Measuring The World Part 17

The two of them looked at each other, furious, then set off.

It was age, said Humboldt after a bit. Once upon a time he'd been able to convince anyone. Overcome every obstacle, get any pa.s.sport he wanted. No one had ever resisted him.

Gauss didn't answer. They walked along in silence.

Well all right, said Gauss finally. He admitted it. It hadn't been clever of him. But he'd made him so angry!

A medium like her should be put out of business, said Humboldt. It was no way to approach the dead. Indecent, was what it was-brazen and vulgar. He had grown up with spirits, and he knew how one behaved toward them.

These lanterns, said Gauss. Soon they would be lit by gas, and night would be banished. They were both growing old in a second-cla.s.s era. What would happen to Eugen now?

Expelled from university. Prison, probably. In certain circ.u.mstances they could arrange for him to be exiled.

Gauss said nothing.

Sometimes one had to accept, said Humboldt, that one couldn't help people. It had taken him years to come to terms with the fact that he could do nothing for Bonpland. He couldn't grieve about it day after day.

The only thing was that he was going to have to tell Minna. She was idiotically fond of the boy.

If something was going to fail, said Humboldt, you just had to let it fail, you couldn't stop it. It didn't sound nice, but this was just the harder side, the brutal side one might say, of success in life.

His life was over, said Gauss. He had a home that meant nothing to him, a daughter n.o.body wanted, and a son who'd landed in a disaster. And his mother wasn't long for this world. For the last fifteen years he'd been measuring hills. He stood still and looked up into the night sky. All in all, he couldn't explain why he felt so lighthearted.

He couldn't either, said Humboldt. But he felt the same way.

Perhaps this thing and that were still possible. Magnetism. The geometry of s.p.a.ce. His head wasn't what it once was, but then again it wasn't useless.

He had never been to Asia, said Humboldt. That was not an appropriate state of affairs. He found himself wondering if it was not in fact a mistake to rule out the invitation to Russia.

Naturally he would need new collaborators. He couldn't do it on his own any more. His eldest son was in the army, the youngest was still too young, and Eugen was out of the picture. But he'd taken to the Weber fellow. And he had a pretty wife! There was a vacant post of professor of physics at Gottingen.

It wouldn't be easy, said Humboldt. The regime would want to control him every step of the way. But if anyone thought he was weak or submissive, they'd made a mistake. They'd kept him away from India. But he would go to Russia.

Experimental physics, said Gauss. Something new. He'd have to think about it.

With any luck, said Humboldt, he could even get as far as China.

THE S STEPPES.

What, ladies and gentlemen, is death? Fundamentally it is not extinction and those seconds when life ends, but the slow decline that precedes it, that creeping debility that extends over years: the time in which a person is still there and yet not there, in which he can still imagine that although his prime is long since past, it lingers yet. So circ.u.mspectly, ladies and gentlemen, has nature organized our death!

When the applause ended, Humboldt had already left the podium. A coach was waiting outside the Choral Hall to take him to his sister-in-law, who was lying on her sickbed. She was gently sinking away, without pain, between sleep and semi-consciousness. She opened her eyes one last time, looked first at Humboldt, then, a little frightened, at her husband, as if she had difficulty distinguis.h.i.+ng between them. Seconds later she was gone. Afterwards the brothers sat together facing each other; Humboldt held his elder brother's hand, because he knew the situation required it, but for a time they totally forgot to sit up straight and say cla.s.sical things.

Did he remember the evening, his elder brother asked finally, when they read the story of Aguirre and he decided to go to the Orinoco? It was a date the world would remember!

Of course he remembered, said Humboldt. But he no longer believed the future world would care, he also had doubts about the significance of the journey upriver itself. The channel didn't produce any benefit for the continent, it was as abandoned and mosquito-ridden as ever, Bonpland had been right. At least he had spent his life without being bored.

Boredom had never troubled him, said the elder brother. He had just not wanted to be alone.

He had always been alone, said Humboldt, but it was boredom that had terrified him to death.

He had found it very hard, said the elder brother, that he had never been made chancellor of Germany, but Hardenberg had prevented it, though it had always been his destiny.

n.o.body, said Humboldt, had a destiny. One simply decided to feign one until one came to believe in it oneself. But so many things didn't fit in with it, one had to really force oneself.

