasing him. They ask him to drink with them, to dine with them; which, on occasion, he does. They ask for details, which he refuses. But despite his reticence, his connection to Dima has made his own reputation. When the rest of the surveyors return from Dehra Dun and they all head back to the mountains, Max knows he will occupy a different position among them. Because of her, everything will be different, and easier, than during the last season. It is this knowledge that breaks the last piece of his heart.
April arrives; the deep snow mantling the Pir Panjal begins to shrink from the black rock. Max writes long letters to Laurence, saying nothing about Dima but musing about what he reads. Into Srinagar march tri-angulators in fresh tidy clothes, newly trained Indian assistants, new crowds of porters bearing glittering instruments, and the officers: Michaels among them. But Michaels can no longer do Max any harm. Max and his three companions present their revised map of Srinagar, and are praised. Then it is time to leave. Still Max has no answers. Dr. Chouteau has continued to elude him; Dima, fully recovered now, thanks him for all his help, gives him some warm socks, and wishes him well with his work.
Which work? Even to her he has not admitted what he is thinking about doing these next months. He holds her right hand in both of his and nods numbly when she says she will write to him, often, and hopes that he’ll write to her. Hopes that they’ll see each other again, when the surveying party returns to Srinagar.
More letters. Another person waiting for him. “Don’t write,” he says, aware the instant he does so of his cruelty. The look on her face—but she has had other lovers (how many lovers?) and she doesn’t make a scene. Perhaps this is why he chose her. When they part, he knows he will become simply a story she tells to the next stranger she welcomes into her life.
And still he does not write to Clara. Other letters from her have arrived, which he hasn’t answered: six months, what is he thinking? Not about her, the life she is leading in his absence, the way her days unfold; not what she and their children are doing, their dreams and daily duties and aspirations and disappointments. Neither is he thinking about Dima; it is not as if his feelings for her have driven out those he has for Clara. He isn’t thinking about either of them. This is his story, his life unfolding. The women will tell the tale of these months another way.
7
April 21, 1864
My dearest, my beloved Clara—
Forgive me for not writing in so long. I have been sick—nothing serious, nothing you need worry about, although it did linger. But I am fully recovered now, in time to join the rest of the party on our march back into the mountains. This season, I expect, will be much like the last. Different mountains, similar work; in October I will be done with the services I contracted for and the Survey will be completed. From my letters of last season you will have a good idea of what I’ll be doing. But Clara …
Max pauses, then crosses out the last two words. What he should say is what he knows she wants to hear: that when October comes he’ll be on his way back to her, as they agreed. But he doesn’t want to lie to her. Not yet.
His party is camped by a frozen stream. The porters are butchering a goat. Michaels, in a nearby tent, has just explained to the men their assignments for the coming week; soon it will be time to eat; Max has half an hour to finish this letter and no way to say what he really means: that after the season is finished, he wants to stay on.
Everything has changed for me, he wants to say. I am changed, I know now who I am and what I want and I can only hope you accept this, and continue to wait for me. I want to stay a year longer. When the Survey ends, in October, I want to wait out the winter in Srinagar, writing up all I have learned and seen so far; and then I want to spend next spring and summer traveling by myself. If I had this time to explore, to test myself, discover the secrets of these mountains—it would be enough, I could be happy with this, it would last me the rest of my life. When I come home, I mean to try to establish myself as a botanist. I have no hope of doing so without taking this time and working solely on my studies.
But he can’t write any of that. Behind him men are laughing, a fire is burning, he can smell the first fragrance of roasting meat. He is off again, to the cold bare brilliance of a place like the moon, and what he can’t explain, yet, to Clara is that he needs other time, during the growing season, to study the plants in the space between the timberline and the line of permanent snow. How do the species that have arisen here differ from those in other places? How do they make a life for themselves, in such difficult circumstances?
Could Clara understand this? He will break it to her gently, he thinks. A hint, at first; a few more suggestions in letters over the coming months; in September he’ll raise the subject. By then he’ll have found some position that will pay his salary while leaving him sufficient time for his own work. Perhaps he’ll have more encouragement from Dr. Hooker by then, which he can offer to Clara as evidence that his work is worthwhile. Perhaps he’ll understand by then how he might justify his plans to her. For now—what else can he say in this letter? He has kept too much from her, these last months. If his letters were meant to be a map of his mind, a way for her to follow his trail, then he has failed her. Somehow, as summer comes to these peaks and he does his job for the last time, he must find a way to let her share in his journey. But for now all he can do is triangulate the first few points.
… I have so much to tell you, Clara. And no more time today; what will you think, after all these months, when you receive such a brief letter? Know that I am thinking of you and the girls, no matter what I do. I promise we’ll do whatever you want when I return: I know how much you miss your brother, perhaps we will join him in New York. I would like that, I think. I would like to start over, all of us, someplace new. Somewhere I can be my new self, live my new life, in your company.
Next to my heart, in an oilskin pouch, I keep the lock of Elizabeth’s hair and your last unopened letter to me, with your solemn instruction on the envelope: To be Opened if You Know You Will Not Return to Me. If the time comes, I will open it. But the time won’t come; I will make it back, I will be with you again.
This comes to you with all my love, from your dearest
Max
The Forest (#ulink_1aaa7b77-3e51-5a6d-8863-8865617c607b)
LATER THE SQUAT WHITE cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the way down; the swellings above and below reminded him of bodices and rounded skirts. Perhaps he viewed the lanterns this way because the girls guiding him down the flagstone steps and across the patio were themselves so doll-like. Amazingly young, amazingly smooth-skinned. Sisters, they’d said. The tiny dark-haired one who’d appeared in the hotel lobby was Rose; the round-cheeked one driving the battered van, with her blond hair frizzing in all directions, was Bianca. Already he’d been clumsy with them.
“You are … are you Dr. Humboldt’s daughters?” he’d asked. The sun was so bright, his eyes were so tired, the jumble of buildings and traffic so confusing. The step up to the van’s back seat was too high for him, but neither girl noticed him struggling.
The small one, Rose, had laughed at his question. “We’re not related to Constance,” she’d said. “I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the institute.” The blond one, who called to mind his own mother sixty years earlier, pulled out of the hotel driveway too fast and said nothing during the short drive to the Humboldts’ house. He feared he’d hurt her feelings. For the last decade or so, he’d been subject to these embarrassing misidentifications, taking young scientists for children or servants when he met them out of context. They all dressed so casually, especially in this country; their faces were so unmarked—how could anyone tell them from the young people who chauffeured him about or offered trays of canapes at parties? But these girls he should have known, he’d probably met them earlier. Now, as he stepped down into the enormous back garden and moved toward the long table spread with food and drink, the girl called after a flower veered toward a crowd gathered by the pool and left him with the girl he’d affronted.
“Dr. Wojciechowicz?” she said, mangling his name as she steered him closer to the table. “Would you like a drink or something?”
Reflexively he corrected her pronunciation; then he shook his head and said, “Please. Call me Krzysztof. And you are Bianca, yes?” He could not help noticing that she had lovely breasts.
“That’s me,” she agreed dryly. “Bianca the chauffeur, Rose’s sister, not related to the famous Dr. Constance Humboldt. No one you need to pay attention to at all.”
“It’s not …” he said. Of course he had insulted her. “It’s just that I’m so tired, and I’m still jet-lagged, and …”
Could he ask her where he was without sounding senile? Somewhere north of Philadelphia, he thought; but he knew this generally, not specifically. When he’d arrived two days ago, his body still on London time, he had fallen asleep during the long, noisy drive from the airport. Since then he’d had no clear sense of his location. He woke in a room that looked like any other; each morning a different stranger appeared and drove him to the institute. Other strangers shuttled him from laboratory to laboratory, talking at length about their research projects and then moving him from laboratory to cafeteria to auditorium to laboratory, from lobby to restaurant and back to his hotel. The talk he’d given was the same talk he’d been giving for years; he had met perhaps thirty fellow scientists and could remember only a handful of their names. All of them seemed to be gathered here, baring too much skin to the early July sun. Saturday, he thought. Also some holiday seemed to be looming.
“Do forgive me,” he said. “The foibles of the elderly.”
“How old are you?”
Her smile was charming and he forgave her rude question. “I am seventy-nine years of age,” he said. “Easy to remember—I was born in 1900, I am always as old as the century.”
“Foibles forgiven.” She—Bianca, he thought. Bianca—held out her hand in that strange boyish way of American women. Meanwhile she was looking over his shoulders, as if hoping to find someone to rescue her. “Bianca Marburg, not quite twenty-two but I’m very old for my age.”
“You’re in college?”
She tossed her hair impatiently. “Not now. My sister and I were dreadful little prodigies—in college at sixteen, out at nineteen, right into graduate school. Rose already has her Ph.D.—how else do you think she’d have a postdoc here?”
Would he never say the right thing to this bristly girl? “So then you … what is the project you are working on?” Americans, he’d been reminded these last two days, were always eager to talk about themselves.
“So then I—I should be in graduate school, and I was until two months ago but I dropped out, it was seeming stupid to me. Unlike my so-successful sister Rose, I am at loose ends.”
She moved a bowl of salad closer to a platter of sliced bread draped with a cloth, then moved it back again. “Which is why I’m driving you around. Why I’m here. I’m sort of between places, you know? I got a temp job typing for an Iraqi biophysicist—see the short guy near the volleyball net? He hired me because I can spell ‘vacuum.’ I’m staying with my sister until I get enough money together to move. I might go to Alaska.”
“That’s nice,” Krzysztof said helplessly.
“Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested. Go talk to the other famous people. Constance collects them, they’re everywhere.”
She huffed off—furious, he saw. At him? In the battered leather bag that hung from his shoulder he felt the bottle he’d carried across the ocean as a special gift for his hostess. But his hostess was nowhere to be seen, and no one moved toward him from either the pool or the round tables with their mushroomlike umbrellas. Already the top of his head was burning; he was all alone and wished he had a hat. Was it possible these people meant to stay in the sun all afternoon?
Bianca made a brisk circuit through the backyard, looking for someplace to settle down. There was Rose, leaning attentively toward Constance’s camel-faced husband, Roger, and listening to him as if she were interested. Entirely typical, Bianca thought; Rose submitted herself to Roger’s monologues as a way of pleasing Constance, who was her advisor. Constance herself was holding court from a elegant lawn chair beneath an umbrella, surrounded by graduate students and postdocs—but Bianca couldn’t bear the way Constance patronized her, and she steered wide of this group. She considered joining the two students Constance employed, who were trotting up and down the steps bearing pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; at last week’s reception, though, Constance had rebuked her for distracting the help. The knot of protein chemists at the volleyball net beckoned, Rick and Wen-li and Diego stripped of their shirts and gleaming in the sun, but she’d slept with Diego after that reception, and now they weren’t speaking. Perhaps Vivek and Anisha, easing themselves into the shallow end of the pool just as Jocelyn, already cannonball-shaped, curled her arms around her legs and launched herself into the deep end with a splash?
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Andrea Barrett
A national hardback bestseller in the US – another magnificently imagined and executed book of historical fiction with a contemporary twist, from one of the masters of the form. ‘These stories possess a wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers.' New York TimesRanging across two centuries, and from the western Himalayas to an Adirondack village, Servants of the Map travels the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.A mapper of the highest mountain peaks, engaged on the trigonometrical measurement of British India, realizes his true obsession while in deflationary correspondence with his far-off wife. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Barrett’s most characteristic theme – the happenings in that borderland between science and desire – unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings.
SERVANTS
OF THE MAP
Andrea Barrett
FOR MY FAMILY
Contents
Cover (#ua6ea49cd-3edd-5939-840e-5b140e15069f)
Title Page (#u1757a32b-c7f5-5869-b82b-88a2c0f27f36)
Servants of the Map (#u4e0dd712-aae8-5c0e-9a22-f302eb9c4dab)
The Forest (#ua7864d39-7246-50bd-ab75-45ba3c899951)
Theories of Rain (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Rivers (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mysteries of Ubiquitin (#litres_trial_promo)
The Cure (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Andrea Barrett (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise for Servants of the Map. (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Servants of the Map (#ulink_c6acff53-2c84-5368-ad13-6a9a9752815b)
1
HE DOES NOT WRITE to his wife about the body found on a mountain that is numbered but still to be named: not about the bones, the shreds of tent, the fragile, browning skull. He says nothing about the diary wedged beneath the rock, or about how it felt to turn the rippled pages. Unlike himself, the surveyor thinks, the lost man traveled alone. Not attached to a branch, however small and insignificant, of the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India. On this twig charged to complete the Kashmir Series, he is nothing. A leaf, an apricot, easily replaced; a Civil Junior Sub-Assistant in the Himalayan Service.
