Measuring the World (13 page)

Belonged to France?

How could he, of all people, be so blind to things that were obvious to everyone else? Göttingen belonged to Hannover, whose personal union with the English crown had been broken by the French victory, and Napoleon had now attached it to the new kingdom of Westphalia, to be ruled by Jérôme Bonaparte. So to whom would a Westphalian official swear his oath of office? Napoleon!

He rubbed his forehead. Westphalia, he repeated, as if it would become clearer if he said it out loud, Jérôme. What did that have to do with them?

With Germany, she said, it had to do with Germany and with where one stood.

He looked at her helplessly.

She already knew, she exclaimed, what he was going to say—that looked at from the future, both sides would cancel each other out and before long nobody would be getting excited about the things people were dying for today. But what difference did that make? Cozying up to the future was a form of cowardice. Did he really think that people would be more intelligent then?

Yes, a little, he said. Of necessity.

But we're living right now!

Unfortunately, he said, snuffed the candles, went to the telescope, and focused it on the overcast surface of Jupiter. The night was clear, and he could see its tiny moons more distinctly than ever before.

Soon afterward he presented the telescope to Professor Pfaff and they moved to Göttingen. Here there was general chaos. French soldiers racketed around at night and on the site of the future observatory, ground hadn't even been broken for the foundations, and the occasional sheep munched on the grass. He had to observe the stars from Professor Lichten-berg's old tower room above the town wall. And worst of all: he was forced to give seminars. Young men came to his apartments, rocked on his chairs, and left grease spots on the cushions of his sofa while he labored to make them understand anything at all.

His students were the stupidest people he had ever met. He spoke so slowly that he had forgotten the beginning of his sentences before he'd reached the end. It didn't do any good. He left everything difficult out, and stuck to the absolute basics. They didn't understand. He wanted to cry. He wondered if halfwits had a special idiom that one could learn like a foreign language. He gesticulated with both hands, pointed to his lips, and shaped sounds exaggeratedly, as if he were dealing with the deaf. But the only person to pass the examination was a young man with watery eyes. His name was Moebius, and he was the only one who appeared not to be a cretin. When he was the only one again to pass the second examination, the dean took Gauss aside after the faculty meeting and begged him not to be so strict. When Gauss got home close to tears, he found only uninvited strangers: a doctor, a midwife, and his parents-in-law.

He'd missed everything, said his mother-in-law. Head in the clouds again!

He didn't even have a decent telescope, he said, upset. What had happened?

It was a boy.

What did she mean, a boy? Only when he saw her eyes did he understand. And he knew at once that she would never forgive him.

He was distressed that he found it so hard to like the baby. People had said it happened of its own accord. But weeks after the birth, when he held the helpless creature who for some reason was called Joseph in his hands and looked at his tiny nose and disconcertingly complete tally of toes, all he felt was pity and shyness. Johanna took it away from him and asked with sudden concern whether he was happy. Of course, he said, and went to his telescope.

Since they had moved to Göttingen, he was visiting Nina again. She was no longer so young, and received him with the intimacy of a wife. He still hadn't learned Russian, she said reproachfully, and he apologized and promised to do it soon. He had sworn to himself that Johanna would never know of these visits, he would lie even under torture. It was his duty to keep pain from her. It was not his duty to tell her the truth. Knowledge was painful. There wasn't a day he didn't wish he had less of it.

He had begun a work of astronomy. Nothing important, not a book for the ages like the
Disquisitiones
, it would be overtaken in time. But it promised to be the most accurate guide to the calculation of orbits and trajectories there had ever been. And he had to hurry. Although he had just turned thirty, he noticed that his concentration was slipping and the pauses that people seemed to make before replying to something were getting shorter. He had lost some more of his teeth, and from week to week he was plagued by colic. The doctor advised smoking a pipe every morning and a lukewarm bath before going to bed. He was sure he would never achieve old age. When Johanna told him that another child was on the way, he couldn't have said whether he was pleased or not. It would have to grow up without him, that much was clear. He was anxious during the birth and relieved afterwards, and in honor of her stupid friend Minna the baby was named Wil-helmine. When he tried to teach her to count a few months later, Johanna said it was really too early.

