Galapagos Regained (20 page)

“You see, my fair philosopher, the impending archipelago is dangerous, home to wild beasts and savage aborigines.” Mr. Dartworthy lifted his lips in a wide white topgallant of a grin. “You'll be glad I'm there, for I never met a jaguar I couldn't tame or a cannibal I couldn't trick into his own pot.”

“What about sea serpents?” asked Chloe, displaying a smile that, she'd been told, carried all the way to the last row of the Adelphi Theatre. “I've heard that the waters around St. Paul's Rocks are teeming with 'em.”

“Sea serpents are my speciality.”

“Don't forget your harpoon,” said Runciter, chuckling.

“Good idea, sir, but I won't need one,” said Mr. Dartworthy. “I'll simply inform the monsters that they're descended from maggots, whereupon they'll shrivel up and die of shame.”

*   *   *

The longer the Reverend Granville Heathway occupied Wormleighton Sanitarium, the more he wondered why Dante had not included boredom amongst the punishments he'd inflicted on his damned souls. True, tedium did not equate precisely to fiery rain, burning tombs, or suffocating feces, but it was excruciating all the same. Day in, day out, Granville sat in his cell, alternately bemoaning his circumstances and reading the single pigeon missive from Bertram. Once each fortnight his dear Evelyn paid him a visit, and together they would stroll about the grounds of the asylum—but she kept these encounters barbarously brief, departing the instant he began discoursing upon the scarecrow menace.

Every time Granville secured an interview with Dr. Earwicker, chief administrator of Wormleighton, he begged permission to pursue some hobby or other, lest his incarceration in the madhouse cause him to go insane. Dr. Earwicker's response never varied: the medical director, Dr. Quelp, had permanently banned all frivolous pastimes. Provided with painting supplies (quoth Quelp), the typical Wormleighton resident would devour the pigments as if they were sweets. Presented with a whittling knife or knitting needle, that same lunatic would in the first instance slit his wrists and in the second poke out an orderly's eyes.

But then one ebullient spring morning Granville became the beneficiary of a miracle. Summoned to Dr. Earwicker's office, he learned that in his case (and in his case alone) Dr. Quelp had rescinded the ban on hobbies. Before the week was out, Granville would receive camel's-hair brushes, blank canvases, and tubes of pigment.

Upon returning to his cell, he beheld a familiar presence, his Muse, a golden-eyed, honey-haired creature called Mireille. She told him to imagine that, after arriving on Crete, Bertram had explored the island's famous labyrinth. Wandering through the corridors and culs-de-sac, torch in hand, Granville's son had in time encountered the chimera whose creation Daedalus had supervised and whose fate Theseus had sealed. Bertram and the man-bull had then engaged in a titanic struggle—a wrestling match that, Mireille insisted, must become the subject of the priest's first painting.

The instant Tobias the orderly brought the materials, Granville set to work on
Bertram versus the Minotaur,
growing so absorbed in the chiaroscuro battle that he failed to notice the arrival of the pigeon Theodora. Only after he'd rendered the figures in full and begun adding details (the red veins flashing in the Minotaur's eyes, the blood flowing from Bertram's wounds) did Granville glance up to behold the messenger strutting atop the dovecote. Hastily he unstrapped the capsule, unraveled the scroll, and seized his quizzing-glass, straightaway determining that Bertram had written in even smaller characters, and at even greater length, than before.

Dearest Father,

Two days ago the Grand Vizier and I stood on the pier and watched as the Mayfair Diluvian League climbed aboard the
Paragon,
followed by Captain Deardon and his crew. Next to embark was Captain Silahdar, an athletic man who might claim kinship with Hercules, and then came the twenty promised soldiers. As the sails grew gravid with Bosporus wind, I decided that, if so stalwart a party fails to recover Noah's ark, it won't be found in this century or even in this millennium.