The elder brother leaned back and gave him a long look. Still boys?

You knew?

Always.

Neither of them spoke for a long while, then Humboldt rose and they embraced as formally as ever.

Will we see each other again?

Certainly. In the flesh or in the light.

He was awaited at the Academy by his two traveling companions, Ehrenberg the zoologist and the mineralogist Rose. Ehrenberg was short, fat, and had a pointed beard. Rose was more than six foot six and seemed to have perpetually damp hair. Both wore thick gla.s.ses. The court had allotted them to Humboldt as his a.s.sistants. Together they checked over all the equipment: the cyanometer, the telescope, and the Leyden jar from his trip to the tropics, an English clock that ran more accurately than the old French one, and for measuring magnetism, a better dipping compa.s.s needle made by Gamberg himself, and also an iron-free tent. Then Humboldt had himself taken to Charlottenburg Palace.

He saluted this journey into the empire of his son-in-law, said Friedrich Wilhelm slowly. So he was elevating Chamberlain Humboldt to the position of True Private Adviser, who from now on was to be addressed as Excellence.

Humboldt was so moved that he had to turn away.

What is it, Alexander?

It was only, said Humboldt hastily, because of the death of his sister-in-law.

He knew Russia, said the king, and he also knew Hum-boldt's reputation. He wished for there to be no problems! It was not necessary to weep tears over every unhappy peasant.

He had given his a.s.surances to the tsar, said Humboldt in a tone that sounded as if he'd learned the words by heart. He would occupy himself with inanimate nature; he would not be studying the relations of the lower cla.s.ses. It was a sentence he had already written twice to the tsar and three times to high officials of the Prussian Court.

At home there were two letters. One from the elder brother, thanking him for the visit and his support. Whether we see each other again or not, now once more, it is just we two, as it always was fundamentally. We were inculcated early with the lesson that life requires an audience. We both believed that the whole world was ours. Little by little the circles became smaller, and we were forced to realize that the actual goal of all our efforts was not the cosmos but merely each other. Because of you I wanted to become a minister, because of me you had to conquer the highest mountain and the deepest caverns, for you I founded the greatest university, for me you discovered South America, and only fools who fail to understand the significance of a single life in double form would describe this as a rivalry: because there was you, I had to become the teacher of my country, because there was me, you had to become the scientist who explored an entire continent; nothing else would have been appropriate. And we always had the most acute sense of what was appropriate. I beg you not to allow this letter to be found sometime in the future with the rest of our correspondence, even if, as you yourself told me, you no longer hold any brief for the future.

The other letter was from Gauss. He too sent his good wishes along with several formulae for magnetic measurements of which Humboldt understood not one line. Besides this, he recommended that Humboldt learn Russian along the way. He himself had recently begun to do the same, not least as the result of a long-standing promise. Should Humboldt encounter a certain Pushkin, would he please not forget to a.s.sure him of his great admiration.

The servant came in and announced that everything was ready, the horses had been fed, the instruments loaded, they would be set to leave at dawn.

In point of fact Russian really did help Gauss survive the aggravation at home, Minna's endless wailing and reproaches, his daughter's sad face, and all the questions about Eugen. Nina had given him the Russian dictionary as a parting present: she had gone to her sister in East Prussia, leaving Gottingen forever. For a moment he had wondered if she, and not Johanna, had been the woman of his life.

He had softened. Recently he had even succeeded in looking at Minna without distaste. There was something in her narrow, elderly, perpetually complaining face that he would miss if she were no longer there.

Weber was writing to him frequently now. It did seem likely that he would soon be coming to Gottingen. The professors.h.i.+p was opening up and Gauss's word carried weight. Such a pity, he said to his daughter, that you're so ugly and he already has a wife!

On the return journey from Berlin, when the swaying of the coach had made him more ill than ever in his life before, he had tried to help himself by thinking through the shuddering, shaking, and rolling to their fundamentals. Slowly but surely he managed to separate out all the parts of the whole combination. It really didn't help much, but in the process he had understood the principle of the smallest possible force: every movement corresponded with that of the system as a whole for as long as it could. The moment he had reached Gottingen in the early hours of the morning, he had sent Weber the notes he'd made, and Weber had returned them with clever comments. The paper would be published in a few months. So now he'd become a physicist.

