The Map That Changed the World (20 page)

It was all information that would soon enable him to sketch in his mind, and with steadily accumulating detail, an outline of what he now surely wanted to produce: a definitive portrait of the immensely complicated arrangements of the strata, a chart of the underworld of his country.

A magnified cross-section of a typical oolitic limestone

O
n early summer Saturdays in the 1950s when the weather was fine, the sisters of the Blessed Order of the Visitation liked nothing more than to take their little convent boys swimming in the sea. To keep us more biddable they tried to tire us out by walking the entire way, taking us up and over the little range of steep Jurassic hills that lay between school and the beach.

I think that none of us appreciated much of the geology at the time; and nor, I daresay, did the nuns—but we all knew that the landscape it formed was unusual and very beautiful. And although my own memories of those long, long walks have been more than a little colored by the harshness of the boarding-school regime (I was six and a half; and the punishment for my frequent dawdling on Saturday walks was six strokes on the hand with a bamboo cane, and a big wooden spoonful of castor oil forced down my throat by an unusually ugly sister who sported a luxuriant blond moustache), there are delights about it that linger yet.

There was a simple routine to the excursions. We would set out from our convent in the old rope-making town of Bridport, in Dorset, and walk for a while beside the main road that took westbound travelers on toward Devon and Cornwall. A mile or so out and we reached a village called Eype, where we would turn south and stop to rest and play games on a sloping meadow thick with ferns and yellow gorse. Then we would plunge off again uphill, into a rabbit warren of steep lanes that had been carved into small canyons of a honey-colored sandstone, and that were concealed from the landscape beyond by hedges six feet high, with a feel about them like front-line trenches—that of course we as brutish little boys very much liked. Occasionally there would be a five-barred field gate, and through it tantalizing glimpses of stands of rolling wheat, warm and golden in the early summer sun.

The roadway in these lanes would be littered with small pieces of rock that had broken from the canyon walls. We would kick them around, imagining them to be grenades or spare ammo, and we would scuff our shoe leather white on their sharp edges, until a disapproving escort nun wagged her finger and reminded us of the probability of public punishment in the school refectory the next morning. The list of offenses fit for the caning-and-castor-oil routine was very long.

After fifteen minutes of slope that had us puffing and panting upward, the road flattened and widened, the canyon walls fell away, the summit meadows appeared, and ahead was the vision that we had all awaited—the sun-dappled hammered-pewter surface of the English Channel—the sea. Up here there always seemed to be a cool onshore breeze blowing up and over the summit. It was tangy with salt and seaweed, and the way it cooled the perspiration was so blessed a feeling that we would race downhill into it with wing-wide arms, and it would muss our hair and tear at our uniform caps, and we would fly down toward the beach and to the surging Channel waves that chewed back and forth across the pebbles and the sand.

I seem to remember that by this point in the weekly expedition the dozen or so of us—all called by numbers, since the convent’s peculiar regime forbade the use of names; I was simply 46—were well beyond caring what the nuns might think: The ocean was by now far too magnetic a temptation. Once in a while we might glance back at them as they stood, black and hooded like carrion crows, fingering their rosaries and muttering prayers or imprecations—but if they disapproved of us tearing off our gray uniforms and plunging headlong into the surf, so what? This was summer, here was the sea, and we were schoolboys—a combination of forces that even these storm troopers of the Blessed Visitation could not overwhelm. So we stripped down to our trunks; we paddled, we swam, we splashed and fooled around in the green water and spray for what seemed hours, shouting ourselves hoarse, forgetting everything in our careless summer delirium.

And then, all too quickly, the heat of the day fell away, and it became late afternoon. The sun was suddenly lower, the shadows longer, and in the sea breeze was the first indication of the evening chill, prompting the occasional shiver and excited comparisons of goose pimples. The sea would be enveloped in a pale purple haze. By now, all weary from swimming, we would retreat some yards from the seaside and begin to play in the still-warm sand. We would build castles, collect starfishes or dogfish egg sacs or shells, or bury one another in tombs that would fill coldly in the slow-rising tide.

It was during one of these lazy after-swimming reveries that I found my first Jurassic fossil. It was an ammonite, coiled in repose like a small and fat spiral spring, the relic of a shell that the textbooks said once held a squidlike animal that could pulse its way slowly and silently backward through the warm and life-rich seas of the time. Although I have long since lost it, I remember it only too well. In my mind now it seems a much-loved talisman of those curiously contented days.

The fossil was a smooth, reddish, circular object that sat nice
ly in the palm of my hand, weighing perhaps a quarter of a pound. It was smooth enough, I thought at first, to be used as a skimmer on the flat surface of the sea. It was almost perfectly whole, not much bigger than an old English penny piece, maybe an inch and a half across, and in comparison with other ammonites I had seen in museums, it seemed to have almost no coils at all—its circumference was simply a circle that folded into itself and then vanished. In its center was a small whorl; and its flanks were traced with sinuous lines, presumably marks that showed how its shell grew, season by season or day by day.

I gazed closely at it, enraptured by its strange delicacy: I licked it to remove some of the sand, and used a fingernail to try, unsuccessfully, to pry away small concretions—these would yield only to the point of a nail file later in the evening. A few of the other boys seemed interested—I remember still that numbers 6 and 25 in particular had shared my fascination and had asked to have a closer look.

The beast evidently left as much of an impression on them. Many years later I came across number 25—by then he had a name and was a senior partner in a private banking firm—while walking along Connaught Road in Hong Kong. It was during an evening of reminiscence some while later that he asked me if I still had that pretty little ammonite? But no, I said shamefacedly, I didn’t; and neither of us could remember much more about the day it was found, nor, to our greater shame, could we remember what 6, the other boy who had liked it, was really called.

