Repeatedly Max has tried to keep up his end of this joint endeavor, only to be frustrated by the books difficulty. For now he has set it aside in favor of a more unexpectedly useful gift. Claras 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 Grays 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 Grays 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 mothers eyes; as distant as the fossilized ferns recently found in the Arctic. As a boy hed had a passion for botany: a charmed few years of learning plants and their names before the shock of his mothers death, his fathers 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. Hookers book as well. Here too he finds much of interest. When he feels lost, when all hes forgotten or never knew about simple botany impedes his understanding, he marks his place with a leaf or a stem and turns back to Grays manual. At home, he thinks, after hes 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 hasnt 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 wasnt sure, then, what use hed 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, hes 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 doesnt 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
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 newit 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 Montgomeries 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), Id 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 points 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 theyve exposed by digging through feet of snow, and the supporting pillars theyve 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 Ive 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 whove 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.