The surveyor, whose name is Max Vigne, reads through the diary before relinquishing it to his superiors. The handwriting trembled in the final pages, the entries growing shorter and more confused. Hailstorms, lightning storms, the loss of a little shaving mirror meant to send a glinting signal from the summit to the admiring crowds below—after noting these, the lost man wrote:
I have been fasting. Several weeks—the soul detaches from the flesh. The ills of spirit and body are washed away and here on the roof of the world, in the abode of snow, one becomes greatly strengthened yet as fresh as a child.
Although Max pauses in wonder over these lines, he still doesn’t share them with his wife. Instead he writes:
April 13, 1863
Dear Clara—
I can hardly understand where I am myself, how shall I explain it to you? Try to imagine the whole chain of the Himalaya, as wide as England and four times its length. Then imagine our speck of a surveying party tucked in the northwest corner, where the Great Himalaya tangles into the Karakoram—or not quite there, but almost there. We are at the edge of the land called Baltistan, or Little Tibet: Ladakh and Greater Tibet lie to the east. And it is so much more astonishing than we imagined. The mountains I wrote to you about earlier, which we crossed to enter the Vale of Kashmir—everything I said about them was true, they dwarf the highest peaks I saw at home. But the land I am headed toward dwarfs in turn the range that lies behind me. Last Wednesday, after breakfast, the low clouds lifted and the sun came out. To the north a huge white mass remained, stretching clear across the horizon. I was worried about an approaching storm. Then I realized those improbable masses were mountains, shimmering and seeming to float over the plains below.
How I wish you could see this for yourself. I have had no mail from you since Srinagar, but messengers do reach us despite our frequent moves and I am hopeful. This morning I opened an envelope from the little trunk you sent with me. Have any of my letters reached you yet? If they have, you will know how much your messages have cheered me. No one but you, my love, would have thought to do this. On the ship, then during our tedious journey across the plains to the Pir Panjal; and even more throughout the weeks of preparation and training in Srinagar, your words have been my great consolation. I wait like a child on Christmas Eve for the dates you have marked on each envelope to arrive: I obey you, you see; I have not cheated. Now that the surveying season has finally begun and we’re on the move, I treasure these even more. I wish I had thought to leave behind a similar gift for you. The letters I wrote you from Srinagar—I know the details about my work could not have been of much interest to you. But I mean to do better, now that we’re entering this astonishing range. If I share with you what I see, what I feel: will that be a kind of gift?
Yours marked to be opened today, the anniversary of that wonderful walk along the Ouse when I asked you to marry me and, against a background of spinning windmills and little boys searching for eels, you stood so sleek and beautiful and you said “yes”—it made me remember the feel of your hand in mine, it was like holding you. I am glad you plan to continue with your German. By now you must have opened the birthday gifts I left for you. Did you like the dictionary? And the necklace?
I should try to catch you up on our journeys of these last few weeks. From Srinagar we labored over the Gurais pass, still knee-deep in snow: my four fellow plane-tablers, the six Indian chainmen, a crowd of Kashmiri and Baiti porters, and Michaels, who has charge of us for the summer. Captain Montgomerie of the Bengal Engineers, head of the entire Kashmir Series, we have not seen since leaving Srinagar. I am told it is his habit to tour the mountains from April until October, inspecting the many small parties of triangulators and plane-tablers, of which we are only one. The complexities of the Survey’s organization are beyond explaining a confusion of military men and civilians, Scots and Irish and English; and then the assistants and porters, all races and castes. All I can tell you is that, although we civilians may rise in the ranks of the Survey, even the most senior of us may never have charge of the military officers. And I am the most junior of all.
From the top of the pass I saw the mountain called Nanga Parbat, monstrous and beautiful, forty miles away. Then we were in the village of Gurais, where we gathered more provisions and porters to replace those returning to Srinagar. Over the Burzil pass and across the Deosai plateau—it is from here that I write to you, a grassy land populated by chattering rodents called marmots. The air is clear beyond clearness today and to the north rises that wall of snowy summits I first mistook for a cloud: the Karakoram range, which we are to map. Even this far away I can see the massive glaciers explored by Godfrey Vigne, to whom I am so tangentially related.
I wonder what he would have thought of me ending up here? Often people ask if I’m related to that famous man but I deny it; it would be wrong of me, even now that he’s dead, to claim such a distant connection. My eccentric, sometimes malicious supervisor, Michaels (an Irishman and former soldier of the Indian army), persists in calling me “Mr. Vaahn-ya,” in an atrocious French accent. This although I have reminded him repeatedly that ours is a good East Anglian family, even if we do have Huguenot ancestors, and that we say the name “Vine.”
All the men who’ve explored these mountains—what a secret, isolated world this is! A kind of archipelago, sparsely populated, visited now and again by passing strangers; each hidden valley an island unto itself, inhabited by small groups of people wildly distinct from each other—it is as if, at home, a day’s journey in one direction brought us to Germany, another’s to Africa. As if, in the distance between the fens and the moors, there were twenty separate kingdoms. I have more to tell you, so much more, but it is late and I must sleep.
What doesn’t he tell Clara? So much, so much. The constant discomforts of the body, the hardships of the daily climbs, the exhaustion, the loneliness: he won’t reveal the things that would worry her. He restrains himself, a constant battle; the battle itself another thing he doesn’t write about. He hasn’t said a word about the way his fellow surveyors tease him. His youth, his chunky, short-legged frame and terribly white skin; the mop of bright yellow hair on his head and the paucity of it elsewhere: although he keeps up with the best of them, and is often the last to tire, he is ashamed each time they strip their clothes to bathe in a freezing stream or a glacial tarn. His British companions are tall and hairy, browning in the sun; the Indians and Kashmiris and Baltis smoother and slighter but dark; he alone looks like a figure made from snow. The skin peels off his nose until he bleeds. When he extends his hat brim with strips of bark, in an effort to fend off the burning rays, Michaels asks him why he doesn’t simply use a parasol.
Michaels himself is thickly pelted, fleshy and sweaty, strong-smelling and apparently impervious to the sun. They have all grown beards, shaving is impossible; only Max’s is blond and sparse. He gets teased for this and sometimes, more cruelly, for the golden curls around his genitals. Not since he was fourteen, when he first left school and began his apprenticeship on the railway survey, has he been so mocked. Then he had his older brother, Laurence, to protect him. But here he is on his own.
The men are amused not only by his looks, but by his box of books and by the pretty, brass-bound trunk that holds Clara’s precious gift to him: a long series of letters, some written by her and others begged from their family and friends. The first is dated the week after he left home, the last more than a year hence; all are marked to be opened on certain dates and anniversaries. Who but Clara would have thought of this? Who else would have had the imagination to project herself into the future, sensing what he might feel like a week, a month, a year from leaving home and writing what might comfort him then?
His companions have not been so lucky. Some are single; others married but to wives they seem not to miss or perhaps are even relieved to have left behind. A Yorkshireman named Wyatt stole one of Clara’s missives from Max’s camp stool, where he’d left it while fetching a cup of tea. “Listen to this,” Wyatt said: laughing, holding the letter above Max’s head and reading aloud to the entire party. “Max, you must wear your woolly vest, you know how cold you get.” Now the men ask tauntingly, every day, what he’s read from the trunk. He comforts himself by believing that they’re jealous.
A more reliable comfort is his box of books. In it, beyond the mathematical and cartographical texts he needs for his work, are three other gifts. With money she’d saved from the household accounts, Clara bought him a copy of Joseph Hooker’s Himalayan Journals. This Max cherishes for the thought behind it, never correcting her misapprehension that Sikkim, where Hooker traveled in 1848, is only a stone’s throw from where Max is traveling now. At home, with a map, he might have put his left thumb on the Karakoram range and his right, many inches away to the east, on the lands that Hooker explored: both almost equally far from England, yet still far apart themselves. Clara might have smiled—despite her interest in Max’s work, geography sometimes eludes her—but that last evening passed in such a flurry that all he managed to do was to thank her. For his brother Laurence, who gave him a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, he’d had only the same hurried thanks. On the flyleaf, Laurence had written: “New ideas, for your new life. Think of me as you read this; I will be reading my own copy in your absence and we can write to each other about what we learn.”
Repeatedly Max has tried to keep up his end of this joint endeavor, only to be frustrated by the book’s difficulty. For now he has set it aside in favor of a more unexpectedly useful gift. Clara’s brother, far away in the city of New York, works as an assistant librarian and sometimes sends extra copies of the books he receives to catalog. “Not of much interest to me,” he wrote to Max, forwarding Asa Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology. “But I know you and Clara like to garden, and to look at flowers in the woods—and I thought perhaps you would enjoy this.”
At first, finding his companions uncongenial, Max read out of boredom and loneliness. Later Gray’s manual captured him. The drawings at the back, the ferns and grasses and seedpods and spore capsules: how lovely these are! As familiar as his mother’s eyes; as distant as the fossilized ferns recently found in the Arctic. As a boy he’d had a passion for botany: a charmed few years of learning plants and their names before the shock of his mother’s death, his father’s long decline, the necessity of going out, so young, to earn a living and help care for his family. Now he has a family of his own. Work of his own, as well, which he is proud of. But the illustrations draw him back to a time when the differences between a hawkweed and a dandelion could fascinate him for hours.
Charmed by the grasses of the Deosai plateau, he begins to dip into Dr. Hooker’s book as well. Here too he finds much of interest. When he feels lost, when all he’s forgotten or never knew about simple botany impedes his understanding, he marks his place with a leaf or a stem and turns back to Gray’s manual. At home, he thinks, after he’s safely returned, he and Clara can wander the fields as they did in the days of their courtship, this time understanding more clearly what they see and teaching these pleasures to their children. He copies passages into his notebook, meaning to share them with her:
Lesson I. BOTANY AS A BRANCH OF NATURAL HISTORY
The Organic World, is the world of organized beings. These consist of organs., of parts which go to make up an individual, a being. And each individual owes its existence to a preceding one like itself, that is, to a parent. It was not merely formed, but produced. At first small and imperfect, it grows and develops by powers of its own; it attains maturity, becomes old, and finally dies. It was formed of inorganic or mineral matter, that is, of earth and air, indeed; but only of this matter under the influence of life; and after life departs, sooner or later, it is decomposed into earth and air again.
He reads, and makes notes, and reads some more. The Himalayan Journals, he has noticed, are “Dedicated to Charles Darwin by his affectionate friend, Joseph Dalton Hooker.” What lives those men lead: far-flung, yet always writing to each other and discussing their ideas. Something else he hasn’t told Clara is this: before leaving Srinagar, in a shop he entered meaning only to buy a new spirit level, he made an uncharacteristically impulsive purchase. A botanical collecting outfit, charming and neat; he could not resist it although he wasn’t sure, then, what use he’d make of it. But on the Deosai plateau he found, after a windstorm, an unusual primrose flowering next to a field of snow. He pressed it, mounted it—not very well, he’s still getting the hang of this—and drew it; then, in a fit of boldness, wrote about it to Dr. Hooker, care of his publisher in England. “The willows and stonecrops are remarkable,” he added. “And I am headed higher still; might the lichens and mosses here be of some interest to you?” He doesn’t expect that Dr. Hooker will write back to him.
In his tent made from blankets, with a candle casting yellow light on the pages, Max pauses over a drawing of a mallow. About his mother, who died when he was nine, he remembers little. In a coffin she lay, hands folded over her black bombazine dress, face swollen and unrecognizable. When he was five or six, still in petticoats, she guided him through the marshes. Her pale hands, so soon to be stilled, plucked reeds and weeds and flowers. Remember these, she said. You must learn the names of the wonderful things surrounding us. Horsetails in her hands, and then in his; the ribbed walls and the satisfying way the segments popped apart at the plump joints. Pickerel rush and mallow and cattail and reed; then she got sick, and then she died. After that, for so many years, there was never time for anything but work.
2
May 1, 1863
Dearest Clara—
A great day: as I was coming down an almost vertical cliff, on my way back to camp, a Baiti coming up from the river met me and handed me a greasy, dirty packet. Letters from you, Laurence, and Zoe—yours were marked “Packet 12,” which I had thought lost after receiving 13 and 14 back in Srinagar. From those earlier letters I knew you had been delivered safely of our beloved Gillian, and that Elizabeth had welcomed her new sister and all three of you were well: but I had no details, and to have missed not only this great event but your account of it made me melancholy. How wonderful then, after five long months, to have your description of the birth. All our family around you, the dawn just breaking as Gillian arrived, and Elizabeth toddling in, later, to peer at the infant in your arms: how I wish I had been with you, my love.