Unwillingly, because Johanna was already pregnant again, he went to Bremen to go through the Jupiter tabulations with Bessel. During the week before the journey he slept badly, had nightmares, and was irritable and depressed for days. The journey was even worse than the one to Königsberg, the coach even narrower, his fellow travelers even more unwashed, and when a wheel broke, they had to stand for four hours in a muddy landscape while the cursing driver repaired it. The moment that Gauss, exhausted, with a heavy head and a sore back, had climbed out of the coach, Bessel asked him about the calculation of Jupiter's mass from the disturbances in Ceres’ trajectory. Had he worked out a consistent orbit yet?

Gauss saw red. He didn't have it yet, what could he do! He had spent hundreds of hours on it. The thing was unimaginably difficult, a torture, dammit he wasn't young any more, people should spare him, in any case he didn't have long to live, it had been a mistake to launch himself on this rubbish in the first place.

Very subdued, Bessel asked if he'd like to see the sea.

No expeditions, said Gauss.

It was really close, said Bessel. A mere stroll! In fact it was another laborious journey and the coach rocked so violently that Gauss got his colic again. It was raining, the window didn't shut tight, and they were soaked to the skin.

But it was worth it, Bessel kept saying. The sea was something one had to see.

Had to? Gauss asked where that was written.

The beach was dirty and even the water left something to be desired. The horizon seemed narrow, the sky was low, and the sea looked like soup under a scum of mist. A cold wind blew. Something was burning nearby and the smoke made it hard to breathe. The body of a headless chicken washed up and down in the waves.

Fine. Gauss blinked into the haze. And now they could go home, yes?

But Bessel's entrepreneurial spirit was unbounded. It wasn't enough to see the sea, one also had to go to the theater!

The theater was expensive, said Gauss.

Bessel laughed. The professor should consider himself a guest, it would be his honor. He would hire a private coach, they would be there in no time at all!

The journey took four agonizing days and the bed at the inn in Weimar was so hard that Gauss's back pain became unbearable. Besides which the bushes along the Ilm made him sneeze. The court theater was hot, and sitting for hours a trial. The play being performed was a piece by Voltaire. Somebody killed somebody else. A woman cried. A man complained. Another woman fell to her knees. There were monologues. The translation was elegant and melodic, but Gauss would rather have read it. He yawned till the tears ran down his cheeks.

Moving, wasn't it, whispered Bessel.

The actors flung their hands up in the air, paced endlessly back and forth, and rolled their eyes as they spoke.

He thought, whispered Bessel, that Goethe was in his box today.

Gauss asked if that was the ass who considered himself fit to correct Newton's theory of light.

People turned around. Bessel seemed to shrink into his seat and didn't say another word until the curtain fell.

As they were leaving, a gaunt gentleman came to speak to them. Did he have the honor to be addressing Gauss the astronomer?

The astronomer and mathematician, said Gauss.

The man introduced himself as a Prussian diplomat, currently posted to Rome, but en route to Berlin where he would take up a position as director of education in the Interior Ministry. There was a great deal to do, the German educational system needed to be reformed from the ground up. He himself had enjoyed the finest education, now he had the opportunity to offer some of it to others. He stood very straight, without leaning on his silver stick. Moreover, they were alumni of the same university and had acquaintances in common. That Herr Gauss was also active in mathematics was something he hadn't known. Uplifting, wasn't it!

Gauss didn't understand.

The performance.

Oh, yes, said Gauss.

The gentleman understood perfectly. Not quite the right thing at this moment. Something German would have been more appropriate. But it was hard to argue with Goethe about such matters.

Gauss, who hadn't been listening up till now, asked the diplomat to repeat his name.

The diplomat bowed and did so. He too was a scientist!

