All the men who’ve explored these mountains—what a secret, isolated world this is! A kind of archipelago, sparsely populated, visited now and again by passing strangers; each hidden valley an island unto itself, inhabited by small groups of people wildly distinct from each other—it is as if, at home, a day’s journey in one direction brought us to Germany, another’s to Africa. As if, in the distance between the fens and the moors, there were twenty separate kingdoms. I have more to tell you, so much more, but it is late and I must sleep.
What doesn’t he tell Clara? So much, so much. The constant discomforts of the body, the hardships of the daily climbs, the exhaustion, the loneliness: he won’t reveal the things that would worry her. He restrains himself, a constant battle; the battle itself another thing he doesn’t write about. He hasn’t said a word about the way his fellow surveyors tease him. His youth, his chunky, short-legged frame and terribly white skin; the mop of bright yellow hair on his head and the paucity of it elsewhere: although he keeps up with the best of them, and is often the last to tire, he is ashamed each time they strip their clothes to bathe in a freezing stream or a glacial tarn. His British companions are tall and hairy, browning in the sun; the Indians and Kashmiris and Baltis smoother and slighter but dark; he alone looks like a figure made from snow. The skin peels off his nose until he bleeds. When he extends his hat brim with strips of bark, in an effort to fend off the burning rays, Michaels asks him why he doesn’t simply use a parasol.
Michaels himself is thickly pelted, fleshy and sweaty, strong-smelling and apparently impervious to the sun. They have all grown beards, shaving is impossible; only Max’s is blond and sparse. He gets teased for this and sometimes, more cruelly, for the golden curls around his genitals. Not since he was fourteen, when he first left school and began his apprenticeship on the railway survey, has he been so mocked. Then he had his older brother, Laurence, to protect him. But here he is on his own.
The men are amused not only by his looks, but by his box of books and by the pretty, brass-bound trunk that holds Clara’s precious gift to him: a long series of letters, some written by her and others begged from their family and friends. The first is dated the week after he left home, the last more than a year hence; all are marked to be opened on certain dates and anniversaries. Who but Clara would have thought of this? Who else would have had the imagination to project herself into the future, sensing what he might feel like a week, a month, a year from leaving home and writing what might comfort him then?
His companions have not been so lucky. Some are single; others married but to wives they seem not to miss or perhaps are even relieved to have left behind. A Yorkshireman named Wyatt stole one of Clara’s missives from Max’s camp stool, where he’d left it while fetching a cup of tea. “Listen to this,” Wyatt said: laughing, holding the letter above Max’s head and reading aloud to the entire party. “Max, you must wear your woolly vest, you know how cold you get.” Now the men ask tauntingly, every day, what he’s read from the trunk. He comforts himself by believing that they’re jealous.
A more reliable comfort is his box of books. In it, beyond the mathematical and cartographical texts he needs for his work, are three other gifts. With money she’d saved from the household accounts, Clara bought him a copy of Joseph Hooker’s Himalayan Journals. This Max cherishes for the thought behind it, never correcting her misapprehension that Sikkim, where Hooker traveled in 1848, is only a stone’s throw from where Max is traveling now. At home, with a map, he might have put his left thumb on the Karakoram range and his right, many inches away to the east, on the lands that Hooker explored: both almost equally far from England, yet still far apart themselves. Clara might have smiled—despite her interest in Max’s work, geography sometimes eludes her—but that last evening passed in such a flurry that all he managed to do was to thank her. For his brother Laurence, who gave him a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, he’d had only the same hurried thanks. On the flyleaf, Laurence had written: “New ideas, for your new life. Think of me as you read this; I will be reading my own copy in your absence and we can write to each other about what we learn.”
Repeatedly Max has tried to keep up his end of this joint endeavor, only to be frustrated by the book’s difficulty. For now he has set it aside in favor of a more unexpectedly useful gift. Clara’s brother, far away in the city of New York, works as an assistant librarian and sometimes sends extra copies of the books he receives to catalog. “Not of much interest to me,” he wrote to Max, forwarding Asa Gray’s Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology. “But I know you and Clara like to garden, and to look at flowers in the woods—and I thought perhaps you would enjoy this.”
At first, finding his companions uncongenial, Max read out of boredom and loneliness. Later Gray’s manual captured him. The drawings at the back, the ferns and grasses and seedpods and spore capsules: how lovely these are! As familiar as his mother’s eyes; as distant as the fossilized ferns recently found in the Arctic. As a boy he’d had a passion for botany: a charmed few years of learning plants and their names before the shock of his mother’s death, his father’s long decline, the necessity of going out, so young, to earn a living and help care for his family. Now he has a family of his own. Work of his own, as well, which he is proud of. But the illustrations draw him back to a time when the differences between a hawkweed and a dandelion could fascinate him for hours.
Charmed by the grasses of the Deosai plateau, he begins to dip into Dr. Hooker’s book as well. Here too he finds much of interest. When he feels lost, when all he’s forgotten or never knew about simple botany impedes his understanding, he marks his place with a leaf or a stem and turns back to Gray’s manual. At home, he thinks, after he’s safely returned, he and Clara can wander the fields as they did in the days of their courtship, this time understanding more clearly what they see and teaching these pleasures to their children. He copies passages into his notebook, meaning to share them with her:
Lesson I. BOTANY AS A BRANCH OF NATURAL HISTORY
The Organic World, is the world of organized beings. These consist of organs., of parts which go to make up an individual, a being. And each individual owes its existence to a preceding one like itself, that is, to a parent. It was not merely formed, but produced. At first small and imperfect, it grows and develops by powers of its own; it attains maturity, becomes old, and finally dies. It was formed of inorganic or mineral matter, that is, of earth and air, indeed; but only of this matter under the influence of life; and after life departs, sooner or later, it is decomposed into earth and air again.
He reads, and makes notes, and reads some more. The Himalayan Journals, he has noticed, are “Dedicated to Charles Darwin by his affectionate friend, Joseph Dalton Hooker.” What lives those men lead: far-flung, yet always writing to each other and discussing their ideas. Something else he hasn’t told Clara is this: before leaving Srinagar, in a shop he entered meaning only to buy a new spirit level, he made an uncharacteristically impulsive purchase. A botanical collecting outfit, charming and neat; he could not resist it although he wasn’t sure, then, what use he’d make of it. But on the Deosai plateau he found, after a windstorm, an unusual primrose flowering next to a field of snow. He pressed it, mounted it—not very well, he’s still getting the hang of this—and drew it; then, in a fit of boldness, wrote about it to Dr. Hooker, care of his publisher in England. “The willows and stonecrops are remarkable,” he added. “And I am headed higher still; might the lichens and mosses here be of some interest to you?” He doesn’t expect that Dr. Hooker will write back to him.
In his tent made from blankets, with a candle casting yellow light on the pages, Max pauses over a drawing of a mallow. About his mother, who died when he was nine, he remembers little. In a coffin she lay, hands folded over her black bombazine dress, face swollen and unrecognizable. When he was five or six, still in petticoats, she guided him through the marshes. Her pale hands, so soon to be stilled, plucked reeds and weeds