Measuring the World (6 page)

So was he saying nobody was going to do any counting right now, asked the duke.

Alas, no, said Zimmerman.

Ah well, said the duke, disappointed. But he should have his stipendium all the same. And come back when he had something to show. He was all for science. His favorite godson, little Alexander, had just left to look for flowers in South America. Maybe what they would be doing here was breeding another fellow just like him! He made a gesture of dismissal, and Gauss and Zimmerman bowed just the way they had practiced as they retreated backwards through the door.

Soon after that, Pilâtre de Rozier came to town. He and the Marquis d’Arlandes had gone up in a basket which the Mont-golfiers had attached to a hot-air balloon, and flown five and a half miles over Paris. After they landed, it was said, two men had had to help the marquis walk away, as he was babbling nonsense, insisting that luminous creatures with bosoms and bird's beaks had flown around them. It had taken hours for him to calm down and blame it all on an attack of nerves.

Pilâtre had his own flying machine and two assistants, and was on his way to Stockholm. He had spent the night in one of the cheaper hostelries and was about to set off again when the duke sent word that he would like him to do a demonstration.

Pilâtre said it was a waste of time and inconvenient to boot.

The messenger indicated that the duke was unaccustomed to having his hospitality rejected so vulgarly.

What hospitality, said Pilâtre. He had paid for lodging and just preparing the balloon would cost him two days of travel time.

Perhaps it was possible to talk that way to one's superiors in France, said the messenger, in France anything was possible. But in Brunswick he would do well to reflect before sending him back with any such message.

Pilâtre gave in. He should have known, he said wearily, in Hannover it had been the same and in Bavaria too, for that matter. So in the name of Christ he would go up in his balloon tomorrow afternoon in front of the gates of this filthy town.

Next morning there was a knock at his door. A boy was standing outside, looking up at him intently, and asked if he could fly with him.

Travel with him, said Pilâtre. In a balloon, it's travel. You don't say fly you say travel. That was what balloonists said.

What balloonists?

He was the first, said Pilâtre, so it was his to decree. But no, of course nobody could travel with him. He tickled the boy's cheeks and tried to close the door.

This wasn't the way he usually behaved, said the boy wiping his nose on the back of his hand. But his name was Gauss, he wasn't some nobody, and before long he would be making discoveries that would equal Isaac Newton's. He wasn't saying this out of vanity, but because time was getting short and he had to be part of the flight. You could see the stars much better up there, couldn't you? Clearer, and not obscured by the haze?

He could bet on it, said Pilâtre.

That's why he had to go too. He knew a lot about stars. You could test him on it as much as you wanted.

Pilâtre laughed and asked who had taught this little man to talk so well. He thought for a while. All right, he said finally, since it was about the stars … !

That afternoon, before a throng of people, the duke, and a saluting battalion of guests, a fire gradually filled the parchment sac with heat through two tubes. No one had expected it to take so long. Half the spectators had already left when the balloon filled out, and barely a quarter were still there when it started to move upright and jerkily began to lift off the ground. The ropes went taut, Pilâtre's assistants loosened the knots, the little basket moved, and Gauss, huddling on the woven bottom of the basket and whispering to himself, would have leapt to his feet if Pilâtre hadn't pushed him down again.

Not yet, he panted. Are you praying?

No, Gauss whispered, he was counting prime numbers. That's what he always did when he was nervous.

Pilâtre stuck up a thumb to check the direction of the wind. The balloon would rise, then head wherever the wind took it, before sinking again when the air inside it cooled. A seagull shrieked somewhere close to the basket. Not yet, yelled Pilâtre, not yet. Not yet. Now! And seizing him partly by his collar, partly by his hair, he hauled Gauss up.

The curve of the earth in the distance. The deep horizon, the hilltops half-hidden in mist. The people staring upward, tiny faces in a ring around the still-burning fire, and next to them the roofs of the town. Little clouds of smoke, tethered to chimneys. A path snaked through the green, and on it a donkey the size of an insect. Gauss clung on to the rim of the basket and it was when he closed his mouth that he realized he had been screaming.

This is how God sees the world, said Pilâtre.

He wanted to say something back, but he'd lost his voice. How fiercely the air was shaking them! And the sun—why was it so much brighter up here? His eyes hurt, but he couldn't close them. And space itself: a straight line from every point to every other point, from this roof to this cloud, to the sun, and back to the roof. Points making lines, lines making planes, planes making bodies, and that wasn't all. The fine curve of space was almost visible from here. He felt Pilâtre's hand on his shoulder. Never go down again. Up and then up further, until there would be no earth beneath them any more. One day this is what people would experience. Everyone would fly then, as if it were quite normal, but by then he would be dead. He peered excitedly into the sun, the light was changing. Dusk seemed to be rising in the still-bright sky like fog. A last flame or two, red on the horizon, then no more sun, then stars. Things never happened this fast down there.