All this I may have lost or forgotten—but I still remember exactly where I found the fossil; and, knowing that William Smith had been to the very place himself, sometime during the fifteen years that he wandered around England exploring and making ready the details of his great map, I decided that I had to go back there. I thought it would be helpful to make my own brief tour of the Jurassic, to follow the outcrop of England’s
most distinctive raft of rocks just as Smith had done, from coast to coast, all the way up to Yorkshire from down here among my school memories, in the magic depths of South Dorset.

Maybe by doing so I would come to learn a little more—learn not simply about the topography of Middle England, nor of the lithologies of the Middle Jurassic nor even of the paleogeography of the era—but about William Smith himself. Perhaps if I took the journey he had, I might gain some clue as to the extent of his achievement. And though I would never quite feel it as he had done—I would never quite know the discomfort of bouncing in a springless chaise on a rock-strewn turnpike, or suffer the cold comforts of a windy coaching inn, or the misery of arguments with an undertipped ostler, still I might come to feel just a little as he had done, all those years ago.

And I had it in mind that, despite the newness of all that now rose on top of the landscape—despite the motorways and power pylons and cell-phone masts, the new cities and New Towns and the forests of skyscrapers and suspension bridges and landmarks that had been built in styles and for reasons that could barely have been imagined two centuries ago—there would be something about the outcrop of the period that would be discernible still. The imprint of geology has an immense power over landscape: the imprint on England of the Middle Jurassic would, I imagined, still be there, underlying everything, imperturbable, immovable—and quite probably, just as in William Smith’s time, instantly recognizable.

D
own at the starting point, forty years on—and the village of Eype still looked much the same. The main road was a divided highway now, with traffic thundering endlessly to and fro along it, and not a line of schoolchildren—who would have been in great peril from the frantic lorries—anywhere to be seen. The lanes at the top of the Downs were just the same, though—
sleepily unpopulated, and incised into the sandstone so deeply that one still half expected duckboards and mud, and the thud of wartime shellfire. And then from on top of the hill, sighing and slumbering below, was the English Channel, just as it always must have been, a soft surging sound on the gravel shore, and with distant ships crawling along its steel gray surface, silhouetted in the southern summer sun.

I walked down to the beach, and, remembering just where I had found the little fossil, turned promptly left to walk the few hundred yards to where I might discover another. In turning left, I was now facing east. A map would show something of a geography that my years in Dorset had allowed me to know quite instinctively. The counties of Devon and Cornwall ranged behind me. Brittany was invisible a long way off across the sea to my right. The rich farming valleys of Thomas Hardy’s Dorset were up above me, where I had come from, to my left. And, most significantly to any seeker after geological truth, unseen but very clearly marked on any map, the White Cliffs of Dover lay a hundred miles away, directly ahead.

And in that single topographic fact is a clear and present indication of the simple existence of geologic time. The white Dover cliffs are made of chalk, which is the best-known rock of a period
*
that, identified by the fossils it contains, has long been known as the Cretaceous. The rocks here in this part of Dorset, on the other hand, were all—and have been similarly identified by another group of very different fossils—laid down during the period known as the Jurassic.

For anyone today to walk eastward from Dorset to Dover along this coastline, just as William Smith had walked eastward along the Somerset Coal Canal from Dunkerton to Limpley Stoke some two centuries before, is to walk forward in geological time—is to walk away from and out of the older rocks and toward and into the newer. The cliffs that ranged before me now were each made of rocks that were successively younger than those in the cliffs that ranged behind me. The more distantly ahead of me they ranged, the younger and the younger they became—so that those lost in the shimmering haze of the afternoon belonged to whole stages and epochs of geological time that were far more recent than those beside and behind me.

It was the gentle and uniform southeasterly dip of all these outcropping rocks that made this possible: Had the rocks not dipped at all, but remained horizontal all the way along the coast, the outcrop would be entirely the same, the topography unchanged, the crops above and the view below unchanged from Dorset to Kent. It was the dip that allowed the history of the underworld to be on such dramatic display—the same gentle and uniform dip that had made all this history so suddenly clear to William Smith in the hills and valleys around Bath.

As the cliffs rose and fell in ranks along the coast in front of me, I could see with consummate ease exactly how each one, because of the bread-and-butter arrangement of its rocks, was geologically different from another. Here beside me the cliff might be made of a Jurassic sandstone capped by a limestone; but two miles further eastward down the coast the same limestone that here was
on top
and formed the cliff’s cap might well form
the base
of the next range of cliffs. Layered on top of it
there would be other rocks—shales maybe, or marls, clays, iron-stones, perhaps more limestones, more sandstones—and with each stratum on top younger and younger than those below until, a hundred miles away, way past the counties of Hampshire and Sussex and well beyond the towns of Bournemouth and Southampton, beyond Brighton and Eastbourne and the great promontory of Beachy Head, there would be the White Cliffs themselves, the chalk.

The rocks here in Kent could be shown by their fossils to belong not merely to a younger geological stage or a younger epoch than those back in Dorset. They would belong to an entire geological period, the Cretaceous, that was a full fifty million years younger than these Jurassic rocks that stood beside me. To cross the southern coast of England, west to east, is thus to travel forward—and at breathtaking chronological speed—in a self-propelled time machine. With every few hundred yards of eastward progress one passes through hundreds of thousands of years of geologic time: A million years of history go by with every couple of miles of march.