Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann & Carol Brown Janeway

Author:Daniel Kehlmann & Carol Brown Janeway [Kehlmann, Daniel & Janeway, Carol Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical
ISBN: 9780375424465
Google: vwNmAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0307277399
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2006-07-15T06:33:48+00:00

THE MOUNTAIN

By the light of a guttering oil lamp, while the wind blew past carrying more and more snowflakes, Aimé Bonpland was trying to write a letter home. If he thought about the preceding months, it was as if he'd lived dozens of lives, all of them similar to one another and none of them worth repeating. The journey up the Orinoco seemed like something one read about in books, New Andalusia was a prehistoric legend, Spain no more than a mere word. He had begun to feel better meanwhile, some days he was already free of fever, and even the dreams, in which he strangled, dismembered, shot, burned, poisoned, or buried Baron Humboldt under stones, were becoming less frequent.

He paused for thought, and chewed the end of his quill. Somewhat higher up the mountain, surrounded by sleeping mules, his hair covered with hoarfrost and a little snow, Humboldt was working out their position using the moons of Jupiter. He had the glass cylinder of the barometer balanced on his knees. Beside him, wrapped in blankets, their three mountain guides were asleep.

Next day, wrote Bonpland, they wanted to conquer Chim-borazo. In case they didn't survive, Baron Humboldt had advised him most insistently to write a letter of farewell, because it was beneath a man to die just like that, without a final word to anyone. On the mountain they would collect rocks and plants, even up here there were unknown plants, he had harvested far too many of them these last months. The baron maintained there were only sixteen underlying species, but the baron was good at recognizing species whereas he, Bonpland, couldn't care less. The majority of their specimens, including three very ancient corpses, had been loaded in Havana onto a ship bound for France, and in a second ship they had sent the herb collections and all their written records to Baron Humboldt's brother. Three weeks ago, or maybe it was six, the days went by so quickly and he had lost all perspective, they had learned that one of the ships had sunk. That had cost Baron Humboldt some bad days, but then he'd said they were only just starting. He, Bonpland, had been less upset by the loss, as he was running such a fever at the time that he hardly knew where and why and who he was. Most of the time he had been fighting flies and mechanical spiders in his nightmares. He was trying not to think about it, and hoped the ship that sank hadn't been the one with the corpses. He had spent so much time with them that by the time they got back to the mouth of the river, he felt they weren't just ballast, but silent companions.

Bonpland wiped his brow and took a deep mouthful from his brass flask. Earlier on he had had a silver one, but he'd lost it under circumstances he could no longer remember. They were only just starting, he wrote. Then he noticed that he'd used this same sentence twice, and crossed it out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.