There was a court-martial, the chainman said. He told the story quietly, as if he’d played no part in it; he had been loyal, he said. Simply an observer. Indian officers had convicted the two sepoys and sentenced them to death. “There was a parade,” the chainman said. His English was very good, the light lilting accent at odds with the tale he told. “A formal parade. We stood lined up on three sides of a square. On the fourth side were two cannon. The sepoys—”
“Did you know them?” Max had asked.
“I knew both of them, I had tried to talk them out of their plan. They were … The officers lashed those two men over the muzzles of the cannons. Then they fired.”
Below them the mountains shone jagged and white, clean and untenanted. Nearby were other Englishmen, and other Indians, working in apparent harmony in this landscape belonging to neither. Yet all this had happened only six years ago.
“There was nothing left of them,” the chainman said. He rose and kicked snow into the fire; the kettle he emptied and packed tidily away. “Parts of them came down like rain, bits of bone and flesh, shreds of uniforms. Some of us were sprinkled with their blood.”
“I …” Max had murmured. What could he say? “A terrible thing.” The chainman returned to work, leaving Max haunted and uneasy.
The other story was this, which Michaels encouraged a triangulator to tell one night when three different surveying teams gathered in a valley to plan their tasks for the next few weeks. An Indian atrocity to match the British one: Cawnpore, a month after the incident reported by the chainman. Of course Max had heard of the massacre of women and children there. No one in England had escaped that news, nor the public frenzy that followed. But Michaels’s gruff, hard-drinking companion, who in 1857 had been with a unit of the Highlanders, told with relish certain details the newspaper hadn’t printed.
“If you had seen the huts,” said Michaels’s friend: Archdale, Max thought his name was. Or maybe Archvale. “A hundred and twenty women and children escaped the first massacre on the riverboats — the mutineers rounded them up and kept them in huts. We arrived not long after they were butchered. I saw those huts, they looked like cages where a pack of wild animals had been set loose among their prey.”
“Tell about the shoes,” Michaels had called from the other side of the fire. All the men were drinking; Michaels had had a case of brandy carried in from Srinagar. His face was dark red, sweating, fierce. That night, as always, he ignored Max almost completely.
“The shoes,” Archdale said. He emptied his glass and leaned forward, face shining in the firelight. “Picture this,” he said. “I go into one hut and the walls are dripping with blood, the floor smeared, the smell unthinkable. Flies buzzing so loudly I thought I’d go mad. Against one wall is a row of women’s shoes, running with blood, draped with bits of clothing.” The Indian chainmen and the Baiti porters were gathered around their separate fires, not far away. Could they hear Archdale? Max wondered. Was it possible Archdale would say these things within earshot of them? “Against the other wall, a row of children’s shoes, so small, just like those our children wear at home. And”—he leaned farther forward here—“do you know what was in them?”
No one answered. Was Gillian wearing shoes yet? “What?” Max said, unable to stop himself.
“Feet!” Archdale roared. “Feet! Those filthy animals, those swine, they had lopped off the children’s feet. We found the bodies in the well.”
That terrible story had set off others; the night had been like a night in hell; Max had fled the campfire soon after Archdale’s tirade and rolled himself in a blanket in a hollow, far from everyone, carved into the rocky cliffs. When he woke he’d been surprised not to find the campground littered with bodies.
Since hearing those tales he has wondered how there could be so much violence on both sides; and how, after that, Englishmen and Indians could be up in these mountains working so calmly together. How can he make sense of an empire founded on such things? Nothing, he thought after hearing those stories. And still thinks. I understand nothing.
Dr. Hooker wrote at great length, in a letter Max didn’t mention to Clara, about the problems of packing botanical collections for the journey home: the weight, the costs; the necessity of using Ward’s cases; the crating of tree ferns and the boats to be hired. How kind he was, to take such trouble in writing to Max, and to warn him of these potential hazards! And yet how little Dr. Hooker understands Max’s own situation. There is no possibility of paying for such things without depriving Clara and his daughters. His collections are limited to the scraps he can dry and preserve in his small press — bad enough he spent money on that; the herbarium sheets he can carry; the sketches and observations in his notebook. He can offer Dr. Hooker only these, but they are not nothing and he hopes his gifts will be received without disappointment.
The lost man whose skull he found — the first one, when he’d just entered these mountains — had at least left behind a record of the movements of his soul. What is he doing, himself? Supporting his family, advancing his career; when he returns to England, he’ll have no trouble finding a good position. But he would like also to feel that he has broadened himself. Hunched over his plane-table, his temples pounding as he draws the lateral moraines of the glacier below him, he hears his mother’s voice.
Look. Remember this. The ribbon of ice below him turns into a snow-covered path that curves through the reeds along the river and vanishes at the horizon; across it a rabbit is moving and his mother stands, her hand in his, quietly keeping him company. They watch, and watch, until the path seems not to be moving away from them, but toward them; the stillness of the afternoon pouring into their clasped hands. There is something special in you, she said. In the way you see.
A few days ago, on his twenty-eighth birthday, he opened the birthday greeting Clara had tucked in his trunk. She had written about the earlier birthdays they’d shared. And about this one, as she imagined it: Your companions, I know, will have made you a special birthday meal. Perhaps you’ll all share a bottle of brandy, or whatever you drink there. I am thinking of you, and of the birthdays in the future we will once more spend together.
Reading this, he’d felt for the first time that Clara’s project might fail. He is no longer the person she wrote to, almost a year ago now. She may have turned into someone else as well. That Gideon she mentions, that nice young man who prunes the trees and brings her wood and does the tasks Max ought to be doing himself: what other parts of Max’s life is he usurping? Max conjures up someone broad-shouldered, very tall — Max and Clara are almost the same height — unbuttoning his shirt and reaching out for Clara … Impossible, it makes him want to howl. Surely she wouldn’t have mentioned him if their friendship was anything but innocent. Yet even if it is, it will have changed her.
He himself has changed so much, he grows further daily from her picture of him. There was no birthday celebration; he told no one of this occasion. If he had, there would have been no response. It is his mother, dead so many years, who seems to speak most truly to the new person he is becoming. As if the years between her death and now were only a detour, his childhood self emerging from a long uneasy sleep. Beyond his work, beyond the mapping and recording, he is seeing; and this — it is terrifying — is becoming more important to him than anything.
5
October 1, 1863