You may find my handwriting difficult to decipher; I have suffered much from snow-blindness. And a kind of generalized mountain sickness as well. We are so high, almost all the time; the smallest effort brings on fatigue 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 remains an 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 I put 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 economies, saving every penny of his pay, after the barest necessities, for Clara in England. He has denied himself warm clothes, extra blankets, the little treats of food and drink on which the other surveyors squandered their money in Srinagar, and before. But this one extravagance he couldn’t resist: not a dancing girl, not a drunken evening’s carouse, but still he is ashamed.
A different kind of shame has kept him from writing about the doubts that plague his sleepless nights. He knows so little, really — why does he think his observations might be useful? He ought to be content with the knowledge that the work he does each day is solid, practical, strong; these maps will stand for years. In Dehra Dun, and in Calcutta and back in England, copyists and engravers will render from his soiled rough maps clean and permanent versions. In a year the Series will be complete: Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and Baltistan, caught in a net of lines; a topographical triumph. Still he longs to make some contribution more purely his.
He dreams of a different kind of map, in shades of misty green. Where the heads of the Survey see the boundaries of states and tribes, here the watershed between India and China, there a plausible boundary for Kashmir, he sees plants, each kind in a range bounded by soil and rainfall and altitude and temperature. And it is this — the careful delineation of the boundaries of those ranges, the subtle links between them — that has begun to interest him more than anything else. Geographical botany, Dr. Hooker said. What grows where. Primulas up to this level, no higher; deodar here, stonecrops and rock jasmines giving way to lichens. Why do rhododendrons grow in Sikkim and not here? He might spend his life in the search for an answer.
When he and his crew gather with the other small parties, he’s reminded that no one shares his interests — at night his companions argue about the ebb and flow of politics, not plant life. The Sikh Wars and the annexation of the Punjab, the administration of Lord Dalhousie, the transfer of power from the East India Company to the Crown, the decisions of the regional revenue officers — it is embarrassing, how little all this interests him. Among the surveyors are military men who have served in the Burmese War, or in Peshawar; who survived the Mutiny or, in various mountains, that stormy year when supplies to the Survey were interrupted and bands of rebels entered Kashmir. He ought to find their stories fascinating. Germans and Russians and Turks and Chinese, empires clashing; Dogras and Sikhs, spies and informants — currents no one understands, secrets it might take a lifetime to unravel. Yet of all this, two stories only have stayed with him.
The first he heard on a snow bench carved in a drift on a ridge, from an Indian chainman who’d served for a while in the Bengal army, and who worked as Max’s assistant for two weeks, and then disappeared. They were resting. The chainman was brewing tea. At Lahore, he said, his regiment had been on the verge of mutiny. On a June night in 1857, one of the spies the suspicious British officers had planted within the regiment reported to the brigadier that the sepoys planned an uprising the following day. That night, when the officers ordered a regimental inspection, they found two sepoys with loaded muskets.