Curious, Gauss leant forward.

He researched old languages.

Ah, said Gauss.

That, said the diplomat, sounded rather disappointed.

Linguistics. Gauss shook his head. He didn't wish to be offensive.

No, no. He should say it.

Gauss shrugged. Linguistics was for people who had the precision for mathematics but not the intelligence. People who would invent their own makeshift logic.

The diplomat was silent.

Gauss asked him about his travels. He must have been everywhere!

That, said the diplomat sourly, was the other von Humboldt, his brother. A case of mistaken identity, and not the first time it had happened. He said goodbye and left with small steps.

That night the pain in his back and stomach gave Gauss no rest. He twisted and turned this way and that and quietly cursed his fate, Weimar, and most of all Bessel. Early next morning, Bessel wasn't yet awake, he ordered the coach to be hitched up, and instructed the driver to take him to Göttingen at once.

When he finally arrived, his traveling case still in his hand, alternately bent double because of his stomach pains and leaning over backwards at an awkward angle to ease his spine, he went to the university to enquire when construction would begin on the observatory.

There wasn't much sound from the ministry right now, said the official. Hannover was a long way away. Nobody knew anything precise. In case he had forgotten, there was a war on.

The army had ships, said Gauss, ships needed to be sailed, navigation needed astronomical charts, and astronomical charts weren't so easy to make at home in the kitchen.

The official promised to have news soon. What was more, there were plans to resurvey the kingdom of Westphalia. The herr professor had already done work as a geodetic surveyor. They were looking for an industrious person who could count, to be leader of the enterprise.

Gauss opened his mouth. Using every ounce of willpower he managed not to scream at the man. He closed his mouth again and left without saying goodbye.

He wrenched open the door to his apartments, called out that he was home and wouldn't be leaving again any time soon. He was pulling off his boots in the hall when the doctor, the midwife, and his mother-in-law stepped out of the bedroom. Ah, wonderful, this time he wouldn't have to reproach himself. Smiling broadly, a little too exuberantly, he asked if it had arrived yet and if it was a boy or a girl and most of all, how much it weighed.

A boy said the doctor. He was dying. As was his mother.

They had tried everything, said the midwife.

What happened after that was beyond his capacity to recall clearly. It seemed as if time were racing both forwards and backwards, and multiple possibilities had simultaneously opened and closed. One memory had him at Johanna's bedside, as she opened her eyes for a moment and gave him a look that was empty of all recognition. Her hair was sticking to her face, her hand was damp and limp, the basket with the infant was standing next to his chair. This was contradicted by another memory in which she was no longer conscious when he stormed into the room, and a third, in which she died at that very moment, her body pale and waxlike, and a fourth in which the two of them had an appallingly clear conversation: she asked if she had to die, after a moment's hesitation he nodded, whereupon she told him not to be sad for too long, one lived, then one died, that was how it was. Only after six o'clock in the afternoon did things come together again. He was sitting at her bedside. People were whispering in the hall. Johanna was dead.

He pushed back the chair and tried to accustom himself to the thought that he would have to marry again. He had children. He had no idea how one brought them up. He couldn't run a household. Servants cost money.

Quietly he opened the door. This, he thought, is it. Having to live although everything was over. Arranging things, organizing things: every day, every hour, every minute. As if there were still some sense in it.

He was a little comforted when he heard his mother arrive. He thought of the stars. The short formula that would summarize all their movements in a simple line. For the first time he knew it would always elude him. Darkness fell slowly. And slowly he moved toward the telescope.

T
HE
M
OUNTAIN

By the light of a guttering oil lamp, while the wind blew past carrying more and more snowflakes, Aimé Bonpland was trying to write a letter home. If he thought about the preceding months, it was as if he'd lived dozens of lives, all of them similar to one another and none of them worth repeating. The journey up the Orinoco seemed like something one read about in books, New Andalusia was a prehistoric legend, Spain no more than a mere word. He had begun to feel better meanwhile, some days he was already free of fever, and even the dreams, in which he strangled, dismembered, shot, burned, poisoned, or buried Baron Humboldt under stones, were becoming less frequent.