Later that afternoon, I stole into the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin, curious to learn more about the legend that the place attracts time travelers. At the risk of defaming Yusuf Effendi's establishment, I shall report that it recalls Christian representations of Perdition, the air vibrating with a burbling noise suggestive of boiling pitch, the ceiling obscured by a dense mantle of hashish smoke evocative of sulphur fumes. Sensing intuitively why I'd brought my custom here, Yusuf Effendi (an elderly gentleman, half-blind from cataracts) asked about my vocation. No sooner had I described myself as a grammar-school geology instructor than he indicated a fleshy man dressed in a friar's robes, seated before a dormant double-hosed hookah.

“Behold a person who will profit by your companionship,” said Yusuf Effendi. “Do not allow appearances to deceive you. He is not so much a monk as a pilgrim in search of Nature's secrets.”

After purchasing a bag of hashish, I approached the friar and introduced myself as a schoolman, an Anglican minister's son, and a straggler from a British archeological expedition
en route
to Trebizond. When I offered to share my euphorigenic hemp, a smile brightened his owlish, bespectacled face.

“Being well educated in botany, I can tell you that hashish derives from the female parts of
Cannabis sativa,
” he said. “My speciality, however, is
Pisum savitum,
the pea plant. You see before you Gregor Mendel of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Brünn. I walked here in a mere six weeks.”

“You covered the distance from Moravia to Turkey on foot?” I asked, astonished, then shook our hashish into the hookah bowl.

“And I'm glad I did, Herr Heathway,” Friar Mendel replied. “Since turning thirty I've suffered from an excess of
avoirdupois
. Thanks to my recent trek, I shed a dozen pounds, even as I traveled backwards as many years. Did I perform the computation correctly? You and your fellow Englishmen are living in 1849,
ja
?”

Nodding, I ignited the hemp. “Yusuf Effendi tells me you desire to know Nature's secrets.”

In defiance of the gloom Friar Mendel's eyes twinkled. “To put it in a nutshell—or, in this instance, a peapod—I am gradually lifting the veil from the mystery of heredity.”

“Tell me more.” I sucked on my hose, drawing the cooled smoke into my lungs.

From his robe Mendel produced a wooden box, flipping back the lid. Dry, rumpled, spherical seeds filled the compartment. “I selected the humble pea plant because its traits sort readily into contrasting pairs: inflated pods versus pinched, tall stalks versus short, et cetera. The monastery afforded me ample space for my garden, one sector dedicated to the study of albumen color, another to jacket tone, the rest to bud position, pod hue, pod texture, stalk height, and—the trait on which I first concentrated—seed shape.”

“Hmmaaahhh,” I said, speaking on behalf of the hashish. Evidently I'd become a kind of puppet, the
Cannabis
my ventriloquist. “I have an inkling of what you're talking about. My father breeds carrier pigeons. Hmmaaahhh.”

Mendel sucked on his hookah hose, raising a noisy chain of bubbles in the water jar. “In shape a
Pisum
pea will be either wrinkled, oblate, and ugly like a scrotum, or round, smooth, and lovely like a breast.” Sensing my shock, he added, “Why should Augustine be the only Augustinian who's privileged to wrestle with concupiscence?”

The hashish not only agreed with me, it also validated Mendel's sentiment. “Good question!”

“It took me forever to establish a true-breeding line of plants yielding only round seeds and a second line yielding only wrinkleds. Left to their private passions, these creatures would have fertilized themselves, the anthers swelling with the thrill of procreation until”—the monk thrust his arms outward—“they
burst
within the capsule and sprayed their bounty on the female organs.”

“I shall never look at a pea in quite the same way again.”

“Being bent on hybridization, however, I emasculated each plant of the wrinkled-pea type—
snip, snip
went my scissors, and the anthers fell away. Next I borrowed a basting brush from the scullery and began transferring pollen from the stamens of my round-pea plants to the stigmas of their wrinkled-pea relations—two hundred and eighty-seven such acts of artificial fertilization in all. Then came the waiting game. God's sunshine caressed my plants. His rains nourished their roots. In time my pregnant buds turned into pods. I opened them up, and what do you think I found?”

“Peas?”

“Of course peas,
Dummkopf
”—Mendel slapped the table—“but every one was round, even though wrinkling had characterized
half
the parents!”

“You must have been amazed.”