In the afternoons he took long walks through the woods. Over time he'd ceased to get lost, he knew this area better than anyone, after all he'd fixed every detail of it on the map. Sometimes it was as if he hadn't just measured the region, but invented it, as if it had only achieved its reality through him. Where once there had been nothing but trees, peat bogs, stones, and gra.s.sy mounds, there was now a net of grades, angles, and numbers. Nothing someone had ever measured was now or ever could be the same as before. Gauss wondered if Humboldt would understand that. It began to rain, and he took shelter under a tree. The gra.s.s s.h.i.+vered, it smelled of fresh earth, and there was nowhere else he could ever want to be but here.

Humboldt's baggage train was not making much progress. His departure had coincided with the time of the spring thaw; a failure in planning of a kind he had never committed before. The coaches sank into the mud or kept sliding off the waterlogged roads; again and again they had to halt and wait. The column was too long, there were too many of them. They were already late by the time they reached Konigsberg. Professor Bessel greeted Humboldt with a rhetorical deluge, led them through the new observatory, and had his guests shown the greatest collection of amber in the country.

Humboldt asked him if he hadn't once worked with Professor Gauss.

The high point of his life, said Bessel, if not exactly easy. The moment in Bremen when the Prince of Mathematics had recommended that he give up science and become a cook or a blacksmith, if neither of these was too much of a challenge, was one from which he'd taken a long time to recover. Nonetheless he had been lucky; his friend Bartels in Petersburg had had an even harder time with him. In the face of such superiority, the only thing that helped was sympathy.

On the next stage of the journey, to Tilsit, the roads were covered in ice, and several times the wagons broke down. At the Russian border they found a troop of Cossacks under orders to accompany them.

That really wasn't necessary, said Humboldt.

He must trust him, said the commander, it was necessary.

He had spent years in the wilderness without protective escort!

This wasn't the wilderness, said the commander. This was Russia.

Outside Dorpat there were a dozen journalists waiting, along with the entire Faculty of Sciences. The first thing they wanted to do was show them the mineralogical and botanical collections.

Gladly, said Humboldt, though in fact he was here not for the museums but for Nature.

Let him take care of that in the meantime, offered Rose, eager to be useful, that shouldn't hold them up, that was precisely why he'd come!

While Rose was measuring the hills around the town, the mayor, the dean of the university, and two officers led Humboldt through an unbelievably long suite of poorly ventilated rooms full of samples of amber. One of the stones held a spider of a kind Humboldt had never seen before, and in another there was an extraordinary winged scorpion, which deserved to be called a fabulous creature. Humboldt held the stone up close to his eyes and blinked, but it did no good, he didn't see well any more. He must have a drawing of it made!

Of course, said Ehrenberg, who all of a sudden was standing right behind him, as he took the stone from his hand and bore it away. Humboldt wanted to call him back, but then he let it go. It would have looked strange in front of all these people. He didn't get the drawing and he never saw the stone again. When he asked Ehrenberg about it later, he couldn't remember anything.

They left Dorpat in the direction of the capital. An imperial courier rode ahead, two officers had attached themselves to them along with three professors and a geologist from the Petersburg Academy, one Volodin, who Humboldt kept forgetting was there, so that he gave a start every time Volodin chimed in with some comment in his light, quiet voice. It was as if something in this pale figure resisted being fixed into memory, or as if it commanded to perfection the art of rendering itself invisible. At the river Narva they had to wait two days for the ice to yield. In the meantime their numbers had swollen to the point where they needed the large ferry to cross, and it could only do that when the river was completely clear. So they were late in reaching St. Petersburg.

The Prussian amba.s.sador accompanied Humboldt to his audience. The tsar held his hand for a long time, a.s.sured him that his visit was an honor for Russia, and asked about Hum-boldt's elder brother, whom he remembered clearly from the Congress of Vienna.

Did he remember him fondly?

Well, said the tsar, to be frank he had always found him rather intimidating.

Every European envoy gave a reception for Humboldt. He dined several times with the imperial family. The finance minister, Count Cancrin, doubled the promised travel funds.

He was grateful, said Humboldt, although he did think with longing of the days when he had financed his travels on his own.

