Servants of the Map (2 page)

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:

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.

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

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.