And how I wish I knew what that long night and its aftermath had really been like; you spare my feelings, I know. You say not a word about your pains and trials. In Packet 13 you mentioned recovering completely from the milk fever, but in 12 you did not tell me you had it, though you must have been suffering even then. Did we understand, when I took this position, how hard it would be? So many months elapse between one of us speaking, the other hearing; so many more before a response arrives. Our emotions lag so far behind the events. For me, it was as if Gillian had been born today. Yet she is five months old, and I have no idea of what those months have brought. Zoe says Elizabeth is growing like a cabbage, and Laurence says he heard from your brother in New York and that the family is thriving; how fortunate that the wound to his foot, which we once so regretted, has saved him from conscription.
I am well too, though terribly busy. But what I want, even more than sleep, is to talk to you. Everything I am seeing and doing is so new—it is nothing, really, like the work I did in England—so much is rushing into me all at once—I get confused. When I lie down to sleep everything spins in my brain. I can only make sense of my new life the way I have made sense of everything, since we first met: by describing it to you. That great gift you have always had of listening, asking such excellent questions—when I tell you enough to let you imagine me clearly, then I can imagine myself.
So, my dearest: imagine this. If this were an army (it almost is; three of Montgomerie’s assistants are military officers, while others, like Michaels and his friends, served in the military forces of the East India Company until the Mutiny, then took their discharge rather than accept transfer to the British Army), I’d be a foot-soldier, far behind the dashing scouts of the triangulating parties who precede us up the summits. It is they who measure, with the utmost accuracy, the baseline between two vantage points, which becomes the first side of a triangle. They who with their theodolites measure the angles between each end of that line and a third high point in the distance: and they who calculate by trigonometry the two other sities of the triangle, thus fixing the distance to the far point and the point’s exact position. One of the sides of that triangle then becomes the base for a new triangle—and so the chain slowly grows, easy enough to see on paper but dearly won in life. In the plains these triangles are small and neat. Out here the sides of a triangle may be a hundred miles or more.
Is this hard to follow? Try to imagine how many peaks must be climbed. And how high they are: 15,000 and 17,000 and 19,000 feet. My companions and I see the results of the triangulators’ hard work when we follow them to the level platforms they’ve exposed by digging through feet of snow, and the supporting pillars they’ve constructed from rocks. Imagine a cold, weary man on the top of a mountain, bent over his theodolite and waiting for a splash of light. Far from him, on another peak, a signal squad manipulates a heliotrope (which is a circular mirror, my dear, mounted on a staff so it may be turned in any direction). On a clear day it flashes bright with reflected sunlight. At night it beams back the rays of a blue-burning lamp.
The triangulators leap from peak to peak; if they are the grasshoppers, we plane-tablers are the ants. At their abandoned stations we camp for days, collecting topographical details and filling in their sketchy outline maps. You might imagine us as putting muscle and sinew on the bare bones they have made. Up through the snow we go, a little file of men; and then at the station I draw and draw until I’ve replicated all I see. I have a new plane-table, handsome and strong. The drawing-board swivels on its tripod, the spirit level guides my position; I set the table directly over the point corresponding to the plotted site of my rough map. Then I rotate the board with the sheet of paper pinned to it until the other main landscape features I can see—those the triangulators have already plotted—are positioned correctly relative to the map.
As I fill in the blank spaces with the bends and curves of a river valley, the dips and rises of a range, the drawing begins to resemble a map of home. For company I have the handful of porters who’ve carried the equipment, and one or two of the Indian chainmen who assist us—intelligent men, trained at Dehra Dun in the basics of mapping and observation. Some know almost as much as I do, and have the additional advantage of speaking the local languages as well as some English. When we meet to exchange results with those who work on the nearby peaks and form the rest of our group, the chainmen gather on one side of the fire, sharing food and stories. In their conversations a great idea called “The Survey” looms like a disembodied god to whom they—we—are all devoted. Proudly, they refer to both themselves and us as “Servants of the Map.”
I will tell you what your very own Servant of the Map saw a few days ago. On the edge of the Deosai plateau, overlooking Skardu, I saw two faraway peaks towering above the rest of the Karakoram, the higher gleaming brilliant blue and the lower yellow. These are the mountains which Montgomerie, seven years ago, designated K1 and K2. K2 the triangulators have calculated at over 28,000 feet: imagine, the second highest mountain in the world, and I have seen it! The sky was the deepest blue, indescribable, sparkling with the signals which the heliotropes of the triangulating parties twinkled at one another. Do you remember our visit to Ely Cathedral? The way the stone rose up so sharply from the flat plain, an explosion of height—it was like our first glimpse of that, magnified beyond reason and dotted with candles.
We have thunderstorms almost every day, they are always terrifying; the one that shook us the afternoon I saw K2 brought hail, and lightning so close that sparks leapt about the rocks at my feet and my hair bristled and crackled. The wind tore my map from the drawing board and sent it spinning over the edge of the plain, a white bird flying into the Indus valley below. But I do not mean to frighten you. I take care of myself, I am as safe as it is possible to be in such a place, I think of you constantly. Even the things I read remind me of you.
In Asa Gray’s manual, I read this today, from
Lesson VII: MORPHOLOGY OF LEAVES—
We may call foliage the natural form of leaves, and look upon the other sorts as special forms,—as transformed leaves … the Great Author of Nature, having designed plants upon one simple plan, just adapts this plan to all cases. So, whenever any special purpose is to be accomplished, no new instruments or organs are created for it, but one of the three general organs of the vegetable, root, stem, or leaf, is made to serve the purpose, and is adapted by taking some peculiar form.
Have I told you I have been working my way through this manual, lesson by lesson? I forget sometimes what I have written to you and what I have not. But I study whenever I can and use what I learn to help make sense both of my surroundings and of what I read in the Himalayan Journals: which I treasure, because it’s from you. As the book Laurence gave me requires more concentration than I can summon, I’ve set it aside for now (my guilty secret; don’t tell him this): but Dr. Hooker I think even more highly of since my arrival here. The rhododendron that Zoe, my thoughtful sister, gave us as a wedding present—do you remember how, when it first flowered, we marveled at the fragrant, snowy blossoms with their secret gold insides? It was raised in a greenhouse in St. John’s Wood, from seeds sent back by Dr. Hooker. I wish I could have been with you this spring to watch it bloom.
I am drifting from my point, I see. Forgive me. The point, the reason I copy this passage, is not to teach you about leaves but to say these words brought tears to my eyes; they made me think of our marriage. When we were together our lives were shaped like our neighbors’, as simple as the open leaves of the maple. Now we are apart, trying to maintain our connection over this immense distance. Trying to stay in touch without touch; how that effort changes us. Perhaps even deforms us.
To an outsider we might now look like the thick seed leaves of the almond or the bean, or the scales of buds or bulbs; like spines or tendrils, sepals or petals, which are also altered leaves. Do you know that, in certain willows, pistils and stamens can sometimes change into each other? Or that pistils often turn into petals in cultivated flowers? Only now do I begin to grasp the principles of growth and change in the plants I learned to name in the woods, those we have grown at home—there is a science to this. Something that transcends mere identification.
I wander, I know. Try to follow me. The point, dear heart, is that through all these transformations one can still discern the original morphology; the original character is altered yet not lost. In our separation our lives are changing, our bond to each other is changing. Yet still we are essentially the same.
I love you. So much. Do you know this?
It is raining again, we are damp and cold. I miss you. All the time.
Max regards the last page of his letter doubtfully. That business about the alteration of leaves; before he sends it, he scratches out the line about the effects of his and Clara’s separation. Deform: such a frightening word.
His days pass in promiscuous chatter, men eating and drinking and working and snoring, men sick and wounded and snow-blind and wheezing; always worries about supplies and medicines and deadlines. He is never alone. He has never felt lonelier. There are quarrels everywhere: among the Indian chainmen, between the chainmen and the porters, the porters and his fellow plane-tablers; between the plane-tablers and the triangulators; even, within his own group, among the parties squatting on the separate peaks. Michaels, their leader, appears to enjoy setting one team against another. Michaels takes the youngest of the porters into his tent at night; Michaels has made advances toward Max and, since Max rebuffed him, startled and furious, has ceased speaking with him directly and communicates by sarcastic notes.
Wyatt has approached Max as well; and a man from another party—the only one as young as Max—with a shock of red hair as obtrusive as a kingfisher’s crest. Now all three are aligned against him. When the whole group meets he has seen, in the shadows just beyond the ring of light sent out by the campfire, men kneeling across from each other, britches unbuttoned, hands on each other … He closed his eyes and turned his back and blocked his ears to the roar of laughter following his hasty departure. Yet who is he to judge them? So starved for love and touch is he that he has, at different times, found himself attracted to the middle-aged, stiff-necked wife of an English official in Srinagar, a Kashmiri flower-seller, a Tibetan herdsman, the herdsman’s dog. He has felt such lust that his teeth throb, and the roots of his hair; the skin of his whole body itching as if about to explode in a giant sneeze.
In the act of writing to Clara, Max makes for himself the solitude he so desperately needs. He holds two strands of her life: one the set of letters she writes to him now—or not now, but as close to now as they can get, four months earlier, five, six—and the other the set of letters she wrote secretly in the months before he left, trying to imagine what he might need to hear. Occasionally he has allowed himself the strange pleasure of opening one letter from each set on the same day. A rounded image of Clara appears when he reads them side by side: she is with him. And this fills him with a desire to offer back to her, in his letters, his truest self. He wants to give her everything: what he is seeing, thinking, feeling; who he truly is. Yet these days he scarcely recognizes himself. How can he offer these aberrant knots of his character to Clara?
He tries to imagine himself into the last days of her pregnancy, into the events of Gillian’s birth, the fever after that. He tries to imagine his family’s daily life, moving on without him. Clara is nursing Gillian, teaching Elizabeth how to talk, tending the garden, watching the flowers unfold; at night, if she is not too weary, she is bending over her dictionary and her German texts, and then … He wonders what would happen if he wrote, Tell me what it feels like to lie in our bed, in the early morning light, naked and without me. Tell me what you do when you think of me. What your hands do, what you imagine me doing.
He doesn’t write that; he doesn’t write about what he does to himself on a narrow cot, in a tent made from a blanket strung over a tree limb, the wind whistling as he stifles his groans with a handkerchief. Even then he doesn’t feel alone. Close by, so near, his companions stifle noises of their own. His only truly private moments are these: bent over a blank page, dreaming with his pen.
3
June 11, 1863
Dearest, dearest Clara:
The packet containing this letter will follow a very zigzag course on its way to you; a miracle that my words reach you at all. Or that yours reach me—how long it has been since the last! A ship that sailed from Bordeaux in March is rumored to have arrived at Bombay and will, I hope, have letters from you. Others from England have reached me—yet none from you—which is why I worry so. But already I hear your voice, reminding me that the fate of mail consigned to one ship may differ so from that consigned to another. I know you and the girls are well.
I am well too, although worried about you. I do what I can to keep busy. Did I tell you that I received, in response to some modest botanical observations I had sent to Dr. Hooker, a brief reply? He corrected my amateur mistakes, suggested I gather some specimens for him, and told me his great love of mosses dated from the time he was five or six. His mother claims that when he was very tiny he was found grubbing in a wall, and that when she asked what he was doing, he cried that he had found Bryam argenteum (not true, he notes now), a pretty moss he’d admired in his father’s collection. At any age, he says—even mine—the passion for botany may manifest itself.
I found this touching and thought you would too. And I’m honored that he would answer me at all. In the hope of being of further use to him, I plan to continue my observations. Where I am now—deep in the heart of the Karakoram—nothing grows but the tiny lichens and mosses that are Dr. Hooker’s greatest love. I can classify hardly any of them, they’re extremely difficult. Except for them the landscape is barren. No one lives here: how would they live? Yet people do pass through from the neighboring valleys, the glaciers serving as highways through the mountains: I have met Hunzakuts, Baltis, Ladakhis and Nagiris and Turkis. But so far no travelers from home, although I hear rumors of solitary wanderers, English and German and French. One elderly adventurer has apparently haunted these mountains for decades, staying at times in Askole and Skardu; traveling even on the Baltoro Glacier and its branches—can this be true? If he exists, no one will tell me his name.
