Servants of the Map Read Online Free PDF Page B

and nausea and the most piercing of headaches. I sleep only with difficulty; it is cold at night, and damp. Our fires will not stay lit. But every day brings new additions to our map, and new sketches of the topography: you will be proud of me, I am becoming quite the draughtsman. And I manage to continue with my other work as well. I keep in mind Hooker’s travails in Nepal and Sikkim: how, in the most difficult of circumstances, he made excellent and detailed observations of his surroundings. I keep in mind Godfrey Vigne, and all he managed to note. Also a man I did not tell you about before, whose diary passed through my hands: how clearly he described his travels, despite his difficulties! By this discipline, and by my work, I hold myself together.
    This week my party climbed a peak some 21,000 feet high. We were not the first ones here: awaiting us was the station the strongest and most cunning of the triangulators built last season. I have not met him, he remainsan almost mythical creature. But I occupied his heap of stones with pride. He triangulated all the high peaks visible from here and the map I have made from this outline, the curves of the glaciers and the jagged valleys, the passes and the glacial lakes—Clara, how I wish you could see it! It is the best thing I have ever done and the pains of my body are nothing.
    I have learned something, these past few months. Something important. On the descent from such a peak, I have learned, I can see almost nothing: by then I am so worn and battered that my eyes and mind no longer work correctly; often I have a fever, I can maintain no useful train of thought, I might as well be blind.
    On my first ascents, before I grasped this, I would make some notes on the way up but often I would skip things, thinking I would observe more closely on the way down. Now I note
everything
on the way up. As we climbed this giant peak I kept a note-book and pencil tied to my jacket pocket and most of the time had them right in my hand: I made note of every geological feature, every bit of vegetation or sign of a passing animal; I noted the weather as it changed over the climb, the depth of the snow, the movements of the clouds. This record—these records, I do this now with every ascent—will I think be invaluable to subsequent travelers. When I return I plan to share them with Dr. Hooker and whoever else is interested.
    It’s an odd thing, though, that there is not much pleasure in the actual recording. Although I am aware, distantly, that I often move through scenes of great beauty, I can’t
feel
that as I climb; all is lost in giddiness and headache and the pain of moving my limbs and drawing breath. But a few days after I descend to a lower altitude, when my body has begun to repair itself—then I look at the notes I made during my hours of misery and find great pleasure in
them.
It is odd, isn’t it? That all one’s pleasures here are retrospective; in the moment itself, there is only the moment, and the pain.
    I must go. A messenger from Michaels came by the camp this morning with new instructions and leaves soon to contact three other parties; if Iput this into his hands it will find its way down the glacier, out of the mountains, over the passes. To you.
    After relinquishing the letter to Michaels’s messenger, he thinks:
What use was that?
For all those words about his work, he has said little of what he really meant. How will Clara know who he is these days, if he hides both his worries and his guilty pleasures? He still hasn’t told her about the gift he bought for himself. A collecting box, like a candle box only flatter, in which to place fresh specimens. A botanical press, with a heap of soft drying paper, to prepare the best of his specimens for an herbarium; and a portfolio in which to lay them out, twenty inches by twelve, closed with a sturdy leather strap and filled with sheets of thin, smooth, unsized paper. Always he has been a man of endless small