We've started to drop, said Pilâtre.

No, he begged, not yet! There were so many of them, more every moment. Each one a dying sun. Every one of them was decaying, and they were all following their own trajectories, and just as there were formulae for every planet that circled its own sun and every moon that circled its own planet, there was a formula, certainly infinitely complicated, but then again maybe not, perhaps hiding behind its own simplicity, that described all these movements, every revolution of every individual body around every other; maybe all you had to do was keep looking. His eyes smarted. It felt as if he hadn't blinked for a long time.

We're about to land, said Pilâtre.

No, not yet! He rose on tiptoes, as if that could help, stared upward, and understood for the first time what movement was, what a body was; most of all, what space was, the space that they stretched between them, and that held them all, even him, even Pilâtre and this basket, in its embrace. Space, that …

They crashed into the wooden frame of a haystack, a rope tore, the basket tipped over. Gauss rolled into a mud puddle, Pilâtre fell so awkwardly that he sprained his arm, and when he saw the tear in the parchment skin, he began to curse so dreadfully that the farmer who had come running out of his house stopped dead and raised his spade threateningly. The assistants arrived breathless to fold the crumpled balloon together. Pilâtre nursed his arm and gave Gauss a slap that was hard enough to hurt.

Now he knew, said Gauss.

What?

That all parallel lines meet.

Fine, said Pilâtre.

His heart was racing. He wondered if he should explain to the man that all he would need was to add a hanging rudder to the basket, and he could turn the air current to make the balloon move in any specific direction. But he kept quiet. Nobody had asked him, and it wouldn't be polite to force his ideas on these people. It took no stretch of the imagination, and one of them would think of it soon.

But now what this man wanted to see was a grateful child. With an effort, Gauss put a smile on his face, stretched his arms wide, and bowed like a marionette. Pilâtre was happy, laughed, and stroked his head.

T
HE
C
AVERN

After six months in New Amsterdam, Trinidad, Humboldt had examined everything that lacked the feet and the fear to run away from him. He had measured the color of the sky, the temperature of lightning flashes, and the weight of the hoarfrost at night, he had tasted bird droppings, investigated earth tremors, and had climbed down into the Cavern of the Dead.

He lived with Bonpland in a white wooden house on the edge of the town, which had recently suffered earthquake damage. Aftershocks still jolted people awake at night, and when they went to bed and held their breath, they could still hear movement deep down beneath them. Humboldt dug holes, dropped thermometers on long threads down wells, and put peas on drumheads. The quake would certainly begin again, he said cheerfully. Soon the whole town would be in ruins.

In the evenings they ate at the governor's mansion and afterwards there was bathing. Chairs were set down in the river, they put on light clothes and sat in the current. Now and then small crocodiles swam by. Once a fish bit off three toes of the viceroy's nephew. The man, his name was Don Oriendo Casaules and he had a huge mustache, twitched and stared blankly in front of him for a few moments before pulling his now-less-than-whole foot disbelievingly out of the red water. He glanced around as if searching for something, then fell sideways and was caught by Humboldt. The next ship took him back to Spain.

Women were frequent visitors: Humboldt counted the lice in their plaited hair. They came in groups, whispered to one another, and giggled at the little man in his uniform with the magnifying glass firmly clamped in his left eye. Bonpland was made miserable by their beauty. He wanted to know what statistics about lice were good for.

One wanted to know, said Humboldt, because one wanted to know. Nobody had yet investigated the presence of these remarkably resistant creatures on the heads of inhabitants of equatorial regions.

Not far from their house, people were auctioned off. Muscular men and women with chained ankles stared empty-eyed at local landowners as they probed inside their mouths, peered into their ears, and went down on their knees to touch their anuses. They felt the soles of their feet, pulled their noses, checked their hair, and fingered their genitalia. Most of them left afterwards, without buying; it was a shrinking branch of the economy. Humboldt bought three men and had their chains removed. They didn't understand. They were now free, Humboldt said through an interpreter, they could go. They stared at him. Free? One of them asked where they were supposed to go. Wherever you wish, said Humboldt. He gave them money. Cautiously they tested the coins with their teeth. One of them sat down on the ground, closed his eyes, and didn't stir, as if there were absolutely nothing in the world to interest him. Humboldt and Bonpland moved away under the mocking eyes of the bystanders. A couple of times they turned around, but none of the freed men was looking after them. In the evening it began to rain, and that night the town was shaken by a fresh earthquake. Next morning the three men had disappeared. No one knew where, and they never turned up again. When the next auction took place, Humboldt and Bonpland stayed at home, working behind closed shutters, and only went outside after it was over.