Around me is a confused mass of rock and glacier and mist, peaks appearing then disappearing beyond the curtains of clouds. The glaciers, covered with rocks and striated like frozen rivers, you would never mistake for snowfields or for anything else; the porters fear them and have their own names for them, while the chainmen claim that, deep within them, are the bodies of men who died in the mountains and are now being slowly carried down the stream of ice. Some decades from now, at the foot of the glacier, a glove or a couple of bones may be spit out.
I have seen wild sheep the size of ponies. I have slept ten nights at a stretch above 15,000 feet; I have woken buried in snow, lost in clouds; days have passed when I could make no sightings and sketch no maps, when we have nothing to eat and huddle together forlornly, watching avalanches peel down the side of the peaks. The weather here is beastly. At the snout of the Baltoro we were nearly swept away by a river leaping from an ice cave. There are no vistas when one travels the glaciers, more a sense of walking along a deep corridor, framed by perpendicular walls. I have a headache nearly all the time, and my neck aches from always gazing upward. The mornings are quiet, everything frozen in place by the frosts of the night. By afternoon the landscape has come alive, moving and shifting as rocks fall, walls of mud slide down, hidden streams dammed by the ice break free with a shout. No place for men.
I travel now in a party of six. Me in charge, the sole Englishman (the others lead similar parties, on other glaciers, on their way to other peaks); two Indian assistants who aid me with the measurements and mapping; three porters. We are on the Baltoro itself as I write. So frequent are the crevasses, and so deceitfully covered with snow, that we tie ourselves together with ropes and move like a single long caterpillar. Yesterday we stopped by the edge of a huge open fissure and, while the other men rested, I tied all our ropes together and sounded the depth; 170 feet of rope failed to reach bottom. Framing us, on both sides of the glacier, are some of the world’s highest peaks.
My task has been to map where Montgomerie’s K2 lies in relation to the Karakoram watershed. And this I have done, though there is no clear sight of it from the glacier itself. With my men I climbed the flank of an enormous mountain called Masherbrum. My men—I ought to try and tell you what it’s like to live in such enforced companionship. They … I will save this for another letter. You know how awkward I have always been. With my own family, with you, I can be myself but here, with strangers—it is terrible, the old shyness seizes me. Without you by my side, to start the conversation and set everyone at ease, I am so clumsy. I do try, but it does no good. Especially with the porters and the chainmen I am at a loss. The barriers of language and our very different circumstances and habits and religions—I ought to be able to break through these, given the bonds of our shared work. Somewhere they too have wives and children, families and homes but I can’t imagine them, I can’t see these men in any other setting and I think they can’t see me any more clearly. For them, I am simply the person who gives orders. In my early days surveying seemed like a perfect career for such a solitary creature as myself. I didn’t understand that, out here, I would be accompanied ceaselessly by strangers.
Yet one does not need to talk all the time. And some things are beyond conversation—several thousand feet up the flank of Masherbrum, as we were perched on a sharp bleak shoulder, there it suddenly rose: K2, sixteen or seventeen miles away, separating one system of glaciers from another. We believe the reason it has no local name is that it isn’t visible from any inhabited place; the nearest village is six days’ march away and the peak is hidden by others, almost as large. I cannot tell you how it felt to see it clearly. I have spent two days here, mapping all the visible peaks and their relationships to each other and the glaciers.
I will entrust this to the herdsman I met, who is on his way to Skardu; may it find its way to you. One of our porters speaks a language somewhat familiar to this herdsman. The pair had a discussion involving much pointing at Masherbrum, an insistent tone on the part of the porter, violent head-shakings from the herdsman. Later I asked the porter what they’d been talking about. The herdsman had asked where we’d been; the porter had shown him the shoulder from which we saw K2. “You have never been there,” the herdsman apparently said. “No one can go there. It is not for men.”
He does not write to Clara about his glacial misadventures. Walking along on a hazy day with his party strung out behind him, he had seen what resembled a small round rock perched on the ice in the distance. Fresh snow had fallen the night before and the glare was terrible; over his eyes he’d drawn a piece of white muslin, like a beekeeper’s veil, which cut the worst of the blinding light but dimmed the outlines of everything. One of his companions had bound a sheet of slit paper over his eyes, while others had woven shades from the hair of yaks’ tails or had unbound their own hair and combed it forward until it screened their eyes. Max was nearly upon the round rock before he recognized it as a head.
A narrow crevasse, its opening covered by drifted snow; a wedge-shaped crack the width of a man at the top, tapering swiftly to a crease: inspecting it, with his veil raised, Max could imagine what had happened. The testing step forward, the confident placement of the second foot; and then one last second of everyday life before the deceitful bridge crumbled and the man plunged down, leaving his head and neck above the surface. The slit would have fit as intimately as a shroud, trapping the man’s feet with his toes pointed down. No room to flex his knees or elbows and gain some purchase—but his head was free, he was breathing, he wasn’t that cold, and surely—surely?—he could pull himself out.
The man had a name, although it would take a while to determine it: Bancroft, whom Max had met only once, a member of one of the triangulating parties, disappeared three days before Max arrived. The ice inside the crevasse, warmed by the heat it stole from Bancroft’s body, would have melted and pulled him inch by inch farther down, chilling him and slowing his blood, stealing his breath as fluid pooled in his feet and legs and his heart struggled to push it back up. By nightfall, with the cold pouring down from the stars, the cold wind pouring down from the peaks, the slit which had parted and shaped itself to Bancroft’s body would have frozen solid around him. After hours of fruitless work, Max and his companions had reluctantly left Bancroft in the ice.
Max had not told Clara any of this: it would have frightened her. It frightened him. And yet despite that he went walking alone, ten days later. The sun was out, the sky was clear; the men had stopped in the middle of the afternoon, refused to go farther without a rest, and set up camp against his wishes. Irritated, he’d refused to waste the day. He’d mapped this section already, but wanted more detail for his sketches: how the ice curved and cracked as it ground past the embracing wall of the mountain. In Wales, when he was being trained, he and Laurence had seen erratic boulders and mountains with deeply scored flanks which were caused, said the bookish young man who led them, by a glacial period that covered all Europe with ice. Now it was as if he’d walked backward into that earlier time.
He fell into a fissure, forty feet deep. A thick tongue of ice, like the recalcitrant piece of heartwood bridging two halves of a split log, stretched between the uphill and downhill walls of the crevasse and broke his fall. He landed face down, draped around a narrow slab, arms and legs dangling into empty space. Feebly he said his own name, calling himself back to life. Then Clara’s, and his daughters’, his sister’s, and his mother’s. Above him he found a ceiling of snow, with a narrow slit of blue sky where his body had broken through. He could move his feet, his hands, his shoulders; apparently nothing was broken. Slowly, hugging the ice with his thighs, he sat upright. Before him the uphill wall of the crevasse glimmered smooth in the blue shadows. Slim ribs of ice, bulges and swellings reminiscent of Clara’s back and belly. Behind him the downhill wall was jagged and white and torn. To his right the crevasse stretched without end, parallel faces disappearing into darkness. But to his left the walls appeared to taper together.
He might make of himself a bridge, he thought. A bridge of flesh, like the bridge of ice. With his back pressed against the wet uphill wall, his legs extended and his hobnailed boots pressed into the crunching, jagged downhill wall, he suspended himself. He moved his right foot a few inches, then his left; sent all his strength into the soles of his feet and then slid his back a few inches, ignoring the icy stream that chattered so far below. Again and again, right foot, left foot, heave. Time stopped, thinking stopped, everything stopped but these small painful motions. The walls drew closer together and he folded with them, his legs bending at the knees, then doubled, until finally he hung in a sideways crouch.
He reached the corner without knowing what he’d do when he got there. The crevasse was shaped like a smile; where the two lips met, the bottom also curved up. He released his right leg and let it slide down, touching some rubble on which he might balance. He stood, he straightened partway. Soaked, scared, exhausted, and so cold. Above him was not the sky, but a roof of snow. Like a mole he scratched at the bottom surface. He tore his fingernails and ripped his hands. When he realized what was happening he stopped digging with his right hand and dug only with his left.
He dug himself out. He hauled himself up. How many hours did this take? His left hand was bloody and blue, his right torn but still working; how lucky he had been. On the surface of the glacier, under the setting sun, he closed his eyes and fixed in his mind the dim, shadowed, silent grave he’d known for a few hours. Among the things he would not mention to Clara—he would never write a word of this—was how seductive he’d found the cold and quiet. How easy he would have found it to sleep on the leaf of ice, his head pillowed on his arm while snow drifted over the broken roof, sealing him in silent darkness. Nothing would have been left of him but his books and maps, and the trunk with Clara’s letters. So many still unopened, dated months in the future, a year in the future. It was the thought of not getting to read them that made him wake up.
4
July 21, 1863
Dear heart—
This week I received your Packet 15, from March; you cannot know what a relief it is to hear from you. But why do I say that when I know you suffer the same torments? It is very upsetting to hear that none of my letters have reached you, and that you have as yet no news of my travels across the country to Kashmir, never mind news of my journeys in the mountains. Although perhaps by now you do: it was still March, I remind myself, when you hadn’t heard from me. It may be September or December before you receive this, and you will be in possession of all my other letters by then, smiling to see me worry in this.
We heard a ship leaving Calcutta was burnt down to the waterline just after it embarked; all the passengers were saved but everything else on board was lost and I wonder if some of my letters were on it, now bits of ash on the sea. When I think about the hands through which these must pass, to find their way to you: a passing herdsman to another party of the Survey, to another messenger, to some official in Srinagar; perhaps to Calcutta, perhaps to Bombay; through a merchant’s hands, or a branch of the military: hand to hand to hand, to a ship, or several ships, and the hazards of weather and human carelessness every inch of the way … My dear, you must keep these accidents in mind, when you worry about me. It grieves me to think of your suffering. Remember the promise we made to each other, to consider not just the accidents that might happen to us, but to our correspondence. Remember how tough I am. How prudent.
Thank you for the story about Elizabeth and the garden. I love to think about the three of you, bundled up and watching the birds as they flick within the branches of the hedgerow. Gillian in your arms, Elizabeth darting along the hawthorns, pursuing the sparrows: these glimpses of your life together keep me going. If you knew how much I miss you … but I have promised myself I will write sensibly. I want you to think of me as I am, as you have always known me, and not as a stranger perpetually complaining. I’m glad Mrs. Moore’s nephew—Gideon?—has been so helpful during his stay with his aunt and has been able to solve the problem with the drains. When next you see him, please tell him I am grateful. Do you see him often.?
I received with the letters from you and our family two more letters from Dr. Hooker. He has received mail from me, from as late as April; how is it my letters are reaching him but not you? When I get home I will let you read what he writes, you will find it fascinating. He is in touch with botanists and collectors all over the world; involved with so many projects and yet still he takes the time to encourage an amateur such as myself. On his own journey, he said, as he climbed from the terai to the snowline he traversed virtually the entire spectrum of the world’s flora, from the leech-infested, dripping jungle to the tiny lichens of the Tibetan plateau. I have a similar opportunity, he says. If I am wise enough to take it. I copy for you here a little paragraph, which he included with questions about what is growing where, and requests for a series of measurements of temperature and altitude.
“When still a child,” he writes, “my father used to take me on excursions in the Highlands, where I fished a good deal, but also botanized; and well I remember on one occasion, that, after returning home, I built up by a heap of stones a representation of one of the mountains I had ascended, and stuck upon it specimens of the mosses I had collected, at heights relative to those at which I had gathered them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany. It pleases me greatly that, though you have started your botanizing as a grown man, you may come to share a similar passion.”
Is that not a lovely tale? The mountain was small, by our standards here, less than 4,000 feet. He has been very encouraging of my efforts and with his help I have set myself a study plan, as if I’m at university. I would like to make myself worthy; worthy to write to such a man as Dr. Hooker, and receive a response. Worthy of seeking an answer to the question that now occupies everyone: how the different forms of life have reached their present habitats. When else will I have a chance like this?
What draws me to these men and their writings is not simply their ideas but the way they defend each other so vigorously and are so firmly bound. Hooker, standing up for Darwin at Oxford and defending his dear friend passionately. Gray, in America, championing Darwin in a series of public debates and converting the world of American science one resistant mind at a time. Our group here is very different. Although the work gets done—the work always gets done, the maps accumulate—I have found little but division and quarrels and bad behavior.
