Servants of the Map (5 page)

“I …” Max had murmured. What could he say? “A terrible thing.” The chainman returned to work, leaving Max haunted and uneasy.

The other story was this, which Michaels encouraged a triangulator to tell one night when three different surveying teams gathered in a valley to plan their tasks for the next few weeks. An Indian atrocity to match the British one: Cawnpore, a month after the incident reported by the chainman. Of course Max had heard of the massacre of women and children there. No one in England had escaped that news, nor the public frenzy that followed. But Michaels’s gruff, hard-drinking companion, who in 1857 had been with a unit of the Highlanders, told with relish certain details the newspaper hadn’t printed.

“If you had seen the huts,” said Michaels’s friend: Archdale, Max
thought his name was. Or maybe Archvale. “A hundred and twenty women and children escaped the first massacre on the riverboats—the mutineers rounded them up and kept them in huts. We arrived not long after they were butchered. I saw those huts, they looked like cages where a pack of wild animals had been set loose among their prey.”

“Tell about the shoes,” Michaels had called from the other side of the fire. All the men were drinking; Michaels had had a case of brandy carried in from Srinagar. His face was dark red, sweating, fierce. That night, as always, he ignored Max almost completely.

“The shoes,” Archdale said. He emptied his glass and leaned forward, face shining in the firelight. “Picture this,” he said. “I go into one hut and the walls are dripping with blood, the floor smeared, the smell unthinkable. Flies buzzing so loudly I thought I’d go mad. Against one wall is a row of women’s shoes, running with blood, draped with bits of clothing.” The Indian chainmen and the Baiti porters were gathered around their separate fires, not far away. Could they hear Archdale? Max wondered. Was it possible Archdale would say these things within earshot of them? “Against the other wall, a row of children’s shoes, so small, just like those our children wear at home. And”—he leaned farther forward here—“do you know what was in them?”

No one answered. Was Gillian wearing shoes yet? “What?” Max said, unable to stop himself.

“Feet!” Archdale roared.
“Feet!
Those filthy animals, those swine, they had lopped off the children’s feet. We found the bodies in the well.”

That terrible story had set off others; the night had been like a night in hell; Max had fled the campfire soon after Archdale’s tirade and rolled himself in a blanket in a hollow, far from everyone, carved into the rocky cliffs. When he woke he’d been surprised not to find the campground littered with bodies.

Since hearing those tales he has wondered how there could be so much violence on both sides; and how, after that, Englishmen and Indians could be up in these mountains working so calmly together. How can he
make sense of an empire founded on such things?
Nothing,
he thought after hearing those stories. And still thinks.
I understand nothing.

Dr. Hooker wrote at great length, in a letter Max didn’t mention to Clara, about the problems of packing botanical collections for the journey home: the weight, the costs; the necessity of using Ward’s cases; the crating of tree ferns and the boats to be hired. How kind he was, to take such trouble in writing to Max, and to warn him of these potential hazards! And yet how little Dr. Hooker understands Max’s own situation. There is no possibility of paying for such things without depriving Clara and his daughters. His collections are limited to the scraps he can dry and preserve in his small press—bad enough he spent money on that; the herbarium sheets he can carry; the sketches and observations in his notebook. He can offer Dr. Hooker only these, but they are not nothing and he hopes his gifts will be received without disappointment.

The lost man whose skull he found—the first one, when he’d just entered these mountains—had at least left behind a record of the movements of his soul. What is he doing, himself? Supporting his family, advancing his career; when he returns to England, he’ll have no trouble finding a good position. But he would like also to feel that he has
broadened
himself. Hunched over his plane-table, his temples pounding as he draws the lateral moraines of the glacier below him, he hears his mother’s voice.

Look. Remember this.
The ribbon of ice below him turns into a snow-covered path that curves through the reeds along the river and vanishes at the horizon; across it a rabbit is moving and his mother stands, her hand in his, quietly keeping him company. They watch, and watch, until the path seems not to be moving away from them, but toward them; the stillness of the afternoon pouring into their clasped hands.
There is something special in you,
she said.
In the way you see.

