He remembered following Dr. Sullivan and Tom Compton to a wharfside tavern where brown beer was served in steins made from the boles of dried flute reeds. The steins were porous and would begin to leak if you let them sit too long. It encouraged a style of drinking not conducive to clarity of thought. There had been food, too, a Darwinian fish draped across the plate like a limp black stingray. It tasted of salt and mud; Guilford ate sparingly.
They argued about the expedition. The frontiersman was scornful, insisting the journey was only an excuse to show the flag and express American claims to the hinterland. “You said yourself, this man Finch is an idiot.”
“He’s a clergyman, not a scientist; he just doesn’t know the difference. But he’s no idiot. He rescued three men from the water at Cataract Canyon — carried a man with double pleurisy safely to Lee’s Ferry. That was ten years ago, but I’m sure he’d do the same tomorrow. He planned and provisioned this expedition and I would trust him with my life.”
“Follow him into the deep country, you are trusting him with your life.”
“So I am. I couldn’t ask for a better companion. I could ask for a better scientist — but even there, Finch has his uses. There’s a certain climate of opinion in Washington that frowns on science in generaclass="underline" we couldn’t predict and can’t explain the Miracle, and in certain people’s minds that’s the next thing to responsibility. Idols with feet of clay fare badly in the public budget. But we can hold up Finch to Congress as a sterling example of so-called reverential science, not a threat to home or pulpit. We go to the hinterland, we learn a few things — and frankly, the more we learn, the shakier Finch’s academic position becomes.”
“You’re being used. Like Donnegan. Sure, you collect a few samples. But the money people want to know how far the Partisans have come, whether there’s coal in the Ruhr valley or iron in Lorraine…”
“And if we reconnoiter the Partisans or spot some anthracite — does it matter? These things will happen whether we cross the Alps or not. At least this way we gain a little knowledge from the bargain.”
Tom Compton turned to Guilford. “Sullivan thinks this continent is a riddle he can solve. That’s a brave and stupid idea.”
Sullivan persisted. “You’ve been farther inland than most trappers, Tom.”
“Not as far as all that.”
“You know what to expect.”
“Go far enough, no one knows what to expect.”
“Still, you’ve had experience.”
“More than you.”
“Your skills would be invaluable.”
“I have better things to do.”
They drank in silence for a while. Another round of beer gave the conversation a philosophical bent. The frontiersman confronted Guilford, his weathered brown face ferocious as a bear’s muzzle. “Why are you here, Mr. Law?”
“I’m a photographer,” Guilford said. He wished he had his camera with him; he wanted to photograph Tom Compton. This sun-wrinkled, beard-engulfed wild animal.
“I know what you do,” the frontiersman said. “Why are you here?”
To further his career. To make a name for himself. To bring back images trapped in glass and silver, of river pools and mountain meadows no human eye had seen. “I don’t know,” he heard himself say. “Curiosity, I guess.”
Tom Compton squinted at Guilford as if he had confessed to leprosy. “People come here to get away from something, Mr. Law, or to hunt for something. To make a little money or maybe even, like Sullivan here, to learn something. But the I don’t knows — those are the dangerous ones.”
One other memory came to Guilford as he was lulled to sleep by the rocking of Argus on the rising tide: Sullivan and Tom Compton talking about the back country, the frontiersman full of warnings: the new continent’s rivers had cut their own beds, not always according to the old maps, the wildlife was dangerous, the forage so difficult that without provisions you might as well be crossing a desert. There were unnamed fevers, often fatal. And as for crossing the Alps: well, Tom said, some few trappers and hunters had thought of crossing by the old St. Gothard route; it wasn’t a new idea. But tales came back, ghost stories, rumors — plain nonsense, Sullivan said scornfully — and maybe so, but enough to make a sane man reconsider… which excludes you, Sullivan said, and Tom grinned hugely and said, you too, you old madman, leaving Guilford to wonder what unspoken agreement had been reached between the two men and what might be waiting for them in the deep interior of this huge and chartless land.
Chapter Six
England at last, Colin Watson thought: but it wasn’t really England at all, was it? The Canadian cargo vessel steamed up the broad estuary of the Thames, its prow cutting into tidal waters the color of green tea: tropical, at least this time of year. Like visiting Bombay or Bihar. Certainly not like coming home.
He thought of the cargo rocking in the holds below. Coal from South Africa, India, Australia, a precious commodity in this age of rebellion and the fraying Empire. Tools and dies from Canada. And hundreds of crated Lee-Enfield rifles from the factory in Alberta, all bound for Kitchener’s Folly, New London, making a safe place in the wilderness, for the day when an English king was restored to an English throne.
The rifles were Watson’s responsibility. As soon as the ship was moored at the primitive docks he ordered his men — a few Sikhs and grumbling Canadians — to cinch and lift the pallets, while he went ashore to sign manifests for the Port Authority. The heat was stifling, and this crude wooden town was not by any stretch of the imagination London. And yet to be here brought home the reality of the Conversion of Europe, which for Watson had been a faraway event, as strange and as inherently implausible as a fairy tale, except that so many had indisputably died.
Certainly this wasn’t the country he had sailed from a decade ago. He had graduated from public school without merit and taken training from the Officer Corps at Woolwich: exchanged one barracks for another, Latin declensions for artillery maneuvers. In his naïveté he had expected G.A. Henty, a dignified heroism, Ndebele rebels fleeing the point of his sword. He had arrived instead at a dusty barracks in Cairo overseeing a rabble of bored infantrymen, until that night when the sky lit up with coruscating fire and the quaking earth shook down the British Protectorate in Egypt, among so many other things. An aimless enough life, but there had been the consolations of friendship and strong drink or, more tenuously, of God and Country, until 1912 made it clear that God was a cipher and that if He existed at all He must surely have despised the English.
Britain’s remaining military power had been concentrated on shoring up her possessions in India and South Africa. Southern Rhodesia had fallen, Salisbury burning like an autumn bonfire; Egypt and Sudan were lost to the Moslem rebels. Watson had been rescued from the hostile ruins of Cairo and placed on a hideously crowded troop transport bound for Canada. He spent months in a relocation barracks in the tall-timber country of British Columbia, was transferred at last to a prairie town where Kitchener’s government-in-exile had established a small-arms factory.
He hadn’t been an exceptional officer before 1912. Had he changed, or had the Army changed around him? He excelled as a sort of Officer Corps shop steward; lived monkishly, survived bitter winters and dry, enervating summers with a surprising degree of patience. The knowledge that he might as easily have been beheaded by Mahdists enforced a certain humility. Eventually he was ordered to Ottawa, where military engineers were in demand as the reconstruction gathered momentum.