You may find my handwriting difficult to decipher; I have suffered much from snow-blindness. And a kind of generalized mountain sickness as well. We are so high, almost all the time; the smallest effort brings on fatigue and nausea and the most piercing of headaches. I sleep only with difficulty; it is cold at night, and damp. Our fires will not stay lit. But every day brings new additions to our map, and new sketches of the topography: you will be proud of me, I am becoming quite the draughtsman. And I manage to continue with my other work as well. I keep in mind Hooker’s travails in Nepal and Sikkim: how, in the most difficult of circumstances, he made excellent and detailed observations of his surroundings. I keep in mind Godfrey Vigne, and all he managed to note. Also a man I did not tell you about before, whose diary passed through my hands: how clearly he described his travels, despite his difficulties! By this discipline, and by my work, I hold myself together.
This week my party climbed a peak some 21,000 feet high. We were not the first ones here: awaiting us was the station the strongest and most cunning of the triangulators built last season. I have not met him, he remains an almost mythical creature. But I occupied his heap of stones with pride. He triangulated all the high peaks visible from here and the map I have made from this outline, the curves of the glaciers and the jagged valleys, the passes and the glacial lakes—Clara, how I wish you could see it! It is the best thing I have ever done and the pains of my body are nothing.
I have learned something, these past few months. Something important. On the descent from such a peak, I have learned, I can see almost nothing: by then I am so worn and battered that my eyes and mind no longer work correctly; often I have a fever, I can maintain no useful train of thought, I might as well be blind.
On my first ascents, before I grasped this, I would make some notes on the way up but often I would skip things, thinking I would observe more closely on the way down. Now I note everything on the way up. As we climbed this giant peak I kept a note-book and pencil tied to my jacket pocket and most of the time had them right in my hand: I made note of every geological feature, every bit of vegetation or sign of a passing animal; I noted the weather as it changed over the climb, the depth of the snow, the movements of the clouds. This record—these records, I do this now with every ascent—will I think be invaluable to subsequent travelers. When I return I plan to share them with Dr. Hooker and whoever else is interested.
It’s an odd thing, though, that there is not much pleasure in the actual recording. Although I am aware, distantly, that I often move through scenes of great beauty, I can’t feel that as I climb; all is lost in giddiness and headache and the pain of moving my limbs and drawing breath. But a few days after I descend to a lower altitude, when my body has begun to repair itself—then I look at the notes I made during my hours of misery and find great pleasure in them. It is odd, isn’t it? That all one’s pleasures here are retrospective; in the moment itself, there is only the moment, and the pain.
I must go. A messenger from Michaels came by the camp this morning with new instructions and leaves soon to contact three other parties; if I put this into his hands it will find its way down the glacier, out of the mountains, over the passes. To you.
After relinquishing the letter to Michaels’s messenger, he thinks: What use was that? For all those words about his work, he has said little of what he really meant. How will Clara know who he is these days, if he hides both his worries and his guilty pleasures? He still hasn’t told her about the gift he bought for himself. A collecting box, like a candle box only flatter, in which to place fresh specimens. A botanical press, with a heap of soft drying paper, to prepare the best of his specimens for an herbarium; and a portfolio in which to lay them out, twenty inches by twelve, closed with a sturdy leather strap and filled with sheets of thin, smooth, unsized paper. Always he has been a man of endless small economies, saving every penny of his pay, after the barest necessities, for Clara in England. He has denied himself warm clothes, extra blankets, the little treats of food and drink on which the other surveyors squandered their money in Srinagar, and before. But this one extravagance he couldn’t resist: not a dancing girl, not a drunken evening’s carouse, but still he is ashamed.
A different kind of shame has kept him from writing about the doubts that plague his sleepless nights. He knows so little, really—why does he think his observations might be useful? He ought to be content with the knowledge that the work he does each day is solid, practical, strong; these maps will stand for years. In Dehra Dun, and in Calcutta and back in England, copyists and engravers will render from his soiled rough maps clean and permanent versions. In a year the Series will be complete: Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Baltistan, caught in a net of lines; a topographical triumph. Still he longs to make some contribution more purely his.
He dreams of a different kind of map, in shades of misty green. Where the heads of the Survey see the boundaries of states and tribes, here the watershed between India and China, there a plausible boundary for Kashmir, he sees plants, each kind in a range bounded by soil and rainfall and altitude and temperature. And it is this—the careful delineation of the boundaries of those ranges, the subtle links between them—that has begun to interest him more than anything else. Geographical botany, Dr. Hooker said. What grows where. Primulas up to this level, no higher; deodar here, stonecrops and rock jasmines giving way to lichens. Why do rhododendrons grow in Sikkim and not here? He might spend his life in the search for an answer.
When he and his crew gather with the other small parties, he’s reminded that no one shares his interests—at night his companions argue about the ebb and flow of politics, not plant life. The Sikh Wars and the annexation of the Punjab, the administration of Lord Dalhousie, the transfer of power from the East India Company to the Crown, the decisions of the regional revenue officers—it is embarrassing, how little all this interests him. Among the surveyors are military men who have served in the Burmese War, or in Peshawar; who survived the Mutiny or, in various mountains, that stormy year when supplies to the Survey were interrupted and bands of rebels entered Kashmir. He ought to find their stories fascinating. Germans and Russians and Turks and Chinese, empires clashing; Dogras and Sikhs, spies and informants—currents no one understands, secrets it might take a lifetime to unravel. Yet of all this, two stories only have stayed with him.
The first he heard on a snow bench carved in a drift on a ridge, from an Indian chainman who’d served for a while in the Bengal army, and who worked as Max’s assistant for two weeks, and then disappeared. They were resting. The chainman was brewing tea. At Lahore, he said, his regiment had been on the verge of mutiny. On a June night in 1857, one of the spies the suspicious British officers had planted within the regiment reported to the brigadier that the sepoys planned an uprising the following day. That night, when the officers ordered a regimental inspection, they found two sepoys with loaded muskets.
There was a court-martial, the chainman said. He told the story quietly, as if he’d played no part in it; he had been loyal, he said. Simply an observer. Indian officers had convicted the two sepoys and sentenced them to death. “There was a parade,” the chainman said. His English was very good, the light lilting accent at odds with the tale he told. “A formal parade. We stood lined up on three sides of a square. On the fourth side were two cannon. The sepoys—”
“Did you know them?” Max had asked.
“I knew both of them, I had tried to talk them out of their plan. They were … The officers lashed those two men over the muzzles of the cannons. Then they fired.”
Below them the mountains shone jagged and white, clean and untenanted. Nearby were other Englishmen, and other Indians, working in apparent harmony in this landscape belonging to neither. Yet all this had happened only six years ago.
“There was nothing left of them,” the chainman said. He rose and kicked snow into the fire; the kettle he emptied and packed tidily away. “Parts of them came down like rain, bits of bone and flesh, shreds of uniforms. Some of us were sprinkled with their blood.”
“I …” Max had murmured. What could he say? “A terrible thing.” The chainman returned to work, leaving Max haunted and uneasy.
The other story was this, which Michaels encouraged a triangulator to tell one night when three different surveying teams gathered in a valley to plan their tasks for the next few weeks. An Indian atrocity to match the British one: Cawnpore, a month after the incident reported by the chainman. Of course Max had heard of the massacre of women and children there. No one in England had escaped that news, nor the public frenzy that followed. But Michaels’s gruff, hard-drinking companion, who in 1857 had been with a unit of the Highlanders, told with relish certain details the newspaper hadn’t printed.
“If you had seen the huts,” said Michaels’s friend: Archdale, Max thought his name was. Or maybe Archvale. “A hundred and twenty women and children escaped the first massacre on the riverboats—the mutineers rounded them up and kept them in huts. We arrived not long after they were butchered. I saw those huts, they looked like cages where a pack of wild animals had been set loose among their prey.”
“Tell about the shoes,” Michaels had called from the other side of the fire. All the men were drinking; Michaels had had a case of brandy carried in from Srinagar. His face was dark red, sweating, fierce. That night, as always, he ignored Max almost completely.
“The shoes,” Archdale said. He emptied his glass and leaned forward, face shining in the firelight. “Picture this,” he said. “I go into one hut and the walls are dripping with blood, the floor smeared, the smell unthinkable. Flies buzzing so loudly I thought I’d go mad. Against one wall is a row of women’s shoes, running with blood, draped with bits of clothing.” The Indian chainmen and the Baiti porters were gathered around their separate fires, not far away. Could they hear Archdale? Max wondered. Was it possible Archdale would say these things within earshot of them? “Against the other wall, a row of children’s shoes, so small, just like those our children wear at home. And”—he leaned farther forward here—“do you know what was in them?”
No one answered. Was Gillian wearing shoes yet? “What?” Max said, unable to stop himself.
“Feet!” Archdale roared. “Feet! Those filthy animals, those swine, they had lopped off the children’s feet. We found the bodies in the well.”
That terrible story had set off others; the night had been like a night in hell; Max had fled the campfire soon after Archdale’s tirade and rolled himself in a blanket in a hollow, far from everyone, carved into the rocky cliffs. When he woke he’d been surprised not to find the campground littered with bodies.
Since hearing those tales he has wondered how there could be so much violence on both sides; and how, after that, Englishmen and Indians could be up in these mountains working so calmly together. How can he make sense of an empire founded on such things? Nothing, he thought after hearing those stories. And still thinks. I understand nothing.
Dr. Hooker wrote at great length, in a letter Max didn’t mention to Clara, about the problems of packing botanical collections for the journey home: the weight, the costs; the necessity of using Ward’s cases; the crating of tree ferns and the boats to be hired. How kind he was, to take such trouble in writing to Max, and to warn him of these potential hazards! And yet how little Dr. Hooker understands Max’s own situation. There is no possibility of paying for such things without depriving Clara and his daughters. His collections are limited to the scraps he can dry and preserve in his small press—bad enough he spent money on that; the herbarium sheets he can carry; the sketches and observations in his notebook. He can offer Dr. Hooker only these, but they are not nothing and he hopes his gifts will be received without disappointment.
The lost man whose skull he found—the first one, when he’d just entered these mountains—had at least left behind a record of the movements of his soul. What is he doing, himself? Supporting his family, advancing his career; when he returns to England, he’ll have no trouble finding a good position. But he would like also to feel that he has broadened himself. Hunched over his plane-table, his temples pounding as he draws the lateral moraines of the glacier below him, he hears his mother’s voice.
Look. Remember this. The ribbon of ice below him turns into a snow-covered path that curves through the reeds along the river and vanishes at the horizon; across it a rabbit is moving and his mother stands, her hand in his, quietly keeping him company. They watch, and watch, until the path seems not to be moving away from them, but toward them; the stillness of the afternoon pouring into their clasped hands. There is something special in you, she said. In the way you see.
A few days ago, on his twenty-eighth birthday, he opened the birthday greeting Clara had tucked in his trunk. She had written about the earlier birthdays they’d shared. And about this one, as she imagined it: Your companions, I know, will have made you a special birthday meal. Perhaps you’ll all share a bottle of brandy, or whatever you drink there. I am thinking of you, and of the birthdays in the future we will once more spend together.
Reading this, he’d felt for the first time that Clara’s project might fail. He is no longer the person she wrote to, almost a year ago now. She may have turned into someone else as well. That Gideon she mentions, that nice young man who prunes the trees and brings her wood and does the tasks Max ought to be doing himself: what other parts of Max’s life is he usurping? Max conjures up someone broad-shouldered, very tall—Max and Clara are almost the same height—unbuttoning his shirt and reaching out for Clara … Impossible, it makes him want to howl. Surely she wouldn’t have mentioned him if their friendship was anything but innocent. Yet even if it is, it will have changed her.
He himself has changed so much, he grows further daily from her picture of him. There was no birthday celebration; he told no one of this occasion. If he had, there would have been no response. It is his mother, dead so many years, who seems to speak most truly to the new person he is becoming. As if the years between her death and now were only a detour, his childhood self emerging from a long uneasy sleep. Beyond his work, beyond the mapping and recording, he is seeing; and this—it is terrifying—is becoming more important to him than anything.
5
October 1, 1863
Dearest Clara—
Forgive me for not writing in so long. Until I received your Packets 17, 18, and 19, all in a wonderful clump last week (16, though, has gone astray), I had almost given up hope of us being in touch before winter. I should have realized your letters couldn’t find me while we were among the glaciers. We are in the valley of the Shighar now, and from here will make our way back to Srinagar. I don’t yet know what my winter assignment will be. The triangulating parties will winter at the headquarters in Dehra Dun, recalibrating the instruments and checking their calculations and training new assistants. There is talk of leaving a small group of plane-tablers in Srinagar, to complete topographical maps of the city and the outlying areas and lakes. I will let you know my orders as soon as I get them.