A few days ago, on his twenty-eighth birthday, he opened the birthday greeting Clara had tucked in his trunk. She had written about the earlier birthdays they’d shared. And about this one, as she imagined it:
Your companions, I know, will have made you a special birthday meal. Perhaps you’ll all share a bottle of brandy, or whatever you drink there. I am thinking of you, and of the birthdays in the future we will once more spend together.

Reading this, he’d felt for the first time that Clara’s project might fail. He is no longer the person she wrote to, almost a year ago now. She may have turned into someone else as well. That Gideon she mentions, that nice young man who prunes the trees and brings her wood and does the tasks Max ought to be doing himself: what other parts of Max’s life is he usurping? Max conjures up someone broad-shouldered, very tall—Max and Clara are almost the same height—unbuttoning his shirt and reaching out for Clara … Impossible, it makes him want to howl. Surely she wouldn’t have mentioned him if their friendship was anything but innocent. Yet even if it is, it will have changed her.

He himself has changed so much, he grows further daily from her picture of him. There was no birthday celebration; he told no one of this occasion. If he had, there would have been no response. It is his mother, dead so many years, who seems to speak most truly to the new person he is becoming. As if the years between her death and now were only a detour, his childhood self emerging from a long uneasy sleep. Beyond his work, beyond the mapping and recording, he is
seeing;
and this—it is terrifying—is becoming more important to him than anything.

October 1, 1863

Dearest Clara—

Forgive me for not writing in so long. Until I received your Packets 17, 18, and 19, all in a wonderful clump last week (16, though, has gone astray), I had almost given up hope of us being in touch before winter. I should have realized your letters couldn’t find me while we were among the
glaciers. We are in the valley of the Shighar now, and from here will make our way back to Srinagar. I don’t yet know what my winter assignment will be. The triangulating parties will winter at the headquarters in Dehra Dun, recalibrating the instruments and checking their calculations and training new assistants. There is talk of leaving a small group of plane-tablers in Srinagar, to complete topographical maps of the city and the outlying areas and lakes. I will let you know my orders as soon as I get them.

At least you know I am alive now. Though how can you make sense of my life here on the evidence of one letter from when I first arrived in Kashmir, and one from deep in the mountains? The others—I must have faith they will find their way to you. Your description of your journey to London, trudging through those government offices as you tried to get some word of me—this filled me with sadness, and with shame. You are generous to say it is not my fault that you went so long without word of me, that you blame a careless ship’s captain, clumsy clerks, and accidents: but it is my fault, still. I am the one who left home. And that I have not written these last weeks—can you forgive me? I console myself with the thought that, since my earlier letters were so delayed, perhaps a trickle of them will continue to reach you during the gap between then and now. But really my only excuse is the hardships of these last weeks. I am so weary; the cold and the altitude make it hard to sleep. And when I do catch a few brief hours I am plagued by nightmares. The men I work with tell me stories, things I would never repeat to you; and though I try not to think about them they haunt me at night.

The season in the mountains is already over; we stayed too long. We crossed one high pass after another during our retreat. And Clara, you can’t imagine the weather. I couldn’t work on my maps, or keep up my notes, or even—my most cherished task—write to you; when I heated the inkpot, the ink still froze on its short journey to the paper. My hands were frozen, my beard a mass of icicles. I wore everything you packed for me, all at once, and still couldn’t stay warm. Lambs’ wool vest and drawers, heavy flannel shirt and lined chamois vest, wool trousers and shirt, three pairs of
stockings and my fur-lined boots, thick woolen hat, flannel-lined kidskin jacket, over that my big sheepskin coat, and then a Kashmir shawl wrapped twice about me, binding the whole mass together—I sweated under the weight of all this, yet grew chilled the instant we stopped moving. Nights were the worst, there is no firewood in the mountains and we had already used up all wed carried. Food was short as well.

I shouldn’t tell you these things; never mind. Now that we are down in the valleys things are easier. And I am fine. Soon enough we’ll reach Srinagar, and whether I stay there or move on to Dehra Dun I am looking forward to the winter. Long quiet months of cleaning up my sketch maps, improving my drawings, fitting together the sections into the larger picture of the Himalayan system. From either place I may write to you often, knowing the chances of you getting my letters in just a few months are good: and I may look forward to receiving yours with some regularity. Still I have some of the letters in your trunk to look forward to, as well: I ration these now, I open one only every few weeks, sometimes ignoring the dates with which you marked them. Forgive me, I save them for when I most need them. This evening, before I began to write to you, I opened one intended for Elizabeth’s birthday. How lovely to be reminded of that happy time when you leaned on my arm, plump and happy as we walked in the garden and waited for her birth. The lock of Elizabeth’s hair you enclosed I have sewn into a pouch, which I wear under my vest.