The journey to the Chaymas mission led through thick forests. At every stop they saw plants they'd never seen before. The ground seemed not to have enough room for so much growth: tree trunks squeezed against one another, plants clambered over other plants, lianas swept over their heads and shoulders. The monks of the mission greeted them warmly, although they didn't understand what the two men wanted of them. The abbot shook his head. There must be something else behind it! Nobody traveled halfway round the world to measure land that didn't even belong to him.

The mission was home to baptized Indians, who lived under their own self-government. There was an Indian commandant, a chief of police, and even a militia, and provided they obeyed all the rules, they were allowed to live as if they were free. They were naked, wearing only individual items of clothing they had picked up here or there: a hat, a stocking, a belt, an epaulette tied securely to a shoulder. It took Humboldt some while to behave as if he were accustomed to this. It offended him to see that women had hair in so many places; it struck him as incompatible with natural dignity. But when he said as much to Bonpland, the latter looked at him with such amusement that he turned red and began to stutter.

Not far from the mission was the cavern of the night birds, where the dead lived. Because of the old legends, the natives refused to go with them. It took a lot of persuasion before two monks and an Indian would come along. It was one of the longest caverns on the continent, a hole sixty feet by ninety which let in so much light that for the first hundred and fifty feet inside the rock, there was grass underfoot and treetops overhead. Only after that did they need to light torches. This was also where the screaming began.

The darkness was home to birds. Thousands of nests hung from the roof like pouches, and the noise was deafening. How they navigated was a mystery. Bonpland fired three shots which were drowned out by the screeching, and immediately picked up two bodies, still twitching. Humboldt hammered samples of stone out of the rock, measured temperature, air pressure, and relative dampness, and scratched moss off the wall. A monk cried out as his sandal squashed a huge unprotected snail. They had to wade through a stream as the birds fluttered around their heads, and Humboldt pressed his hands over his ears while the monks made the sign of the cross.

Here, said the guide, was where the kingdom of the dead began. This was as far as he would go.

Humboldt offered to double his pay.

The guide declined. This place was no good! And besides, what were they looking for here; men belonged in the light.

Well said, roared Bonpland.

Light, yelled Humboldt, light wasn't brightness, light was knowledge!

He went on, and Bonpland and the monks followed. The passage divided, and without a guide they didn't know which way to go. Humboldt suggested they split up. Bonpland and the monks shook their heads.

Then left, said Humboldt.

Why left, said Bonpland.

Well then, right, said Humboldt.

But why right?

Dammit, yelled Humboldt, this was becoming really stupid. And he went left, ahead of the others. The screaming of the birds echoed even louder down here. After a time it was possible to make out high-pitched clicking sounds, produced one after the other at great speed. Humboldt knelt down to inspect the misshapen plants on the cave floor. Bloated, colorless growths, almost formless. Interesting, he shouted in Bonpland's ear, he had written a paper in Freiberg about exactly this!

When the two of them looked up, they noticed that the monks were no longer there.

Superstitious blockheads, cried Humboldt. Onward!

The ground sloped sharply downhill. They were surrounded by the clattering of wings, yet no creature ever brushed against them. They groped their way along a wall to a rock cathedral. The torches, too feeble to illuminate the vault, threw exaggerated shadows onto the walls. Humboldt looked at the thermometer: it was getting steadily warmer, he doubted Professor Werner would be pleased! The next thing he saw was the figure of his mother, standing next to him. He blinked, but she remained visible for longer than was appropriate for an illusion. Her shawl tied tight against her throat, head to one side, smiling absentmindedly chin and nose as thin as they had been on the last day of her life, a bent umbrella in her hands. He closed his eyes and counted slowly to ten.

What did you say, asked Bonpland.

Nothing, said Humboldt, and concentrated on hammering a splinter out of the stone.

Further back there, the passage continued, said Bonpland.

They'd done enough, said Humboldt.

Bonpland offered up that there must surely be more unknown plants deeper inside the mountain.

Better to turn back, said Humboldt. Enough was enough.

They followed a stream in the direction of the sunlight. Gradually the number of birds diminished, their screaming quieted, and soon they could extinguish the torches.

In front of the cave mouth the Indian guide was turning their two birds over a fire to render the fat. The feathers, beaks, and necks were already scorched, blood was dripping into the flames, the fatty tissue was hissing, and a bigger smoke hung over the clearing. The best fat, he explained. Odorless, and it would stay fresh for more than a year.

Now they would need two more, said Bonpland, furious.