At least you know I am alive now. Though how can you make sense of my life here on the evidence of one letter from when I first arrived in Kashmir, and one from deep in the mountains? The others—I must have faith they will find their way to you. Your description of your journey to London, trudging through those government offices as you tried to get some word of me—this filled me with sadness, and with shame. You are generous to say it is not my fault that you went so long without word of me, that you blame a careless ship’s captain, clumsy clerks, and accidents: but it is my fault, still. I am the one who left home. And that I have not written these last weeks—can you forgive me? I console myself with the thought that, since my earlier letters were so delayed, perhaps a trickle of them will continue to reach you during the gap between then and now. But really my only excuse is the hardships of these last weeks. I am so weary; the cold and the altitude make it hard to sleep. And when I do catch a few brief hours I am plagued by nightmares. The men I work with tell me stories, things I would never repeat to you; and though I try not to think about them they haunt me at night.
The season in the mountains is already over; we stayed too long. We crossed one high pass after another during our retreat. And Clara, you can’t imagine the weather. I couldn’t work on my maps, or keep up my notes, or even—my most cherished task—write to you; when I heated the inkpot, the ink still froze on its short journey to the paper. My hands were frozen, my beard a mass of icicles. I wore everything you packed for me, all at once, and still couldn’t stay warm. Lambs’ wool vest and drawers, heavy flannel shirt and lined chamois vest, wool trousers and shirt, three pairs of stockings and my fur-lined boots, thick woolen hat, flannel-lined kidskin jacket, over that my big sheepskin coat, and then a Kashmir shawl wrapped twice about me, binding the whole mass together—I sweated under the weight of all this, yet grew chilled the instant we stopped moving. Nights were the worst, there is no firewood in the mountains and we had already used up all wed carried. Food was short as well.
I shouldn’t tell you these things; never mind. Now that we are down in the valleys things are easier. And I am fine. Soon enough we’ll reach Srinagar, and whether I stay there or move on to Dehra Dun I am looking forward to the winter. Long quiet months of cleaning up my sketch maps, improving my drawings, fitting together the sections into the larger picture of the Himalayan system. From either place I may write to you often, knowing the chances of you getting my letters in just a few months are good: and I may look forward to receiving yours with some regularity. Still I have some of the letters in your trunk to look forward to, as well: I ration these now, I open one only every few weeks, sometimes ignoring the dates with which you marked them. Forgive me, I save them for when I most need them. This evening, before I began to write to you, I opened one intended for Elizabeth’s birthday. How lovely to be reminded of that happy time when you leaned on my arm, plump and happy as we walked in the garden and waited for her birth. The lock of Elizabeth’s hair you enclosed I have sewn into a pouch, which I wear under my vest.
What else do I have to tell you? So much has happened these last weeks that I don’t know how to describe it all; and perhaps it wouldn’t interest you, it is just my daily work. Yesterday I had a strange encounter, though. Camped by the edge of a river, trying to restore some order to my papers while my companions were off in search of fuel, I looked up to see a stranger approaching; clearly a European although he wore clothes of Kashmiri cut. When I invited him to take tea with me he made himself comfortable and told me about himself. A doctor and an explorer, elderly; he calls himself Dr. Chouteau and says he is of French birth, though his English is indistinguishable from mine. This he explains by claiming to have left home as a boy of fourteen; claiming also to have been exploring in these mountains for over forty years. We did not meet in Srinagar, he told me, because he lives in a native quarter there. I think he may be the solitary traveler of whom I heard such odd rumors earlier in the season, though when I asked him this he shrugged and said, “There are a few of us.”
We passed together the most interesting afternoon I’ve had in weeks. My own companions and I have grown weary of each other, we seldom speak at all; but Dr. Chouteau talked without stopping for several hours. A great liar, I would have to say. Even within those hours he began to contradict himself. But how intriguing he was. He is very tall, thin and hawk-nosed, with a skin burnt dark brown by years in the sun and deeply lined. His ragtag outfit he tops with a large turban, from which sprout the plumes of some unidentifiable bird. He showed me his scars: a round one, like a coin, on the back of one hand, and another to match on the front—here a bullet passed through, he said, when he was fighting in Afghanistan. A hollow in his right calf, where, in Kabul, a bandit hacked at him with a sword as he escaped by horse. For some time he lived among a Kafir tribe, with a beautiful black-eyed mistress; the seam running from eyebrow to cheekbone to chin he earned, he says, in a fight to win her. He has been in Jalalabad and the Kabul river basin; in the Pamirs among the Kirghiz nomads; in Yarkand and Leh, Chitral and Gilgit.
Or so he says. Myself, I cannot quite credit this; he is elusive regarding his travel routes, and about dates and seasons and companions. But perhaps he truly did all these things, at one time or another, and erases the details and connections out of necessity: I think perhaps he has been a spy. For whom?
I try to forget what you have said about the way you gather with our families and friends and pass these letters around, or read them out loud; if I thought of that I would grow too self-conscious to write to you at all. But I will tell you one peculiar thing about Dr. Chouteau if you promise to keep this to yourself. He has lived to such a robust old age, he swears, by the most meticulous attention to personal hygiene. And how has he avoided the gastric complaints that afflict almost all of us when we eat the local foods? A daily clyster, he says. The cleansing enema he administers to himself, with a special syringe. I have seen this object with my own eyes, he carries it with him and showed it to me. It looked rather like a hookah. Far better this, he said, looking at my bewildered countenance, than the calomel and other purgatives on which less wise travelers rely.
Some of the other things he told me I can’t repeat, even to you: they have to do with princes and dancing-girls, seraglios and such-like: when I am home again I will share these with you, in the privacy of our own bed.
Clara, I am so confused. Meeting this stranger made me realize with more than usual sharpness how lonely I am, how cut off I feel from all that is important to me. My past life seems to be disappearing, my memories grow jumbled. Who was the Max Vigne who went here or there, did this or that? It’s as if I am dissolving and reforming; I am turning into someone I don’t recognize. If I believed in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, I might suspect that the wind is blowing someone else’s soul in through my nostrils, while my old soul flies out my ears. In the mountains I lay awake in the cold, frozen despite my blankets, and my life in England—my boyhood, even my life with you—passed by my eyes as if it had been lived by someone else. Forgive these wanderings. The household details of which you wrote, the problems with the roof, the chimney, the apple trees—I know I should offer some answers in response to your questions but it feels pointless. You will have long since had to resolve these things before you receive my advice. I trust your judgment completely.
Good night; the wind is blowing hard. What a fine thing a house is. In my tent I think of you and the girls, snug inside the walls.
After that, he does not write to Clara for a while.
The river valleys, the high plains, the dirt and crowds and smells and noise of Srinagar, where the surveying parties are reshuffled and he finds himself, with three other plane-tablers, left behind in makeshift quarters, with preliminary maps of the city and the valley and vague instructions to fill in the details while everyone else (Michaels too; at least he is finally free of Michaels!) moves on to Dehra Dun, not to return until spring: and still he does not write to Clara. He does not write to anyone, he does not keep up his botanical notes, he makes no sketches other than those required for the maps. He does his work, because he must. But he does no more. He cannot remember ever feeling like this.
6
If he could make himself write, he might say this:
Dearest Clara—
Who am I? Who am I meant to be? I imagine a different life for myself but how can I know, how can anyone know, if this is a foolish dream, or a sensible goal? Have I any scientific talent at all? Dr. Hooker says I do, he has been most encouraging. If he is right, then my separation from you means something, and the isolation I’ve imposed on myself, and the long hours of extra work. But if I have no real gift, if I am only deluding myself … then I am wasting everything.
There is something noble, surely, in following the path of one’s gifts; don’t we have a duty to use our talents to the utmost? Isn’t any sacrifice, in the pursuit of that, worthwhile? In these past months I have often felt that the current which is most truly me, laid aside when I was still a boy and had to face the responsibilities of family life, has all this time continued to flow the way water moves unseen beneath the glaciers. When I am alone, with my notes and plants and the correlations of weather and geology and flora springing clear before me, I feel: This is who I am. This is what I was born to do. But if in fact I have no real capacity for this work, if it is only my vanity leading me down this path—what then?
He has grown morose, he knows. Worse than morose. Maudlin, self-pitying. And self-deluding: not just about his possible talents, but in the very language with which he now contemplates writing Clara. Nobility, duty, sacrifice—whose words are those? Not his. He is using them to screen himself from the knowledge of whatever is shifting in him.
On the journey back to Srinagar, among the triangulators and plane-tablers led by Michaels and eventually joined by Captain Montgomerie himself, Max was silent, sullen, distant. If he could, he would have talked to no one. In Srinagar, once the crowd of officers and triangulators left for Dehra Dun, he felt still worse. Investigating the streets and alleys, the outlying villages and the limestone springs, he was charmed by what he saw and wished it would stay the same. But meanwhile he couldn’t help hearing talk of his government annexing Kashmir and turning the valley into another Simla: a retreat for soldiers and government officials, people he would prefer to avoid.
When he returns at night to the room he shares with three other plane-tablers, he flops on his cot and can’t understand why he feels so trapped. Didn’t he miss having walls and a roof? Perhaps it isn’t the dark planks and the stingy windows that make him grind his teeth, but his companions’ self-important chatter about measurements and calculations, possibilities for promotion. He shuts his ears to them and imagines, instead, talking with the vainglorious old explorer whose tales left him feeling lost, and full of questions.
The stories he wrote to Clara were the least of what happened that afternoon. Dr. Chouteau had been everywhere, Max learned. Without a map; maps meant nothing to him. Max’s work he’d regarded with detached interest, almost amusement. Looking down at the sheets of paper, the carefully drawn cliffs and rivers and glaciers, Dr. Chouteau had said, I have been here. And here. Here. And so many other places. He spoke of the gravestone, seen in Kabul, that marked the resting place of an Englishman who’d passed through there a century and a half ago. Of wandering Russians, Austrians, Chinese, Turks, the twists and turns of the Great Game, the nasty little wars. Godfrey Vigne, he’d said—Isn’t it odd, that you share that last name?—had been no simple traveler, but a British spy. Those forays into Baltistan a way of gathering information; and his attempts to reach Central Asia a way of determining that the only routes by which the Russians might enter India lay west of the Karakoram. I knew him, Dr. Chouteau said. We were in Afghanistan together. He was the one who determined that Baltistan has no strategic importance to the British plans for India.
More than anyone else, Dr. Chouteau made Max understand the purpose of his work. I never make maps, Dr. Chouteau said. Or not maps anyone else could read. They might fall into the wrong hands. Max’s maps, he pointed out, would be printed, distributed to governments, passed on to armies and merchants and travelers. Someone, someday, would study them as they planned an invasion, or planned to stop one. What can Max’s insignificant hardships matter, when compared to the adventures of such solitary travelers as Dr. Chouteau, or the lost man he saw when he first arrived in the mountains; of Godfrey Vigne or of Dr. Hooker? In Srinagar, Max understands that his journeys have been only the palest imitations of theirs.
He hasn’t heard from Dr. Hooker in months. And although he knows he ought to understand, from Clara’s trials, that accident may have been at work, he interprets this as pure rejection. The observations he sent weren’t worthy; Hooker has ceased to reply because Max’s work is of no interest. All he will leave behind are maps, which will be merged with all the other maps, on which he will be nameless: small contributions to the great Atlas of India, which has been growing for almost forty years. In London a faceless man collates the results of the triangulations into huge unwieldy sheets, engraved on copper or lithographed: two miles to an inch, four miles to an inch—what will become of them? He knows, or thinks he knows, though his imagination is colored by despair: they will burn or be eaten by rats and cockroaches, obliterated by fungus, sold as waste paper. Those that survive will be shared with allies, or hidden from enemies.
Max might write to Dr. Hooker about this; in Sikkim, he knows, Dr. Hooker and a companion had been seized while botanizing and held as political hostages. That event had served as excuse for an invasion by the British army and the annexation of southern Sikkim. Although Dr. Hooker refused to accompany the troops, he gave the general in charge of the invasion the topographical map he’d drawn. That map was copied at the surveyor general’s office; another map, of the Khasia Hills, made its way into the Atlas of India, complimented by all for its geological, botanical, and meteorological notes. Max has seen this one himself, though its import escaped him at the time. Dr. Hooker did it in his spare time, tossing off what cost Max so much labor.
But what is the point of tormenting himself? In the increasing cold he reads over Dr. Hooker’s letters to him, looking for the first signs of disfavor. The letters are imperturbably kind, he can find no hint of where he failed. For comfort he turns, not to the remaining letters in Clara’s trunk—those forward-casting, hopeful exercises make him feel too sad—but instead to the first of her letters to reach him. From those, still brave and cheerful, he works his way into the later ones. A line about Gillian’s colic, and how it lingered; a line about the bugs in the rhubarb: unsaid, all the difficulties that must have surrounded each event. The roof is leaking, the sink is broken, Elizabeth has chicken pox, Clara wrote. Zoe is bearing bravely her broken engagement, but we are all worried about her. What she means is: Where are you, where are you? Why have you left me to face this all alone?
