But what is the point of tormenting himself? In the increasing cold he reads over Dr. Hooker’s letters to him, looking for the first signs of disfavor. The letters are imperturbably kind, he can find no hint of where he failed. For comfort he turns, not to the remaining letters in Clara’s trunk — those forward-casting, hopeful exercises make him feel too sad — but instead to the first of her letters to reach him. From those, still brave and cheerful, he works his way into the later ones. A line about Gillian’s colic, and how it lingered; a line about the bugs in the rhubarb: unsaid, all the difficulties that must have surrounded each event. The roof is leaking, the sink is broken, Elizabeth has chicken pox, Clara wrote. Zoe is bearing bravely her broken engagement, but we are all worried about her. What she means is: Where are you, where are you? Why have you left me to face this all alone?
Her packet 16, which failed to reach him in October with the rest of that batch, has finally arrived along with other, more recent letters. In early April she described the gardens, the plague of slugs, the foundling sparrow Elizabeth had adopted, and Gillian’s avid, crawling explorations; the death of a neighbor and the funeral, which she attended with Gideon. Gideon, again. Then something broke through and she wrote what she’d never permitted herself before:
Terrible scenes rise up before my eyes and they are as real as the rest of my life. I look out the window and I see a carriage pull up to the door, a man steps out, he is bearing a black-bordered envelope; I know what is in it, I know. He walks up to the door and I am already crying. He looks down at his shoes. I take the letter from him, I open it; it is come from the government offices in London and I skip over the sentences which attempt to prepare me for the news. I skip to the part in which it says you have died. In the mountains, of an accident. In the plains, of some terrible fever. On a ship which has sunk — I read the sentences again and again — they confirm my worst fears and I grow faint — hope expires in me and yet I will not believe. In the envelope, too, another sheet: The words of someone I have never met, who witnessed your last days. Though I am a stranger to you, it is my sad duty to inform you of a most terrible event. And then a description of whatever befell you; and one more sheet, which is your last letter to me.
You see how I torment myself. I imagine all the things you might write. I imagine, on some days, that you tell me the truth; on others that you lie, to spare my feelings. I imagine you writing, Do not grieve too long, dearest Clara. The cruelest thing, when we think of our loved ones dying in distant lands, is the thought of them dying alone and abandoned, uncared for — but throughout my illness I have had the attentions of kind men. I imagine, I imagine … how can I imagine you alive and well, when I have not heard from you for so long?
I am ashamed of myself for writing this. All over Britain other women wait, patiently, for soldiers and sailors and explorers and merchants — why can’t I? I will try to be stronger. When you read this page, know that it was written by Clara who loves you, in a moment of weakness and despair.
At least that is past now, for her; from her other letters he knows she was finally reassured. But that she suffered like this; that he is only hearing about it now … To whom is she turning for consolation?
Winter drags on. Meetings and work; official appearances and work; squabbles and work. Work. He does what he can, what he must. Part of him wants to rush home to Clara. To give up this job, this place, these ambitions; to sail home at the earliest opportunity and never to travel again. It has all been too much: the complexities and politics, the secrets underlying everything. Until he left England, he thinks now, he had lived in a state of remarkable innocence. Never, not even as a boy, had he been able to fit himself into the world. But he had thought, until recently, that he might turn his back on what he didn’t understand and make his own solitary path. Have his own heroes, pursue his own goals. But if his heroes are spies; if his work is in service of men whose goals led to bloodstained rooms and raining flesh — nothing is left of the world as he once envisioned it.
He wanders the city and its outskirts, keeping an eye out, as he walks, for Dr. Chouteau. He must be here; where else would he spend the winter? Stories of that irascible old man, or of someone like him, surface now and then; often Max has a sense that Dr. Chouteau hides down the next alley, across the next bridge. He hears tales of other travelers as well — Jacquemont and Moorcroft, the Schlagintweit brothers, Thomas Thomson, and the Baron von Hugel. The tales contradict each other, as do those about Dr. Chouteau himself. In one story he is said to be an Irish mercenary, in another an American businessman. Through these distorted lenses Max sees himself as if for the first time, and something happens to him.
That lost man, whose skull he found when he first arrived in the mountains — is this what befell him? As an experiment, Max stops eating. He fasts for three days and confirms what the lost man wrote in his diary: his spirit soars free, everything looks different. His mother is with him often, during that airy, delirious time. Dr. Chouteau strolls through his imagination as well. In a brief break in the flow of Dr. Chouteau’s endless, self-regarding narrative, Max had offered an account of his own experiences up on the glacier. His cold entombment, his lucky escape; he’d been humiliated when Dr. Chouteau laughed and patted his shoulder. A few hours, he said. You barely tasted the truth. I was caught for a week on the Stachen Glacier, in a giant blizzard. There is no harsher place on this earth; it belongs to no one. Which won’t keep people from squabbling over it someday. The men I traveled with died.
When Max hallucinates Dr. Chouteau’s voice emerging from the mouth of a boatwoman arguing with her neighbor, he starts eating again, moving again. The old maps he’s been asked to revise are astonishingly inaccurate. He wanders through narrow lanes overhung by balconies, in and out of a maze of courtyards. The air smells of stale cooking oil, burning charcoal, human excrement. He makes his way back and forth across the seven bridges of Srinagar so often he might be weaving a web. Temples, mosques, the churches of the missionaries; women carrying earthenware pots on their heads; barges and bakeshops and markets piled with rock salt and lentils, bottles of ghee — his wanderings he justifies as being in service to the map, although he also understands that part of what drives him into the biting air is a search for Dr. Chouteau. If Max could find him, if he could ask him some questions, perhaps this unease that has settled over him might lift.
As winter turns into early spring, as he does what he can with his map of the valley and, in response to letters from Dehra Dun, begins preparations for another season up in the mountains, his life spirals within him like the tendril of a climbing plant. One day he sits down, finally, with Laurence’s gift to him and begins working slowly through the lines of Mr. Darwin’s argument. The ideas aren’t unfamiliar to him; as with the news of Cawnpore and the Mutiny, he has heard them summarized, read accounts in the newspapers, discussed the outlines of the theory of descent with modification with Laurence and others. But when he confronts the details and grasps all the strands of the theory, it hits him like the knowledge of the use made of Dr. Hooker’s maps, or the uses that will be made of his own. He scribbles all over the margins. At first he writes to Laurence simply to say: I am reading it. Have you read it? It is marvelous. The world is other than we thought. But a different, more complicated letter begins to unfurl in his mind.