Dry Storeroom No. 1 (4 page)

My heady calculations were infused with the smell of naphtha, which provided a general fug throughout the Entomology Department. This is a chemical designed to keep away the pests that might otherwise gorge on the insects in the drawers—insects that eat long-dead insects. For of all the members of the animal kingdom the insects are endlessly inventive, experts at survival under almost any conditions, able to prosper where nothing else can earn a living. For some of them, the glue on an old label is a feast. When our own vainglorious species gets its eventual come-uppance—as it will—this will not disturb the cockroach (ah! So here are the Blattidae) one whit, nor jeopardize the prolific weevil, nor distract the swarming aphid. I soon learned that the very success of the insects poses the greatest problems to the entomologist. There are so many species, particularly in the tropics, that simply cataloguing and naming them all can seem an insurmountable task. There is still a long way to go, despite more than two hundred years of descriptive endeavour. We shall see later how scientific ruses have been suggested to get around this labour of Hercules. But, for now, I retreated back down the little hidden staircase into the familiar world of the basement of the Natural History Museum, and to the embrace of the trilobites.

Not far from my office door there is a tiny lift. A brass plaque in the lift informs the passenger that it was installed thanks to the beneficence of Prof. Oldfield Thomas FRS, and it certainly saved the poor curator from walking all around the galleries to get upstairs. I took the lift upwards to the third floor, where the all-purpose key had to be used again to let any passenger out. A kind of cage encloses the elevator’s inmates, and as it whizzes away there is an odd sensation of being carried upwards through solid walls. I emerged close by a cross-section through a great giant sequoia tree propped against the wall; this specimen had been displayed to the public ever since the early days of the Museum. I remembered seeing it as a child. Time was spelled out in the tree rings that circled the richly red wood. As evidence of the antiquity of the tree, human events were ticked off along one of its diameters at the appropriate number of annual tree rings. The tree was so big when America was “discovered” it was of such and such a size when the Black Death stalked through Europe.

There is probably no more graphic way of comprehending earthly time than the stately chronometry of this tree. This one individual plant had seen more than a thousand years of modern human history, yet this was perhaps one-hundredth of the time since our species emerged from Africa. Then again, this life span of
Homo sapiens
(at most a hundred thousand years) was just a late sliver from the great trunk of geological time. The stretch of time life has been on Earth runs to at least 3.5 thousand
million
years. Or, if you prefer, more than a million times the age of the great arboreal Methuselah of living organisms that I was contemplating. Every specimen preserved in the Museum is a product of time, and evolution, cradled in the bosom of our planet. The Natural History Museum is, first and foremost, a celebration of what time has done to life. If the world is to remain in ecological balance, there is a pressing need to know about all the organisms that collaborate to spin the web of life. The planet’s very survival might depend upon such knowledge. I want to drag all the visitors to the Museum up to the tree and explain about time, and how we exist atop a vast history that has made us what we are, and that we ignore that history at our peril. But if I did, I fear that I should be branded with the same label as that funny old man who comes up in the street to tell you about his messages from angels.