He paused for thought, and chewed the end of his quill. Somewhat higher up the mountain, surrounded by sleeping mules, his hair covered with hoarfrost and a little snow, Humboldt was working out their position using the moons of Jupiter. He had the glass cylinder of the barometer balanced on his knees. Beside him, wrapped in blankets, their three mountain guides were asleep.

Next day, wrote Bonpland, they wanted to conquer Chim-borazo. In case they didn't survive, Baron Humboldt had advised him most insistently to write a letter of farewell, because it was beneath a man to die just like that, without a final word to anyone. On the mountain they would collect rocks and plants, even up here there were unknown plants, he had harvested far too many of them these last months. The baron maintained there were only sixteen underlying species, but the baron was good at recognizing species whereas he, Bonpland, couldn't care less. The majority of their specimens, including three very ancient corpses, had been loaded in Havana onto a ship bound for France, and in a second ship they had sent the herb collections and all their written records to Baron Humboldt's brother. Three weeks ago, or maybe it was six, the days went by so quickly and he had lost all perspective, they had learned that one of the ships had sunk. That had cost Baron Humboldt some bad days, but then he'd said they were only just starting. He, Bonpland, had been less upset by the loss, as he was running such a fever at the time that he hardly knew where and why and who he was. Most of the time he had been fighting flies and mechanical spiders in his nightmares. He was trying not to think about it, and hoped the ship that sank hadn't been the one with the corpses. He had spent so much time with them that by the time they got back to the mouth of the river, he felt they weren't just ballast, but silent companions.

Bonpland wiped his brow and took a deep mouthful from his brass flask. Earlier on he had had a silver one, but he'd lost it under circumstances he could no longer remember. They were only just starting, he wrote. Then he noticed that he'd used this same sentence twice, and crossed it out. They were only just starting! He blinked and crossed it out again. Unfortunately he couldn't describe the details of their route, everything was a blur, all he had was a couple of images which seemed, if he really tried, to have some connection. In Havana, for example, the baron had had two crocodiles captured and shut in with a pack of dogs to study their hunting behavior. The screaming of the dogs had been almost unbearable, it sounded like children crying. And afterwards the walls had been so bloody that the room had had to be repainted at Baron Humboldt's expense.

He closed his eyes, then snapped them open again and looked all round him in surprise, as if he had forgotten for a moment where he was. He coughed and took another large mouthful. Off Cartagena their ship had almost capsized, and on the river Magdalena the mosquitoes had plagued them even more determinedly than on the Orinoco; finally they had climbed thousands of steps once laid by the long-lost Incas to the freezing heights of the Cordilleras. Normally people would have been carried up by porters but Baron Humboldt had refused. Because of human dignity. The porters had been so insulted they had almost beaten them to a pulp. Bonpland took a deep breath; then, involuntarily, he sighed quietly. Outside Santa Fé de Bogotá the town dignitaries had been gathered to greet them, their fame had already gone before them, at least that of the baron, whereas strangely enough, nobody seemed to have heard of Aimé Bonpland. Maybe this had to do with the fever. He stopped: the last sentence struck him as illogical. He considered whether to cross it out, but then decided against it. Their hosts had been noble people, there was laughter when the baron had refused to let go of his barometer, and they seemed amazed that so famous a man could be so short. They had been given hospitality by Mutis, the biologist. The baron had always kept trying to talk about plants, but Mutis's invariable response was that one did not discuss such subjects in society. Nonetheless, he, Bonpland, had succeeded in reducing his fever thanks to Mutis's herbs. Mutis had employed a young chambermaid, an Indian from the highlands, with whom, here he paused, took a large gulp, and peered up at Humboldt's figure, now almost invisible in the darkness, he could have excellent social intercourse of this, that, and indeed every other kind. Meanwhile the baron had inspected mines and drawn maps. Outstanding maps. Of that he had no doubt.