“Not in the least, for I already had my theory in hand. I'm sorry I called you
Dummkopf
.”

“It's quite all right,” I said (though it wasn't).

“Every
Pisum
fancier knows that roundness is a pea's expected shape, but I am the first to ask whether the occasional wrinkles appear capriciously or lawfully. Pondering the problem day after day, I grew convinced that every reproductive cell, whether a male seed or a female egg, carries a constellation of heredity units. Whereas the dominant type of unit determines one category of traits, the deferential type governs another category. Such a recessive characteristic—wrinkling in peas, for example—will find expression only if two corresponding hereditary units show up during the mating process.”

Mendel flourished a fountain pen, which he subsequently employed to illustrate his conjectures, drawing capital
R
's to mean “Round” and lowercase
w
's to mean “wrinkled” on the back of a hashish menu.

“Consider the erotic experience I arranged for my true-breeding parent plants. Pollen from round-pea vines entered the bridal bower bearing their dominant
R
units, where they paid court to wrinkled-pea ova bearing deferential
w
units. Throughout their wedding night, the
R
's and
w
's mingled to determine not only the outward aspect of the next generation but also—pay close attention—the composition of the sex cells of those future plants. As the buds turned into pods, they had only
Rw
or
wR
combinations to work with, so naturally all the peas looked round, given the subservience of
w
to
R
.”

“I believe I follow your logic,” I said.

Mendel suckled his hookah hose, inhaling an extravagant cloud of
Cannabis
. “This is great shit.”

“I quite agree.”

“When I examined my other hybridization plots, I discovered that in every case the dominant trait had prevailed—yellow albumen over green, gray jackets over white, inflated pods over pinched, green pods over yellow.” The monk contemplated the nozzle of his hose. “I've heard that indulging in
Cannabis
creates a desire to munch on something.”

“Now that you mention it—”

With his palm Mendel scooped a cluster of dried peas from his seed box, jamming them into his mouth. “Have some,” he said, chewing. “I've got thousands more back in Brünn.”

I accepted the invitation, acquiring and consuming a crunchy handful of
Pisum
seeds.

“So there I was,” my water-pipe companion continued, “staring at my jars of round first-generation seeds and theorizing that these hybrid
Rw
's and
wR
's could bring forth plants bearing
both
sorts of pea. There was but one way to prove it.”

“Wait for next spring, sow the seeds, and observes what happens.”

“Precisely! I passed the winter thinking more about
Pisum
than did God on the sixth day of Creation. I realized that once I'd planted my round peas and permitted Nature to bless the buds with male and female organs, four kinds of self-fertilization would occur,
Rw, wR, RR,
and
ww
. What's more, given that
R
always trumps
w,
the ratio of round peas to wrinkled in the pod-children of my hybrids should be three-to-one.”

“I'm on the edge of my seat,” I said (though my precarious posture probably owed more to the hashish than to Mendel's narrative).

“Spring came. The peas went into their pots. Sun and rain made their respective contributions. The plants emerged, matured, indulged their reproductive appetites. The buds turned into pods. I snapped one off, opened it up. Within lay
both
sorts of pea, round and wrinkled! I opened another pod. Round and wrinkled, side by side! And so it went, pod after pod. The chief characteristic of the wrinkled hybrids had reemerged as if by magic. No, that's wrong—by mathematics: for when I brought in the whole crop, it happened that 5,474 peas were round and 1,850 were wrinkled, the very three-to-one ratio I'd predicted!”

“You are the Nostradamus of biology.”

“Not the Nostradamus, the Newton. I can now say with confidence that every generation of plant, bird, and beast is endowed with discrete and segregated packets containing numerous hereditary units, one packet from the mother, one from the father, each unit keyed to a particular trait. No matter how long their association with one another throughout a species's natural history, these factors do not interact. They are the inviolate molecules of God's
modus operandi
. Standing there in my hot garden, surrounded by grids of potted plants, I grasped the law whereby suppressed characteristics reappear in grandchildren, grandnephews, grandnieces, great-grandchildren, and so on. I've done it, Bertram! You're sucking weed with the man who solved the supreme biological riddle!”