Her packet 16, which failed to reach him in October with the rest of that batch, has finally arrived along with other, more recent letters. In early April she described the gardens, the plague of slugs, the foundling sparrow Elizabeth had adopted, and Gillian’s avid, crawling explorations; the death of a neighbor and the funeral, which she attended with Gideon. Gideon, again. Then something broke through and she wrote what she’d never permitted herself before:
Terrible scenes rise up before my eyes and they are as real as the rest of my life. I look out the window and I see a carriage pull up to the door, a man steps out, he is bearing a black-bordered envelope; I know what is in it, I know. He walks up to the door and I am already crying. He looks down at his shoes. I take the letter from him, I open it; it is come from the government offices in London and I skip over the sentences which attempt to prepare me for the news. I skip to the part in which it says you have died. In the mountains, of an accident. In the plains, of some terrible fever. On a ship which has sunk—I read the sentences again and again—they confirm my worst fears and I grow faint—hope expires in me and yet I will not believe. In the envelope, too, another sheet: The words of someone I have never met, who witnessed your last days. Though I am a stranger to you, it is my sad duty to inform you of a most terrible event. And then a description of whatever befell you; and one more sheet, which is your last letter to me. You see how I torment myself. I imagine all the things you might write. I imagine, on some days, that you tell me the truth; on others that you lie, to spare my feelings. I imagine you writing, Do not grieve too long, dearest Clara. The cruelest thing, when we think of our loved ones dying in distant lands, is the thought of them dying alone and abandoned, uncared for—but throughout my illness I have had the attentions of kind men. I imagine, I imagine … how can I imagine you alive and well, when I have not heard from you for so long? I am ashamed of myself for writing this. All over Britain other women wait, patiently, for soldiers and sailors and explorers and merchants—why can’t I? I will try to be stronger. When you read this page, know that it was written by Clara who loves you, in a moment of weakness and despair.
At least that is past now, for her; from her other letters he knows she was finally reassured. But that she suffered like this; that he is only hearing about it now … To whom is she turning for consolation?
Winter drags on. Meetings and work; official appearances and work; squabbles and work. Work. He does what he can, what he must. Part of him wants to rush home to Clara. To give up this job, this place, these ambitions; to sail home at the earliest opportunity and never to travel again. It has all been too much: the complexities and politics, the secrets underlying everything. Until he left England, he thinks now, he had lived in a state of remarkable innocence. Never, not even as a boy, had he been able to fit himself into the world. But he had thought, until recently, that he might turn his back on what he didn’t understand and make his own solitary path. Have his own heroes, pursue his own goals. But if his heroes are spies; if his work is in service of men whose goals led to bloodstained rooms and raining flesh—nothing is left of the world as he once envisioned it.
He wanders the city and its outskirts, keeping an eye out, as he walks, for Dr. Chouteau. He must be here; where else would he spend the winter? Stories of that irascible old man, or of someone like him, surface now and then; often Max has a sense that Dr. Chouteau hides down the next alley, across the next bridge. He hears tales of other travelers as well—Jacquemont and Moorcroft, the Schlagintweit brothers, Thomas Thomson, and the Baron von Hugel. The tales contradict each other, as do those about Dr. Chouteau himself. In one story he is said to be an Irish mercenary, in another an American businessman. Through these distorted lenses Max sees himself as if for the first time, and something happens to him.
That lost man, whose skull he found when he first arrived in the mountains—is this what befell him? As an experiment, Max stops eating. He fasts for three days and confirms what the lost man wrote in his diary: his spirit soars free, everything looks different. His mother is with him often, during that airy, delirious time. Dr. Chouteau strolls through his imagination as well. In a brief break in the flow of Dr. Chouteau’s endless, self-regarding narrative, Max had offered an account of his own experiences up on the glacier. His cold entombment, his lucky escape; he’d been humiliated when Dr. Chouteau laughed and patted his shoulder. A few hours, he said. You barely tasted the truth. I was caught for a week on the Stachen Glacier, in a giant blizzard. There is no harsher place on this earth; it belongs to no one. Which won’t keep people from squabbling over it someday. The men I traveled with died.
When Max hallucinates Dr. Chouteau’s voice emerging from the mouth of a boatwoman arguing with her neighbor, he starts eating again, moving again. The old maps he’s been asked to revise are astonishingly inaccurate. He wanders through narrow lanes overhung by balconies, in and out of a maze of courtyards. The air smells of stale cooking oil, burning charcoal, human excrement. He makes his way back and forth across the seven bridges of Srinagar so often he might be weaving a web. Temples, mosques, the churches of the missionaries; women carrying earthenware pots on their heads; barges and bakeshops and markets piled with rock salt and lentils, bottles of ghee—his wanderings he justifies as being in service to the map, although he also understands that part of what drives him into the biting air is a search for Dr. Chouteau. If Max could find him, if he could ask him some questions, perhaps this unease that has settled over him might lift.
As winter turns into early spring, as he does what he can with his map of the valley and, in response to letters from Dehra Dun, begins preparations for another season up in the mountains, his life spirals within him like the tendril of a climbing plant. One day he sits down, finally, with Laurence’s gift to him and begins working slowly through the lines of Mr. Darwin’s argument. The ideas aren’t unfamiliar to him; as with the news of Cawnpore and the Mutiny, he has heard them summarized, read accounts in the newspapers, discussed the outlines of the theory of descent with modification with Laurence and others. But when he confronts the details and grasps all the strands of the theory, it hits him like the knowledge of the use made of Dr. Hooker’s maps, or the uses that will be made of his own. He scribbles all over the margins. At first he writes to Laurence simply to say: I am reading it. Have you read it? It is marvelous. The world is other than we thought. But a different, more complicated letter begins to unfurl in his mind.
A mountain, he reads, is an island on the land. The identity of many plants and animals, on mountain-summits, separated from each other by hundreds of miles of lowlands, where the alpine species could not possibly exist, is one of the most striking cases known of the same species living at distant points, without the apparent possibility of their having migrated from one to another … the glacial period affords a simple explanation of these facts.
He closes his eyes and sees the cold sweeping south and covering the land with snow and ice, arctic plants and animals migrating into the temperate regions. Then, centuries later, the warmth returning and the arctic forms retreating northward with the glaciers, leaving isolated representatives stranded on the icy summits. Along the Himalaya, Mr. Darwin writes, at points 900 miles apart, glaciers have left the marks of their former low descent; and in Sikkim, Dr. Hooker saw maize growing on gigantic ancient moraines. The point of Dr. Hooker’s work, Max sees, is not just to map the geographical distribution of plants but to use that map in service of a broader theory. Not just, The same genus of lichen appears in Baltistan and in Sikkim. But, The lichens of the far ends of the Himalaya are related, descending from a common ancestor.
It is while his head is spinning with these notions that, on the far side of the great lake called the Dal, near a place where, if it was summer, the lotus flowers would be nodding their heads above their enormous circular leaves, by a chenar tree in which herons have nested for generations, he meets at last not Dr. Chouteau, but a woman. Dark-haired, dark-eyed: Dima. At first he speaks to her simply to be polite, and to conceal his surprise that she’d address him without being introduced. Then he notices, in her capable hands, a sheaf of reeds someone else might not consider handsome, but which she praises for the symmetry of their softly drooping heads. Although she wears no wedding ring, she is here by the lake without a chaperone.
The afternoon passes swiftly as they examine other reeds, the withered remains of ferns, lichens clustered on the rocks. Her education has come, Max learns, from a series of tutors and travelers and missionaries; botanizing is her favorite diversion. He eyes her dress, which is well cut although not elaborate; her boots, which are sturdy and look expensive. From what is she seeking diversion? She speaks of plants and trees and gardens, a stream of conversation that feels intimate yet reveals nothing personal. In return he tells her a bit about his work. When they part, and she invites him to call on her a few days later, he accepts. Such a long time since he has spoken with anyone congenial.
Within the week, she lets him know that he’d be welcome in her bed; and, gently, that he’d be a fool to refuse her. Max doesn’t hide from her the fact that he’s married, nor that he must leave this place soon. But the relief he finds with her—not just her body, the comforts of her bed, but her intelligence, her hands on his neck, the sympathy with which she listens to his hopes and longings—the relief is so great that sometimes, after she falls asleep, he weeps.
“I have been lonely,” she tells him. “I have been without company for a while.” She strokes his thighs and his sturdy smooth chest and slips down the sheets until their hipbones are aligned. Compactly built, she is several inches shorter than him but points out that their legs are the same length; his extra height is in his torso. Swiftly he pushes away a memory of his wedding night with long-waisted Clara. The silvery filaments etched across Dima’s stomach he tries not to recognize as being like those that appeared on Clara, after Elizabeth’s birth.
He doesn’t insult her by paying her for their time together; she isn’t a prostitute, simply a woman grown used, of necessity, to being kept by men. Each time he arrives at her bungalow he brings gifts: little carved boxes and bangles and lengths of cloth; for her daughter, who is nearly Elizabeth’s age, toy elephants and camels. Otherwise he tries to ignore the little girl. Who is her father, what is her name? He can’t think about that, he can’t look at her. Dima, seeming somehow to understand, sends her daughter off to play with the children of her servants when he arrives. Through the open window over her bed he sometimes hears them laughing.
Dima has lived with her father in Leh and Gilgit and here, in a quarter of Srinagar seldom visited by Europeans; she claims to be the daughter of a Russian explorer and a woman, now dead, from Skardu. For some years she was the mistress of a Scotsman who fled his job with the East India Company, explored in Ladakh, and ended up in Kashmir; later she lived with a German geologist. Or so she says. In bed she tells Max tales of her lovers, their friends, her father’s friends—a secret band of wanderers, each with a story as complicated as Dr. Chouteau’s. Which one taught her botany? In those stories, and the way that she appears to omit at least as much as she reveals, she resembles Dr. Chouteau himself, whom she claims to know. A friend of her father’s, she says. A cartographer (but didn’t he tell Max he never made maps?) and advisor to obscure princes; a spendthrift and an amateur geologist. Bad with his servants but excellent with animals; once he kept falcons. She knows a good deal about him but not, she claims, where he is now.
One night, walking back from her bungalow, a shadowy figure resembling Dr. Chouteau appears on the street before Max and then disappears into an alley. Although the night is dark, Max follows. The men crouched around charcoal braziers and leaning in doorways regard him quietly. Not just Kashmiris: Tibetans and Ladakhis, Yarkandis, Gujars, Dards—are those Dards?—and Baltis and fair-haired men who might be Kafirs. During this last year, he has learned to recognize such men by their size and coloring and the shape of their eyes, their dress and weapons and bearing. As they have no doubt learned to recognize Englishmen. If Dr. Chouteau is among them, he hides himself. For a moment, as Max backs away with his hands held open and empty before him, he realizes that anything might happen to him. He is no one here. No one knows where he is. In the Yasin valley, Dr. Chouteau said, he once stumbled across a pile of stones crowned by a pair of hands. The hands were white, desiccated, bound together at the wrists. Below the stones was the remainder of the body.
When he leaves the alley, all Max can see for a while are the stars and the looming blackness of the mountains. How clear the sky is! His mind feels equally clear, washed out by that moment of darkness.
During his next weeks with Dima, Clara recedes—a voice in his ear, words on paper; mysterious, as she was when he first knew her. Only when Dima catches a cold and he has to tend her, bringing basins and handkerchiefs and cups of tea, does he recollect what living with Clara was really like. Not the ardent, long-distance exchange of words on which they’ve survived for more than a year, but the grit and weariness of everyday life. Household chores and worries over money, a crying child, a smoking stove; relatives coming and going, all needing things, and both of them stretched so thin; none of it Clara’s fault, it is only life. Now it is Dima who is sick, and who can no longer maintain her enchanting deceits. The carefully placed candles, the painted screen behind which she undoes her ribbons and laces to emerge in a state of artful undress, the daughter disposed of so she may listen with utmost attention to him, concentrate on him completely—all that breaks down. One day there is a problem with her well, which he must tend to. On another her daughter—her name is Kate—comes into Dima’s bedroom in tears, her dress torn by some children who’ve been teasing her. He has to take Kate’s hand. He has to find the other children and scold them and convince them all to play nicely together, then report back to Dima how this has been settled. He is falling, he thinks. Headfirst, into another crevasse.