He nodded several times unconsciously, then continued. They had advanced with eleven mules across the river and up the route to the pass. Pouring rain. The ground boggy and full of thorns. And because Baron Humboldt also refused to allow himself to be carried, they had had to go barefoot to spare their boots. They had walked their feet to a bloody mess. And the mules had been obstreperous. They had had to stop climbing Pichincha when he was overcome with dizziness and nausea. At first Baron Humboldt had wanted to carry on alone, but then he too had passed out. Somehow they had made it back down into the valley. The baron had then tried it again with a guide who of course had never been up there in his life, in these parts nobody went climbing mountains unless someone forced them to. It took three tries before they were successful, and now they knew exactly how high the mountain was, the temperature of its smoke, and the identity of the lichens on its stones. Baron Humboldt was exceedingly interested in volcanoes, more than anything else, it all had to do with his teachers in Germany and a man in Weimar he revered like a god. Now they were facing their crowning enterprise. Chimborazo. Bonpland took a last swallow, wrapped himself tighter in his coverlet, and looked out at Humboldt, who, as he could just still make out, was listening to the ground with a brass cone.

He had heard a rumbling, Humboldt called. Movements in the earth's crust! With any luck they could hope for an eruption.

That would be wonderful, said Bonpland, folded the letter, and stretched out on the floor. He felt the chill of the frozen earth against his cheek. It seemed to ease his fever.

As always, he went to sleep at once, and as he almost always did, he dreamed that he was in Paris, it was morning sometime in the fall, and rain was pattering gently against the windowpane. A woman he couldn't see clearly asked if he really did believe he'd traveled through the tropics and he answered not really, and if he had, then it was only for a moment. Then he woke up because Humboldt was shaking his shoulder and asking what he was waiting for, it was already past four o'clock. Bonpland stood up and as Humboldt turned away, he seized him, pushed him toward the ravine, and threw him with all his strength over the edge of the cliff. Someone shook his shoulder and asked what he was waiting for, it was four o'clock, they had to leave. Bonpland rubbed his eyes, brushed the snow out of his hair, and stood up.

The Indian guides looked at him sleepily, and Humboldt handed them a sealed envelope. His farewell letter to his brother. He had spent a long time polishing it. In case he should not return, he asked their assurance that they would bring it to the nearest Jesuit mission.

The guides yawned and said yes.

And this was his, said Bonpland. It wasn't sealed, they could read it if they wished, and if they didn't deliver it, he really didn't care.

Humboldt ordered the guides to wait for them for at least three days. They nodded, bored, and twitched their woolen ponchos straight. Meticulously he checked over the chronometer and the telescope, then crossed his arms and stared into space for a time. Suddenly, he left. Hastily Bonpland seized specimen boxes and stick and ran after him.

More at ease than he'd been for a long time, Humboldt talked about his childhood, working on the lightning conductor, the lonely excursions through the woods, and afterwards arranging his first beetles in collections, and Henriette Herz's salon. He pitied anyone who had not been graced with such a sentimental education.

His sentimental education, said Bonpland, had taken place with a farm girl from the neighborhood. She had allowed just about everything. He'd had to protect himself from her brothers, that was all.

He kept thinking about the dog, said Humboldt suddenly. He still couldn't get rid of his sense of guilt. He had been responsible for the beast!

The farm girl had been astonishing. Not even fourteen, and she had mastered things you wouldn't believe.

The dogs in Havana had been another matter. Of course he had been sorry about them. But science demanded it, and now one knew more about the hunting habits of crocodiles. Besides which, they'd been mongrels, no pedigrees, and very mangy.

Where they were going now, there were no more plants, only brownish yellow lichens on the stones poking up out of the snow. Bonpland heard his own heart beating very loud and the hissing of the wind as it swept over the surfaces of the snow. When a little butterfly flew up in front of him, he felt a shock.

