Servants of the Map Read Online Free PDF

through a merchant’s hands, or a branch of the military: hand to hand to hand, to a ship, or several ships, and the hazards of weather and human carelessness every inch of the way … My dear, you must keep these accidents in mind, when you worry about me. It grieves me to think of your suffering. Remember the promise we made to each other, to consider not just the accidents that might happen to us, but to our correspondence. Remember how tough I am. How prudent.
    Thank you for the story about Elizabeth and the garden. I love to think about the three of you, bundled up and watching the birds as they flick within the branches of the hedgerow. Gillian in your arms, Elizabethdarting along the hawthorns, pursuing the sparrows: these glimpses of your life together keep me going. If you knew how much I miss you … but I have promised myself I will write
sensibly.
I want you to think of me as I am, as you have always known me, and not as a stranger perpetually complaining. I’m glad Mrs. Moore’s nephew—Gideon?—has been so helpful during his stay with his aunt and has been able to solve the problem with the drains. When next you see him, please tell him I am grateful. Do you see him often.?
    I received with the letters from you and our family two more letters from Dr. Hooker. He
has
received mail from me, from as late as April; how is it my letters are reaching him but not you? When I get home I will let you read what he writes, you will find it fascinating. He is in touch with botanists and collectors all over the world; involved with so many projects and yet still he takes the time to encourage an amateur such as myself. On his own journey, he said, as he climbed from the
terai
to the snowline he traversed virtually the entire spectrum of the world’s flora, from the leech-infested, dripping jungle to the tiny lichens of the Tibetan plateau. I have a similar opportunity, he says. If I am wise enough to take it. I copy for you here a little paragraph, which he included with questions about what is growing where, and requests for a series of measurements of temperature and altitude.
    “When still a child,” he writes, “my father used to take me on excursions in the Highlands, where I fished a good deal, but also botanized; and well I remember on one occasion, that, after returning home, I built up by a heap of stones a representation of one of the mountains I had ascended, and stuck upon it specimens of the mosses I had collected, at heights relative to those at which I had gathered them. This was the dawn of my love for geographical botany. It pleases me greatly that, though you have started your botanizing as a grown man, you may come to share a similar passion.”
    Is that not a lovely tale? The mountain was small, by our standardshere, less than 4,000 feet. He has been very encouraging of my efforts and with his help I have set myself a study plan, as if I’m at university. I would like to make myself
worthy;
worthy to write to such a man as Dr. Hooker, and receive a response. Worthy of seeking an answer to the question that now occupies everyone: how the different forms of life have reached their present habitats. When else will I have a chance like this?
    What draws me to these men and their writings is not simply their ideas but the way they defend each other so vigorously and are so firmly bound. Hooker, standing up for Darwin at Oxford and defending his dear friend passionately. Gray, in America, championing Darwin in a series of public debates and converting the world of American science one resistant mind at a time. Our group here is very different. Although the work gets done—the work always gets done, the maps accumulate—I have found little but division and quarrels and bad behavior.
    You may find my handwriting difficult to decipher; I have suffered much from snow-blindness. And a kind of generalized mountain sickness as well. We are so high, almost all the time; the smallest effort brings on fatigue