During Dima’s illness it is with some relief—he knows it is shameful—that he returns at night to his spartan quarters. Through the gossip that flies so swiftly among the British community, the three other surveyors have heard about Dima. Twice Max was spotted with her, and this was all it took; shunned alike by Hindus and Moslems, Christians and Sikhs, she has a reputation. That it is Max she’s taken up with, Max she’s chosen; to Max’s amazement and chagrin, his companions find this glamorous. They themselves have found solace in the brothels; Srinagar is filled with women and they no longer turn to each other for physical relief. But to them, unaware of Dima’s illness and her precarious household, Max’s situation seems exotic. The knowledge that he shares their weaknesses, despite the way he has kept to himself—this, finally, is what makes Max’s companions accept him.
They stop teasing him. They ask him to drink with them, to dine with them; which, on occasion, he does. They ask for details, which he refuses. But despite his reticence, his connection to Dima has made his own reputation. When the rest of the surveyors return from Dehra Dun and they all head back to the mountains, Max knows he will occupy a different position among them. Because of her, everything will be different, and easier, than during the last season. It is this knowledge that breaks the last piece of his heart.
April arrives; the deep snow mantling the Pir Panjal begins to shrink from the black rock. Max writes long letters to Laurence, saying nothing about Dima but musing about what he reads. Into Srinagar march tri-angulators in fresh tidy clothes, newly trained Indian assistants, new crowds of porters bearing glittering instruments, and the officers: Michaels among them. But Michaels can no longer do Max any harm. Max and his three companions present their revised map of Srinagar, and are praised. Then it is time to leave. Still Max has no answers. Dr. Chouteau has continued to elude him; Dima, fully recovered now, thanks him for all his help, gives him some warm socks, and wishes him well with his work.
Which work? Even to her he has not admitted what he is thinking about doing these next months. He holds her right hand in both of his and nods numbly when she says she will write to him, often, and hopes that he’ll write to her. Hopes that they’ll see each other again, when the surveying party returns to Srinagar.
More letters. Another person waiting for him. “Don’t write,” he says, aware the instant he does so of his cruelty. The look on her face—but she has had other lovers (how many lovers?) and she doesn’t make a scene. Perhaps this is why he chose her. When they part, he knows he will become simply a story she tells to the next stranger she welcomes into her life.
And still he does not write to Clara. Other letters from her have arrived, which he hasn’t answered: six months, what is he thinking? Not about her, the life she is leading in his absence, the way her days unfold; not what she and their children are doing, their dreams and daily duties and aspirations and disappointments. Neither is he thinking about Dima; it is not as if his feelings for her have driven out those he has for Clara. He isn’t thinking about either of them. This is his story, his life unfolding. The women will tell the tale of these months another way.
7
April 21, 1864
My dearest, my beloved Clara—
Forgive me for not writing in so long. I have been sick—nothing serious, nothing you need worry about, although it did linger. But I am fully recovered now, in time to join the rest of the party on our march back into the mountains. This season, I expect, will be much like the last. Different mountains, similar work; in October I will be done with the services I contracted for and the Survey will be completed. From my letters of last season you will have a good idea of what I’ll be doing. But Clara …
Max pauses, then crosses out the last two words. What he should say is what he knows she wants to hear: that when October comes he’ll be on his way back to her, as they agreed. But he doesn’t want to lie to her. Not yet.
His party is camped by a frozen stream. The porters are butchering a goat. Michaels, in a nearby tent, has just explained to the men their assignments for the coming week; soon it will be time to eat; Max has half an hour to finish this letter and no way to say what he really means: that after the season is finished, he wants to stay on.
Everything has changed for me, he wants to say. I am changed, I know now who I am and what I want and I can only hope you accept this, and continue to wait for me. I want to stay a year longer. When the Survey ends, in October, I want to wait out the winter in Srinagar, writing up all I have learned and seen so far; and then I want to spend next spring and summer traveling by myself. If I had this time to explore, to test myself, discover the secrets of these mountains—it would be enough, I could be happy with this, it would last me the rest of my life. When I come home, I mean to try to establish myself as a botanist. I have no hope of doing so without taking this time and working solely on my studies.
But he can’t write any of that. Behind him men are laughing, a fire is burning, he can smell the first fragrance of roasting meat. He is off again, to the cold bare brilliance of a place like the moon, and what he can’t explain, yet, to Clara is that he needs other time, during the growing season, to study the plants in the space between the timberline and the line of permanent snow. How do the species that have arisen here differ from those in other places? How do they make a life for themselves, in such difficult circumstances?
Could Clara understand this? He will break it to her gently, he thinks. A hint, at first; a few more suggestions in letters over the coming months; in September he’ll raise the subject. By then he’ll have found some position that will pay his salary while leaving him sufficient time for his own work. Perhaps he’ll have more encouragement from Dr. Hooker by then, which he can offer to Clara as evidence that his work is worthwhile. Perhaps he’ll understand by then how he might justify his plans to her. For now—what else can he say in this letter? He has kept too much from her, these last months. If his letters were meant to be a map of his mind, a way for her to follow his trail, then he has failed her. Somehow, as summer comes to these peaks and he does his job for the last time, he must find a way to let her share in his journey. But for now all he can do is triangulate the first few points.
… I have so much to tell you, Clara. And no more time today; what will you think, after all these months, when you receive such a brief letter? Know that I am thinking of you and the girls, no matter what I do. I promise we’ll do whatever you want when I return: I know how much you miss your brother, perhaps we will join him in New York. I would like that, I think. I would like to start over, all of us, someplace new. Somewhere I can be my new self, live my new life, in your company.
Next to my heart, in an oilskin pouch, I keep the lock of Elizabeth’s hair and your last unopened letter to me, with your solemn instruction on the envelope: To be Opened if You Know You Will Not Return to Me. If the time comes, I will open it. But the time won’t come; I will make it back, I will be with you again.
This comes to you with all my love, from your dearest
Max
The Forest (#ulink_1aaa7b77-3e51-5a6d-8863-8865617c607b)
LATER THE SQUAT WHITE cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the way down; the swellings above and below reminded him of bodices and rounded skirts. Perhaps he viewed the lanterns this way because the girls guiding him down the flagstone steps and across the patio were themselves so doll-like. Amazingly young, amazingly smooth-skinned. Sisters, they’d said. The tiny dark-haired one who’d appeared in the hotel lobby was Rose; the round-cheeked one driving the battered van, with her blond hair frizzing in all directions, was Bianca. Already he’d been clumsy with them.
“You are … are you Dr. Humboldt’s daughters?” he’d asked. The sun was so bright, his eyes were so tired, the jumble of buildings and traffic so confusing. The step up to the van’s back seat was too high for him, but neither girl noticed him struggling.
The small one, Rose, had laughed at his question. “We’re not related to Constance,” she’d said. “I’m a postdoctoral fellow at the institute.” The blond one, who called to mind his own mother sixty years earlier, pulled out of the hotel driveway too fast and said nothing during the short drive to the Humboldts’ house. He feared he’d hurt her feelings. For the last decade or so, he’d been subject to these embarrassing misidentifications, taking young scientists for children or servants when he met them out of context. They all dressed so casually, especially in this country; their faces were so unmarked—how could anyone tell them from the young people who chauffeured him about or offered trays of canapes at parties? But these girls he should have known, he’d probably met them earlier. Now, as he stepped down into the enormous back garden and moved toward the long table spread with food and drink, the girl called after a flower veered toward a crowd gathered by the pool and left him with the girl he’d affronted.
“Dr. Wojciechowicz?” she said, mangling his name as she steered him closer to the table. “Would you like a drink or something?”
Reflexively he corrected her pronunciation; then he shook his head and said, “Please. Call me Krzysztof. And you are Bianca, yes?” He could not help noticing that she had lovely breasts.
“That’s me,” she agreed dryly. “Bianca the chauffeur, Rose’s sister, not related to the famous Dr. Constance Humboldt. No one you need to pay attention to at all.”
“It’s not …” he said. Of course he had insulted her. “It’s just that I’m so tired, and I’m still jet-lagged, and …”
Could he ask her where he was without sounding senile? Somewhere north of Philadelphia, he thought; but he knew this generally, not specifically. When he’d arrived two days ago, his body still on London time, he had fallen asleep during the long, noisy drive from the airport. Since then he’d had no clear sense of his location. He woke in a room that looked like any other; each morning a different stranger appeared and drove him to the institute. Other strangers shuttled him from laboratory to laboratory, talking at length about their research projects and then moving him from laboratory to cafeteria to auditorium to laboratory, from lobby to restaurant and back to his hotel. The talk he’d given was the same talk he’d been giving for years; he had met perhaps thirty fellow scientists and could remember only a handful of their names. All of them seemed to be gathered here, baring too much skin to the early July sun. Saturday, he thought. Also some holiday seemed to be looming.
“Do forgive me,” he said. “The foibles of the elderly.”
“How old are you?”
Her smile was charming and he forgave her rude question. “I am seventy-nine years of age,” he said. “Easy to remember—I was born in 1900, I am always as old as the century.”
“Foibles forgiven.” She—Bianca, he thought. Bianca—held out her hand in that strange boyish way of American women. Meanwhile she was looking over his shoulders, as if hoping to find someone to rescue her. “Bianca Marburg, not quite twenty-two but I’m very old for my age.”
“You’re in college?”
She tossed her hair impatiently. “Not now. My sister and I were dreadful little prodigies—in college at sixteen, out at nineteen, right into graduate school. Rose already has her Ph.D.—how else do you think she’d have a postdoc here?”
Would he never say the right thing to this bristly girl? “So then you … what is the project you are working on?” Americans, he’d been reminded these last two days, were always eager to talk about themselves.
“So then I—I should be in graduate school, and I was until two months ago but I dropped out, it was seeming stupid to me. Unlike my so-successful sister Rose, I am at loose ends.”
She moved a bowl of salad closer to a platter of sliced bread draped with a cloth, then moved it back again. “Which is why I’m driving you around. Why I’m here. I’m sort of between places, you know? I got a temp job typing for an Iraqi biophysicist—see the short guy near the volleyball net? He hired me because I can spell ‘vacuum.’ I’m staying with my sister until I get enough money together to move. I might go to Alaska.”
“That’s nice,” Krzysztof said helplessly.
“Oh, please,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested. Go talk to the other famous people. Constance collects them, they’re everywhere.”
She huffed off—furious, he saw. At him? In the battered leather bag that hung from his shoulder he felt the bottle he’d carried across the ocean as a special gift for his hostess. But his hostess was nowhere to be seen, and no one moved toward him from either the pool or the round tables with their mushroomlike umbrellas. Already the top of his head was burning; he was all alone and wished he had a hat. Was it possible these people meant to stay in the sun all afternoon?
Bianca made a brisk circuit through the backyard, looking for someplace to settle down. There was Rose, leaning attentively toward Constance’s camel-faced husband, Roger, and listening to him as if she were interested. Entirely typical, Bianca thought; Rose submitted herself to Roger’s monologues as a way of pleasing Constance, who was her advisor. Constance herself was holding court from a elegant lawn chair beneath an umbrella, surrounded by graduate students and postdocs—but Bianca couldn’t bear the way Constance patronized her, and she steered wide of this group. She considered joining the two students Constance employed, who were trotting up and down the steps bearing pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; at last week’s reception, though, Constance had rebuked her for distracting the help. The knot of protein chemists at the volleyball net beckoned, Rick and Wen-li and Diego stripped of their shirts and gleaming in the sun, but she’d slept with Diego after that reception, and now they weren’t speaking. Perhaps Vivek and Anisha, easing themselves into the shallow end of the pool just as Jocelyn, already cannonball-shaped, curled her arms around her legs and launched herself into the deep end with a splash?
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Andrea Barrett
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A national hardback bestseller in the US – another magnificently imagined and executed book of historical fiction with a contemporary twist, from one of the masters of the form. ‘These stories possess a wonderful clarity and ease, the serene authority of a writer working at the very height of her powers.′ New York TimesRanging across two centuries, and from the western Himalayas to an Adirondack village, Servants of the Map travels the territories of yearning and awakening, of loss and unexpected discovery.A mapper of the highest mountain peaks, engaged on the trigonometrical measurement of British India, realizes his true obsession while in deflationary correspondence with his far-off wife. A young woman afire with scientific curiosity must come to terms with a romantic fantasy. Brothers and sisters, torn apart at an early age, are beset by dreams of reunion. Throughout, Barrett’s most characteristic theme – the happenings in that borderland between science and desire – unfolds in the diverse lives of unforgettable human beings.