No reason for longing, said Cancrin, he had every freedom and this, he pushed a piece of paper at Humboldt, was the route that would be permitted. He would be escorted along the way, he was expected at every stopping point, and all provincial garrisons were under orders to provide for his safety.

He wasn't sure, said Humboldt. He wanted to move about freely. A scientist must be able to improvise.

Only if he'd failed to plan properly, Cancrin reproached him with a smile. And this plan, he could promise him, was outstanding.

Before they went on to Moscow, Humboldt got letters again: two from his elder brother, whom loneliness was rendering talkative. A long letter from Bessel. And a card from Gauss from the depths of his experiments in magnetism. He was taking the thing seriously now, he had had a customdesigned windowless hut built, with an airtight door, and nails of unmagnetizable copper.

At first the town councilors had thought he'd gone mad. But Gauss had cursed them at such length, threatening and wailing and dangling so many totally invented advantages for trade and the economy and the town's fame before their eyes that they finally agreed and had put up the hut next to the observatory. Now he was spending the majority of his days in front of a long hanging iron needle in a galvanometer. Its movement was so weak as to be invisible to the naked eye; one had to direct a telescope at a mirror set up over the needle to see the minuscule oscillations of the movable scale. Hum-boldt's supposition was correct: the earth's field fluctuated, its strength altered periodically. But Gauss was measuring in shorter intervals than he had, he was measuring more accurately, and naturally he measured better; it amused him that it had eluded Humboldt that one had to take into account the stretching of the thread from which the needle was suspended.

Gauss observed the movement by the light of an oil lamp for hour after hour. No sound penetrated to him. Just as the balloon flight with Pilatre long ago had shown him what s.p.a.ce was, at some point now he would understand the restlessness in the heart of Nature. One didn't need to clamber up mountains or torment oneself in the jungle. Whoever observed the needle was looking into the interior of the world. Sometimes his thoughts turned to his family. He missed Eugen, and Minna hadn't been well since the boy was not there. His youngest would soon finish school. He wasn't particularly intelligent either, and certainly wouldn't become a student. One had to accept it, one must not overestimate people. At least he was getting on better and better with Weber, and just recently a Russian mathematician had sent him a paper in which the supposition was laid out that Euclid's geometry was not the true geometry, and parallel lines did meet. Since he had written back to say that none of these ideas was new to him, he was considered in Russia to be a pretender.

At the thought that others would make public things he had known for so long, he felt an unaccustomed stab of pain. So he had had to reach this age before he learned what ambition was. Now and again, as he stared at the needle without daring to breathe, so as not to disturb its silent dance, he saw himself as a magus from the dark ages, like an alchemist in an engraving. But why not? The Scientia Nova Scientia Nova had come out of magic, and some whiff of that would always remain. had come out of magic, and some whiff of that would always remain.

Carefully he unfolded the map of Russia. What needed to be done was to distribute huts like this one all across the wastes of Siberia, to be inhabited by reliable men who understood how to pay attention to instruments, spend hour after hour in front of telescopes, and lead a silent, watchful existence. Humboldt was good at organizing things, probably he could handle this too, Gauss thought. As he finished the list of the designated statistics, his youngest son tore open the door and brought him a letter. Wind shot in, papers flew through the air, the needle erupted in panicked movements, and Gauss boxed the child's ears twice with a force he would not forget in a hurry. Only after a half hour of sitting still and waiting had the compa.s.s settled sufficiently for Gauss to dare make a movement and open the letter. Plans would have to be changed, wrote Humboldt, he couldn't do anything he wished, a route had been prescribed, and he didn't think it sensible to deviate from it, he could measure along it but nowhere else, and he would try to adjust the calculations accordingly. Gauss laid aside the letter, smiling sadly. For the first time he felt sorry for Humboldt.

In Moscow everything came to a halt. It was quite impossible, said the mayor, that his honored guest should set out again right away. Whether it was a suitable time of year or not was neither here nor there, society awaited him, he simply could not deny Moscow what he had granted to St. Petersburg. So here, too, every evening, while Rose and Ehrenberg collected rock samples in the vicinity, Humboldt had to attend a dinner; toasts were offered, men in evening dress waved their gla.s.ses and cried Vivat, and trumpeters blew their instruments out of tune, and someone was always enquiring sympathetically if Humboldt didn't feel well. Of course he did, he replied and watched the setting sun, it was just that he'd never been fond of music and did it really have to be so loud?