Not far from the famous tree there is another of those locked doors. By now I knew what to expect. Behind the door there would be a further secret domain, and so it proved. This was the portal to the Herbarium, centre of the Department of Botany. Built almost at the top of the west end of the original Museum, it was the greatest surprise so far. I had become accustomed to the idea that behind the scenes I would find workaday spaces, functional and purposeful, but scarcely matching the grandeur of the public galleries. The Herbarium disabused me of that notion, for before me lay another grand hall, spacious and airy, illuminated naturally from skylights high above. Running along almost the whole length of the “nave” of the hall (which indeed was as long as a large church) there were two ranks of polished hardwood cabinets. By now I knew what to expect of these—they would house the collections. And so it proved. Where a door was ajar I could see folders neatly stacked side by side in the cupboards, a different kind of collection from any I had seen so far. On tables between the cabinets some of the folders lay open for study: each one contained a number of herbarium sheets a couple of feet in length, on which were laid out pressed flowers; well, not just the flowers, but whole plants, leaves, stems and all. The one before me seemed to be a kind of
Aquilegia,
and it was spread out in the most delicate way, so as to display the beauty of its lobed leaves, and the pendent flowers. The fresh green colour of life had faded to a yellowish hue, tinged the colour of dry sherry. But the sheet had preserved the essence of the plant, much as a sepia photograph might preserve a Victorian street scene. There in immaculate copperplate script was the scientific name of the plant recorded by some long-retired curator—the date of collection showed that the plant had been pressed well over a century before, 24 May 1867. These herbarium sheets were clearly as permanent as the other collections I had seen, for all that the “fairest flower [is] no sooner blown but blasted” as Milton said. Death could evidently be stopped in its tracks by using the correct procedures. Then all the archival information could be recorded on the same sheet of paper, not only the name and date, but also the locality, collector and identifier, and details of other specimens in the collection. Once more, I glanced along the rows of cabinets—and there were more on either side of the Herbarium—and tried to guess the vast number of records that must be stored in this great room. Since the herbarium sheet was little more than a slip of paper, there would be dozens of specimens in a folder, many folders to a cabinet, and so on, apparently for ever. The mind soon went dizzy with the calculations. I learned recently that there are more than two million plants stored in the Botany Department.

To either side of the “nave” of the Herbarium there were aisles in which worked the botanists. To be more accurate, the arrangement was like a series of private chapels tucked away on either side of the long hall. There were no doors to separate the workrooms from the main part of the Herbarium, but rather a narrow opening led into a concealed office area, hidden behind the flanking cabinets, a secret niche protected from the prying eyes of the casual visitor. Nowadays, these niches are partly occupied by computers, but when I first visited there were old black typewriters sitting on the desks, and piles of papers and sheaves of carbon paper for making copies for the files. Old monographs lay open at pictures of weeds. The niches did have a Dickensian atmosphere, and one half expected a Sam Weller to pop out from his niche and cry out that he was “wery sorry to keep you waiting, sir.” On my exploratory trip into the Herbarium, I was foolish enough to poke my head around the corner of a niche belonging to a very cross-looking senior curator, who threw a kind of generalized snarl in my direction. I decided it was time to flee back to the safety of the trilobites.

Later, I took another trip out through the basement, but this time I popped out of the back of the old building into a kind of alley; this was the “tradesman’s entrance” to the Museum, where bicycles were parked, and pallets and unwanted pieces of furniture were piled up. There was often a funny smell (see Chapter 4). Many pieces of surplus wood or furniture had the words “Rosen wanted” scrawled upon them in white chalk. I subsequently discovered these rejects had been bagged by Brian Rosen, the coral expert. Because his room commanded a view of the alley, he could nip out with his chalk quicker than anybody else. When I got to know Brian better, I visited his house in south London and found complex constructions in his garden entirely fabricated from Museum detritus. There was a kind of apotheosis of the garden shed, a thing with porticoes and pillars, and inside the shed yet more stuff retrieved from the clutches of the skip. I have a vision of a Watts Tower one day rising from the back streets of West Norwood, entirely composed of bits and pieces discarded from the Natural History Museum. Today, the back alley by the bikes is where smokers go to puff furtively, just as they did in their school days.

At the further end of the passageway, an intriguing notice: “Spirit Building” pointed the visitor to a newer block than the original Museum, entirely undistinguished from the outside, no ornament at all. This building proved to be another part of the Zoology Department. The spirits lived in jars. These were the wet collections: pickled, preserved and potted zoology. The storerooms were dark and sealed off from the world, so that when a light was switched on a battery of round glass jars with similar lids stretching away into the distance would suddenly be illuminated…and inside the jars maybe a huge python curled up and pallid, like the intestine of a giant, or perhaps a fish all spiny and phantasmagorical, or a lizard that seemed to paw the edge of its jar, or a long-dead lobster. There were several floors of these jars, arranged by zoological kind, cupboard after cupboard full of fishes, or crustaceans, or frogs, or lizards. It was like a storeroom for warlocks, where eye of newt and toe of frog came in a thousand varieties, and fillet of fenny snake was as easy to order as buttered toast.