What else do I have to tell you? So much has happened these last weeks that I don’t know how to describe it all; and perhaps it wouldn’t interest you, it is just my daily work. Yesterday I had a strange encounter, though. Camped by the edge of a river, trying to restore some order to my papers while my companions were off in search of fuel, I looked up to see a stranger approaching; clearly a European although he wore clothes of Kashmiri cut. When I invited him to take tea with me he made himself comfortable and told me about himself. A doctor and an explorer, elderly; he calls himself Dr. Chouteau and says he is of French birth, though his English is indistinguishable from mine. This he explains by claiming to have
left home as a boy of fourteen; claiming also to have been exploring in these mountains for over forty years. We did not meet in Srinagar, he told me, because he lives in a native quarter there. I think he may be the solitary traveler of whom I heard such odd rumors earlier in the season, though when I asked him this he shrugged and said, “There are a few of us.”

We passed together the most interesting afternoon I’ve had in weeks. My own companions and I have grown weary of each other, we seldom speak at all; but Dr. Chouteau talked without stopping for several hours. A great liar, I would have to say. Even within those hours he began to contradict himself. But how intriguing he was. He is very tall, thin and hawk-nosed, with a skin burnt dark brown by years in the sun and deeply lined. His ragtag outfit he tops with a large turban, from which sprout the plumes of some unidentifiable bird. He showed me his scars: a round one, like a coin, on the back of one hand, and another to match on the front—here a bullet passed through, he said, when he was fighting in Afghanistan. A hollow in his right calf, where, in Kabul, a bandit hacked at him with a sword as he escaped by horse. For some time he lived among a Kafir tribe, with a beautiful black-eyed mistress; the seam running from eyebrow to cheekbone to chin he earned, he says, in a fight to win her. He has been in Jalalabad and the Kabul river basin; in the Pamirs among the Kirghiz nomads; in Yarkand and Leh, Chitral and Gilgit.

Or so he says. Myself, I cannot quite credit this; he is elusive regarding his travel routes, and about dates and seasons and companions. But perhaps he truly did all these things, at one time or another, and erases the details and connections out of necessity: I think perhaps he has been a spy. For whom?

I try to forget what you have said about the way you gather with our families and friends and pass these letters around, or read them out loud; if I thought of that I would grow too self-conscious to write to you at all. But I will tell you one peculiar thing about Dr. Chouteau if you promise to keep this to yourself. He has lived to such a robust old age, he swears, by the most meticulous attention to personal hygiene. And how has he
avoided the gastric complaints that afflict almost all of us when we eat the local foods? A daily clyster, he says. The cleansing enema he administers to himself, with a special syringe. I have seen this object with my own eyes, he carries it with him and showed it to me. It looked rather like a hookah. Far better this, he said, looking at my bewildered countenance, than the calomel and other purgatives on which less wise travelers rely.

Some of the other things he told me I can’t repeat, even to you: they have to do with princes and dancing-girls, seraglios and such-like: when I am home again I will share these with you, in the privacy of our own bed.

Clara, I am so confused. Meeting this stranger made me realize with more than usual sharpness how lonely I am, how cut off I feel from all that is important to me. My past life seems to be disappearing, my memories grow jumbled. Who was the Max Vigne who went here or there, did this or that? It’s as if I am dissolving and reforming; I am turning into someone I don’t recognize. If I believed in the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, I might suspect that the wind is blowing someone else’s soul in through my nostrils, while my old soul flies out my ears. In the mountains I lay awake in the cold, frozen despite my blankets, and my life in England—my boyhood, even my life with you—passed by my eyes as if it had been lived by someone else. Forgive these wanderings. The household details of which you wrote, the problems with the roof, the chimney, the apple trees—I know I should offer some answers in response to your questions but it feels pointless. You will have long since had to resolve these things before you receive my advice. I trust your judgment completely.