Humboldt asked Bonpland for his brandy flask, took a big swallow, and set off on the path back to the mission with one of the monks, while Bonpland returned the other way to shoot two more birds. After several hundred yards, Humboldt stopped still, tilted his head back, and looked up into the tree-tops which were holding up the sky high above his head.

Reverberation!

Reverberation, repeated the monk.

If it wasn't a sense of smell, said Humboldt, it must be the resonance. That clicking, echoing back off the walls. That must be how the creatures worked out their direction.

As he went on, he made notes. A system that people could utilize on moonless nights or underwater. And the fat: its odor-lessness would make it ideal for manufacturing candles. He threw open the door to his monastery cell, and a naked woman was there waiting for him. At first he thought either she was there because of the lice, or she'd brought a message. Then he understood that this time it wasn't the case, and she wanted exactly what he thought she wanted, and that there was no way out.

Obviously the governor had sent her, it fit with his idea of a rough joke between men. She had been waiting alone in the room for a night and a day, out of sheer boredom she'd taken the sextant to pieces and muddled up all the collected plants, drunk the spirits intended for the preparation of specimens, and then slept off her drunkenness. After waking up she'd found a funny portrait of a dwarf with pursed lips, which she naturally failed to recognize as Frederick the Great, and colored it in quite well. Now that Humboldt was finally here, she wanted to get it over with.

While he was still asking where she'd come from, what she wanted, and if there was anything he could do for her, she was already undoing his trousers with a practiced hand. She was small and plump and couldn't be much older than fifteen. He moved backwards, she followed him, he bumped against the wall and as he tried sharply to set her straight, he found he'd forgotten his Spanish.

Her name was Ines, she said, and he could trust her.

As she pulled up his shirt, a button tore off and rolled across the floor. Humboldt followed it with his eyes until it hit the wall and fell over. She put her arms round his neck and pulled him, while he murmured that she was to let go, he was an official of the Prussian Crown, into the middle of the room.

Oh God, she said, listen to your heart pound.

She dragged him down with her onto the carpet, and for some reason he allowed her to roll him onto his back while her hands wandered down over him until she stopped, laughed, and said there wasn't much going on. He looked at her bent back, the ceiling, and the palm leaves shivering in the wind outside the window.

Now, she said. He was to trust her!

The leaves were short and pointed, it was a tree he had never inspected until now. He wanted to sit up, but she laid her hand on his face and pushed him down, and he asked himself how she could fail to understand that he was in hell. Later on he couldn't have said how long it lasted before she gave up, pushed back her hair, and looked at him sadly. He closed his eyes. She stood up.

It didn't matter, she said quietly, it was her fault.

His head hurt, and he had a raging thirst. Only when he heard the door shut behind her did he open his eyes.

Bonpland found him at his desk, surrounded by the chronometers, the hygrometer, the thermometer, and the reassembled sextant. Magnifying glass clenched in his eye, he was looking at palm leaves. Interesting structure, remarkable! It was getting to be time they moved on.

So suddenly?

According to old reports, there was a natural channel between the great rivers of the Orinoco and the Amazon. European geographers took that to be mere legend. The dominant school of theory held that only mountain ranges could act as watersheds, and there was no possible linkage between inland river systems.

Oddly enough, he had never thought about it, said Bonpland.

The theory was wrong, said Humboldt. He was going to find the channel and solve the riddle.

Aha, said Bonpland. A channel.

He didn't like his attitude, said Humboldt. Always complaining, always objecting. Would it be too much to ask for a little enthusiasm?

Bonpland asked if something had happened.

There was about to be an eclipse of the sun! This would enable him to establish the exact coordinates of their coastal town. Then it would be possible to construct a net of measuring points all the way to the end of the channel.

But that would be way deep in primeval forest!

Primeval was a big word, said Humboldt. It shouldn't be allowed to frighten him. Primeval forest was still just forest. Nature spoke the same language everywhere.

He wrote to his brother. The journey was magnificent, with a plethora of discoveries. New plants cropped up every day, more than one could count, and his observations of tremors were suggesting a new theory of the earth's crust. His knowledge of the nature of head lice was also becoming unusually advanced. Yours as always, please put this in the newspaper!

He checked to see if his hand was still trembling. Then he wrote to Immanuel Kant. A new concept of the science of physical geography was forcing its way into his mind. At different altitudes, although at similar temperatures, similar plants grew all over the planet, so climate zones stretched not just laterally but also vertically: at some given spot the earth's surface could thus run the gamut from tropical to arctic. If one connected these zones into lines, one would get a map of the major climate currents. Thanking him for any comments, and in warmest hopes that the professor was in good health, he remained his humble … He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and signed with the boldest signature he could muster.