The specimens were preserved in alcohol or formaldehyde. Colour seldom survived this treatment for long, so that fish and newt, frog and worm, jellyfish and jeroboam, shared a kind of tuberous pallor, something like that of a parsnip. The jars ranged in size from tiny phials crowded together and containing dozens of small shrimps to great towers of glass holding goannas from the outback or carnivorous lizards from Comoro. Here was the profusion of the animal world pickled in perpetuity, a washed-out parade of the panoply of life. It was a place to make one think of the transience of all things. I had never realized until I slid open one of the cupboards in the Spirit Building that many fish have a naturally depressed appearance. A grouper in a jar is a sorry thing indeed, the corners of its mouth turned down in a parody of gloominess. Worst of all is the stonefish, an immensely ugly animal that lurks in estuaries in Australia. It is stout, and covered in warty excrescences, with fins more like props than agents of propulsion; its mouth is gloomier than a grouper’s; it seems to have plenty to be gloomy about, looking as it does. I discovered that it spends most of its life camouflaged and motionless, its ragged skin a perfect disguise, until some prey comes near enough—then that apparently dejected mouth can engulf the unfortunate prey in a trice.

On another expedition I encountered the General Library (and this is just one of five libraries in the Museum), after entering it accidentally by a side door off one of the public galleries. It was difficult to believe that there could be so many books pertaining to natural history. Situated in a newer part of the Museum, the main reading room was vast, with tomes on shelves all around the perimeter stretching as high as one could reach—and beyond this room there were galleries of further books, and here they were piled so high on shelf after shelf that there were little ladders to help the reader retrieve some of the higher volumes. There are those who find libraries intimidating, but I am not one of them. I like to see the books in their old leather bindings, the shelves stretching away, deeply filled; it gives me a sense of continuity with past scholars. Even so, encountering an enormous library like this for the first time is a humbling experience. Think of all the thousands of workers putting pen to paper to add to the knowledge of the natural world, or to communicate scientific ideas to their colleagues. If all this is known already, how can a new intruder into the world of learning make any mark at all?

I took down one of the volumes at random:
Acta Universitatis Lundensis
—the scholarly publications of the University of Lund in Sweden. Well over a century of labours by Scandinavian scientists were preserved here in perpetuity, in volume after volume, or at least until paper crumbles away. The older volumes had green leather bindings, scuffed with use and age; newer volumes were cloth-bound, doubtless in the interests of economy. This part of the library was devoted just to Scandinavian journals, for nearby was a huge run of the organ of the Royal Society of Sweden some yards in length, and over there a great swathe of journals from the University of Uppsala, one of the most ancient universities in Europe. In these pages the great Linnaeus published some of his work, which is still cited today. So it went on, with publications from universities and institutes in Sweden and Norway that meant little to me then. And if the works in this segment of the library were just from one little piece of the world, how much greater would be the literature of the United States, or Russia? Or China? The Museum was dedicated to trying to collect
everything
that was published on the natural history of the planet. Once more I attempted in vain to calculate the size of the holdings on the shelves, floor on floor, only to boggle hopelessly, baffled by bibliographic boundlessness. I crept back to my own little corner.

So my exploration continued, up dark stairwells and down dim passages. I came across a room full of antelope and deer trophies, the walls lined with dozens of ribbed or twisted horns, as if it were the entrance lobby to some stately home owned by a bloodthirsty monomaniac. On another occasion I found my way into one of the towers that flanked the main entrance to the Museum—only to find that to get there one had to take a path that led over the roof. I came across a taxidermist’s lair, where a man with an eye patch was reconstructing a badger. I failed to find the Department of Mineralogy altogether, apart from meeting some meteorite experts in their redoubt at the end of the minerals gallery. There seemed to be no end to it. Even now, after more than thirty years of exploration, there are corners I have never visited. It was a place like Mervyn Peake’s rambling palace of Gormenghast, labyrinthine and almost endless, where some forgotten specialist might be secreted in a room so hard to find that his very existence might be called into question. I felt that somebody might go quietly mad in a distant compartment and never be called to account. I was to discover that this was no less than the truth.