Panting, Humboldt came to the topic of Urquijo's fall from grace. A bad business. It was still a rumor, but gradually the signs were accumulating that the minister had lost the favor of the queen. Which meant more decades of slavery. When they got back, he intended to write some things that these people were not going to like.

The snow piled higher. Bonpland lost his footing and slid downhill, followed shortly afterwards by Humboldt. To protect the scrapes on their hands from the cold, they wrapped them in scarves. Humboldt examined the leather soles of his shoes. Nails, he said thoughtfully. Driven through the soles from the inside out. That's what they needed now.

Soon the snow was up to their knees and a sudden mist enveloped them. Humboldt measured the dips in the magnetic needle and established their altitude with the barometer. If he wasn't mistaken, the shortest route to the summit led northeast over the flattened slope, then a bit to the left, then steep uphill.

Northeast, Bonpland repeated. In this mist you couldn't even tell where the summit and the valley were!

There, said Humboldt, and pointed off somewhere with absolute assurance.

Bent over, they trudged past walls of cliff that had cracked and weathered into columns. High above them, visible for seconds then hidden again, a snow-covered ridge led up to the top. Instinctively, they bore to the left as they walked, where the land fell away steeply in sheets of frost. To their right, it was a straight drop into the abyss. At first Bonpland was oblivious to the gentleman in dark clothes trudging sadly at their side. Only when the figure transformed itself into a geometrical shape, a kind of pulsating honeycomb, did he feel uneasy.

Left, over there, he asked, was that something?

Humboldt glanced to the side. No.

Good, said Bonpland.

They paused for a rest on a narrow platform because Bon-pland's nose was bleeding. Uneasily he looked around at the honeycomb, which was swaying slowly toward them. He coughed and took a mouthful from his brass flask. When the bleeding let up and they were able to continue, he felt relieved. Humboldt's timepiece told them that they had only been climbing for a few hours. The mist was so thick that there was no way to tell up from down: wherever one looked, there was a single unbroken expanse of white.

The snow was now up to their hips. Humboldt cried out and vanished into a drift. Bonpland dug with his hands until he got hold of his coat, and pulled him out. Humboldt thumped the snow off his clothes and satisfied himself that none of the instruments were damaged. They found an outcrop of rock where they waited for the mists to thin and brighten. Soon the sun would break through.

Old friend, said Humboldt. He didn't want to turn sentimental, but after the long way they'd come, at a great moment like this, there was something he wanted to say.

Bonpland listened. But nothing came out. Humboldt seemed to have forgotten already.

He didn't wish to be a spoilsport, said Bonpland, but something was wrong. There, to the right, no, a bit further on, no, left, yes, that was it. That thing that looked like a star made of cotton wool. Or like a house. Was he right to assume that he was the only one who could see it?

Humboldt nodded.

Bonpland asked if he should be worried.

Matter of opinion, said Humboldt. It was probably the result of reduced pressure and the altered composition of the air. Noxious gases could be excluded. But besides, he wasn't the doctor here.

So who else was?

Intriguing, said Humboldt, how constantly the density of the atmosphere lessened as one went up. If one did the math, one could deduce at what point the void began. Or at what point, because of the drop in boiling point, the blood began to bubble in the veins. As for himself, for example, he'd been seeing the lost dog for quite some time. He looked completely ragged, and he was missing a leg and an ear. Aside from that, he didn't sink into the snow at all, and his eyes were black and dead. It wasn't a pretty sight, and he was having to keep a tight hold on himself to keep from screaming. Nor could he stop thinking about the fact that they'd failed to give the dog a name. But maybe that hadn't been necessary, they'd only had the one dog, right?

He didn't know of any other, said Bonpland.

Humboldt, comforted, gave a nod and they kept climbing. They had to move slowly because of the crevasses under the snow. Once the mist lightened for a few seconds and there was a ravine right there, then the mist covered it again. Bleeding from the gums, Humboldt said to himself reproachfully, no fit condition, should be ashamed of himself.