Where is my hotel? Shouldn’t I have reached it by now? My surroundings are completely unfamiliar to me. Nothing remotely like where I’m staying. There aren’t even any shops around here. Dead to the world, this neighbourhood, an unlikely place for a hotel. From my inside pocket I take the small street map I found in my room last night.
I’ve been going in the wrong direction! I always get lost, always. How many times haven’t I lost my way in foreign cities?
It takes me another hour to locate my hotel, and still it isn’t dark. Back in my room, I order a whisky. Sorry, sir, not allowed. As a last resort I drain a large glass of water, sit down at the small bureau and, with my mouth opening and shutting like a fish out of water, I scrawl on the back of the ski tower postcard:
Dear Professor Sibbelee, a quick greeting from the North, although not yet the High North. I met Professor Nummedal this morning; he asked me to convey his best regards to you.
I am very grateful for this valuable introduction. Professor Nummedal gave me a warm welcome and took the trouble to take me on an instructive tour of the environs of Oslo!
For the aerial photographs he directed me to the Geological Survey in Trondheim.
Alfred I.
The only space left for my signature is in the bottom left-hand corner, and I consider it a lucky twist of fate that there is no room for the rest of my surname.
7
Scandinavian countries have numerous qualities to recommend them, one of them being the strength of their sanitary installations.
The shower is a bristle brush of water. I stay under it for a long time, as if I could slough off the entire wasted day. Start all over again. But when finally I turn off the taps, I ask myself: Was it really a wasted day? Maybe Nummedal’s intentions were good. Maybe he genuinely tried to obtain the aerial photographs for me, without success, and simply wanted to make up for it by taking me on that tour. Maybe telling me to go to Trondheim was the best advice. Maybe his gruffness was due to embarrassment at not keeping his promise to Sibbelee.
I return to the bedroom dripping wet, twiddle the knobs on my transistor radio. I can actually receive a Dutch station here. Let me see. There’s someone talking into a microphone.
It’s a professor of physics, giving a lecture. Fascinating Facts from the World of Science and Technology — in terms comprehensible to the layman.
Sounding a note on the flute, he says, requires an air speed of a hundred and twenty-five kilometres per hour.
*
What was that? A hundred and twenty-five kilometres per hour? That’s hurricane force. I have that kind of figure on tap, promising young scientist that I am.
You need to blast the air with your mouth at a speed of a hundred and twenty-five kilometres per hour for the flute to produce a sound.
I never realised that, and yet I played a fair number of flutes between the ages of seven and fourteen.
My first flute was a plain celluloid instrument. I could play the national anthem on my flute, but one day I held a magnifying glass to it to find out whether it would burn. It caught fire, I dropped it on the floor, the flames went out for lack of fuel, but my mother was deeply shocked. She gave me a recorder made of ebony. Not long afterwards I found out that the flutes they played in real orchestras were of the transverse type. My mother said transverse flutes were very expensive, too expensive. That was long after my father died, but my grandfather was still alive, and he gave me a flute he had played himself as a boy. A big transverse flute with six openings and eight valves. It was made up of four segments screwed together end to end, with rings of ivory marking the joins.
First we’ll see how you get on by yourself, then I’ll decide if it’s worth your having flute lessons.
I wanted to be a flautist, a professional flautist in a big orchestra. My mother didn’t like to say no, but she was not pleased with my chosen career.
It was six months before I was able to get any sound out of the big transverse flute. At the market I bought an old book of flute studies. By the age of fourteen I was playing quite well, but then I made a fatal discovery. The flutes they played in real orchestras were quite different from the one I had. They were so-called Böhm flutes, a variety invented by one Theobald Böhm, and they didn’t have six openings and eight valves like mine. The technique was quite different, too. My flute wasn’t even good enough for the school orchestra. I asked my mother, who seldom refused me anything, to buy me a proper Böhm flute. But my mother said: ‘Do you know you’ll have to start again from scratch? And I hope you realise that people don’t become world famous for playing the flute. The violin, yes, or the piano. Flautists mostly play the accompaniment in big orchestras. It’s the best they can hope for, and even then all they get to do is perform music they didn’t compose themselves.’
Her last point tipped the balance. I took to collecting rocks, because becoming a biologist like my father did not appeal to me. Instead of a flautist I would be a scientist.
And, yet, in all those years playing the flute I never stopped to consider the speed of the air passing through it, let alone how that speed might be measured.
Water in my ears, a towel over my hands, I stand there, shamefaced. An enquiring mind seeks to measure and count.
I have even made a habit of counting my paces, in imitation of Buys Ballot, who formulated Buys Ballot’s law. (If a person stands with his back to the wind in the northern hemisphere, the area of low pressure is found to his left.)
Wind … but it was someone else who had the idea of measuring the wind passing through a flute. Not me.
Just as I’m about to change the station on the transistor, the professor observes that the speed of the air current in whistles was calculated by Christiaan Huygens — all of three hundred years ago.
I switch off the radio and climb into bed. I can’t get to sleep. At this extreme northern latitude the sun doesn’t go down far enough. The windows are blacked out with curtains, but It’s impossible to forget the daylight outside.
At half past four I’m still awake. The bus from the S.A.S. office to the airport leaves at eight. If I fall asleep now, I may not wake up in time. But I don’t fall asleep.
At five I give up and get out of bed, open the curtains and take another shower. By the end I feel drowsier than before, but there isn’t much point in lying down again. Naked, I sit on my bed and consider. I decide I might as well pack my suitcase now, and go over the contents of my rucksack again.
Hiking shoes, hammer, sleeping bag, water flask, mug, new notebook, camera, films, the geological compass Eva gave me in my first year at university. It’s quite large, with a rectangular base, precision degree scale, sights, clinometer, spirit level and mirror.
I snap it open and peer at my reflection. Eva had said the mirror made it a funny sort of present. She had said: ‘I didn’t know geology was a science that makes you look in the mirror all the time.’
She was twelve at the time, my little sister.
Not only was she the first person in my experience to define geology thus, she was quite right where I was concerned.
Over the years I must have taken the compass from its case ten times more often for a quick glance in the mirror than for taking measurements.