It took weeks before he was given permission to set out for the Urals. Even more escorts had attached themselves, and it took an entire day for all the coaches to be made ready for the journey.

It was beyond belief, said Humboldt to Ehrenberg, he would not tolerate it, this was no expedition any longer!

One couldn't always do as one wished, was Rose's contribution.

And besides, asked Ehrenberg, what was the drawback? They were all clever, honorable people, they could relieve him of any work that was perhaps too much for him. Humboldt flushed with anger. But before he could say anything, the coaches started moving and his answer was submerged in the squeaking of wheels and the clattering of hooves.

At Nizhni Novgorod he established the breadth of the Volga with his s.e.xtant. For half an hour he stared through the eyepiece, swiveled the alidade, and murmured calculations. The escort watched respectfully. It was, said Volodin to Rose, as if they were experiencing a journey in time, as if they'd been transported into a history book, it was sublime. It made him want to cry!

Finally Humboldt announced that the river was five thousand two hundred and forty point seven feet wide.

But of course it was, said Rose soothingly.

Two hundred and forty point nine, to be exact, said Ehren-berg. But he had to admit it was a pretty good result given how old the method was.

In the city Humboldt was given salt, bread, and a golden key, was named an honorary citizen, had to listen to the offerings of a children's choir and partic.i.p.ate in fourteen official and twenty-one unofficial private receptions before they were allowed onto a guard boat to sail up the Volga. At Kazan he insisted on carrying out magnetic measurements. He had the iron-free tent set up on open land, asked for quiet, crawled into it, and attached the compa.s.s to the prespecified suspension system. It took him longer than usual, because his hands were trembling, and the wind had started to make his eyes water. The needle swung hesitantly, steadied itself, held still for several minutes, then began to swing again. Humboldt thought of Gauss, a sixth of the earth's circ.u.mference away, who was doing the same thing. The poor man had never seen anything of the world. Humboldt gave a melancholy smile, suddenly he was feeling sorry for Gauss. Rose tapped on the surface of the tent from outside and asked if possibly things might go a little faster.

As they continued on their way they pa.s.sed a column of convict women, escorted by mounted lancers. Humboldt wanted to halt and talk to them.

Out of the question, said Rose.

Completely unthinkable, Ehrenberg agreed. He banged on the roof and the coach moved off; within minutes their cloud of dust had swallowed up the column.

In Perm, as was now the routine, Ehrenberg and Rose set themselves to gathering rocks while Humboldt dined with the governor. The governor had four brothers, eight sons, five daughters, twenty-seven grandchildren, and nine greatgrandchildren, along with an indeterminate number of cousins. They were all there and wanted to hear stories about the land across the sea. He didn't know anything, said Humboldt, he could barely remember, he would really like to go to bed.

Next morning he gave instructions for the collection to be divided: they needed two of every sample, which had to be transported separately.

But they'd been working with divided collections for years, said Rose.

All along, said Ehrenberg.

No sensible scientist did it any other way, said Rose. Everyone was familiar with Humboldt's writings.

They reached Ekaterinburg. The merchant with whom Humboldt was provided lodging had a beard, like everyone here, and wore a long tunic and a sash. When Humboldt returned home late in the evening from the mayor's reception, his host wanted to drink with him. Humboldt declined, the man began to sob like a child, smote his breast, and cried in terrible French that he was wretched, wretched, wretched, and he wanted to die.

Well all right, said Humboldt unhappily, but just one gla.s.s!

The vodka made Humboldt so ill that he had to spend two days in bed. For reasons no one could fathom, the administration set a Cossack guard in front of the house, and two officers were not to be deterred from spending the nights snoring in one corner of his room.

When he was able to get up again, Ehrenberg, Rose, and Volodin took him to an open goldmine. The captain of the mine, named Ossipov, was occupied with the question of what could be done against seepage. He took Humboldt into a flooded tunnel: the water was hip-deep and it stank of mold. Humboldt looked down mistrustfully at his sodden trouser legs.

It needed to be better pumped!