Servants of the Map. Andrea Barrett

       Servants of the Map

      1

      HE DOES NOT WRITE to his wife about the body found on a mountain that is numbered but still to be named: not about the bones, the shreds of tent, the fragile, browning skull. He says nothing about the diary wedged beneath the rock, or about how it felt to turn the rippled pages. Unlike himself, the surveyor thinks, the lost man traveled alone. Not attached to a branch, however small and insignificant, of the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India. On this twig charged to complete the Kashmir Series, he is nothing. A leaf, an apricot, easily replaced; a Civil Junior Sub-Assistant in the Himalayan Service.

      The surveyor, whose name is Max Vigne, reads through the diary before relinquishing it to his superiors. The handwriting trembled in the final pages, the entries growing shorter and more confused. Hailstorms, lightning storms, the loss of a little shaving mirror meant to send a glinting signal from the summit to the admiring crowds below—after noting these, the lost man wrote:

      I have been fasting. Several weeks—the soul detaches from the flesh. The ills of spirit and body are washed away and here on the roof of the world, in the abode of snow, one becomes greatly strengthened yet as fresh as a child.

      Although Max pauses in wonder over these lines, he still doesn’t share them with his wife. Instead he writes:

       April 13, 1863

       Dear Clara—

       I can hardly understand where I am myself, how shall I explain it to you? Try to imagine the whole chain of the Himalaya, as wide as England and four times its length. Then imagine our speck of a surveying party tucked in the northwest corner, where the Great Himalaya tangles into the Karakoram—or not quite there, but almost there. We are at the edge of the land called Baltistan, or Little Tibet: Ladakh and Greater Tibet lie to the east. And it is so much more astonishing than we imagined. The mountains I wrote to you about earlier, which we crossed to enter the Vale of Kashmir—everything I said about them was true, they dwarf the highest peaks I saw at home. But the land I am headed toward dwarfs in turn the range that lies behind me. Last Wednesday, after breakfast, the low clouds lifted and the sun came out. To the north a huge white mass remained, stretching clear across the horizon. I was worried about an approaching storm. Then I realized those improbable masses were mountains, shimmering and seeming to float over the plains below.

       How I wish you could see this for yourself. I have had no mail from you since Srinagar, but messengers do reach us despite our frequent moves and I am hopeful. This morning I opened an envelope from the little trunk you sent with me. Have any of my letters reached you yet? If they have, you will know how much your messages have cheered me. No one but you, my love, would have thought to do this. On the ship, then during our tedious journey across the plains to the Pir Panjal; and even more throughout the weeks of preparation and training in Srinagar, your words have been my great consolation. I wait like a child on Christmas Eve for the dates you have marked on each envelope to arrive: I obey you, you see; I have not cheated. Now that the surveying season has finally begun and we’re on the move, I treasure these even more. I wish I had thought to leave behind a similar gift for you. The letters I wrote you from Srinagar—I know the details about my work could not have been of much interest to you. But I mean to do better, now that we’re entering this astonishing range. If I share with you what I see, what I feel: will that be a kind of gift?

       Yours marked to be opened today, the anniversary of that wonderful walk along the Ouse when I asked you to marry me and, against a background of spinning windmills and little boys searching for eels, you stood so sleek and beautiful and you said “yes”—it made me remember the feel of your hand in mine, it was like holding you. I am glad you plan to continue with your German. By now you must have opened the birthday gifts I left for you. Did you like the dictionary? And the necklace?

       I should try to catch you up on our journeys of these last few weeks. From Srinagar we labored over the Gurais pass, still knee-deep in snow: my four fellow plane-tablers, the six Indian chainmen, a crowd of Kashmiri and Baiti porters, and Michaels, who has charge of us for the summer. Captain Montgomerie of the Bengal Engineers, head of the entire Kashmir Series, we have not seen since leaving Srinagar. I am told it is his habit to tour the mountains from April until October, inspecting the many small parties of triangulators and plane-tablers, of which we are only one. The complexities of the Survey’s organization are beyond explaining a confusion of military men and civilians, Scots and Irish and English; and then the assistants and porters, all races and castes. All I can tell you is that, although we civilians may rise in the ranks of the Survey, even the most senior of us may never have charge of the military officers. And I am the most junior of all.

       From the top of the pass I saw the mountain called Nanga Parbat, monstrous and beautiful, forty miles away. Then we were in the village of Gurais, where we gathered more provisions and porters to replace those returning to Srinagar. Over the Burzil pass and across the Deosai plateau—it is from here that I write to you, a grassy land populated by chattering rodents called marmots. The air is clear beyond clearness today and to the north rises that wall of snowy summits I first mistook for a cloud: the Karakoram range, which we are to map. Even this far away I can see the massive glaciers explored by Godfrey Vigne, to whom I am so tangentially related.

       I wonder what he would have thought of me ending up here?