Humboldt told him not to be so stupid. As a piece of silver touched the second wound, a painful spasm shot through his back muscles and up into his head. With a shaking hand he made a note: Musculus cucuUaris, ongoing prickling sensation in dorsal vertebrae. No doubt about it, this was electricity! Repeat with the silver! He counted four shocks, regularly spaced, then the objects around him lost their color.
When he regained consciousness, the servant was sitting white-faced on the floor, his hands bloody.
Onward, said Humboldt, and with a strange shiver of apprehension he realized that something in him was finding pleasure in this. Now for the frogs!
Oh no, said the servant.
Humboldt asked if he was intending to look for a new job.
The servant laid four dead, meticulously cleaned frogs on Humboldt's bloodied back. But this was quite enough, he said, after all they were both good Christians.
Humboldt ignored him and ordered silver again. The shocks began immediately. With each one, as he saw in the mirror, the frogs jumped as if alive. He bit down into the pillow, the cloth was wet from his tears. The servant giggled hysterically. Humboldt wanted to make notes, but his hands were too weak. Laboriously he got to his feet. The two wounds were running and the liquid coming out of them was so corrosive it was inflaming his skin. Humboldt tried to capture some of it in a glass tube, but his shoulder was swollen up and he couldn't turn round. He looked at the servant.
The servant shook his head.
Very well, said Humboldt, in that case in God's name would he please get the doctor! He wiped his face and waited until he regained the use of his hands so that he could jot down the essentials. There had been a flow of current, he had felt it, and it hadn't come from his body or the frogs, it had come from the chemical antagonism between the metals.
It wasn't easy to explain to the doctor what had been going on. The servant gave notice the same week, two scars remained, and the treatise on living muscle fiber as a conductor established Humboldt's reputation as a scientist.
He seemed to be showing some evidence of confusion, said his brother in a letter from Jena. He should really bear in mind that one also had moral obligations to one's own body, which wasn't just some random object among many; I'm begging you, do come, Schiller wants to meet you.
You misunderstand me, Humboldt replied, I have established that a human being is prepared to endure insult, but that a great deal of knowledge escapes him because he is afraid of pain. The man who deliberately undergoes pain nonetheless learns things he didn't … He laid down his pen, rubbed his shoulder, and crumpled the paper into a ball. Why, I wonder, he began again, does the fact that we are brothers strike me as the real riddle? That the two of us are alone, that we're doubles, that you are what I was never intended to be, and I am what you cannot be, that we must go through existence as a pair, together, whether we want it or not, closer all our lives than either of us will ever be to someone else. And why do I imagine that the greatness we each achieve will have no future, no matter what successes we have, and that it will vanish as if it were nothing until our names, which competed against each other in their fame, melt back into one and fade to a blank? He faltered, then tore the sheet into little pieces.
To examine the plants in the Freiberg mines, he developed the miner's lamp: a flame fed by a gas canister which worked in places even where there was no air. It almost killed him. He climbed down into a chamber in the rock that had never been explored before, set down the lamp, and within a matter of minutes lost consciousness. Dying, he saw tropical creepers which turned to women's bodies as he watched, and came back to his senses with a scream. A Spaniard named Andres del Rio, a former classmate at the Freiberg School of Mines, had found him and got him up to the surface again. Humboldt was almost too ashamed to thank him properly.
It took him a month of hard work to develop a breathing machine: two pipes led from an airbag to a breathing mask. He strapped the apparatus on and went down. Stony-faced he endured the onset of hallucinations. Then first his knees began to buckle and dizziness multiplied the single flame to a blaze; he opened the air valve and watched grimly as the women turned back into plants and the plants into mere nothings. He stayed down in the cool darkness for hours. When he emerged into the daylight, he was met with a letter from Kunth, summoning him to his mother's deathbed.
As was appropriate, he found the fastest horse and rode out. Rain lashed his face, his coat flapped behind him, twice he slipped from the saddle and landed in the dirt. He arrived filthy and unshaven, and because he knew what was correct behavior, he pretended to be out of breath. Kunth nodded his approval; they sat together at her bedside and watched as the pain transformed her face into something unknown. Consumption had burned her up inside, her cheeks had fallen in, her chin was long, and her nose was suddenly hooked; so much blood had been let that she had almost died of it. While Humboldt held her hand, afternoon passed over into evening and a messenger brought a letter from his brother, excusing himself on the grounds of urgent business in Weimar. As night set in, his mother struggled erect in bed and began to emit sharp screams. The sleeping draught was having no effect, even another bleeding brought no relief, and Humboldt could not believe the fact that she was capable of such improper behavior. Around midnight her screams became so unbridled and loud and seemed to be coming from so deep in her body as it arched upward that she seemed to be in ecstasy. He waited with closed eyes. It took two hours for her to fall quiet. At first light, she murmured something incomprehensible; as the sun rose in the morning sky she looked at her son and said he must control himself, that was no way to be lolling about. Then she turned her head away, her eyes seemed to turn to glass, and he was looking at the first corpse he had ever seen in his life.
Kunth put a hand on his shoulder. No one could begin to measure what this family had meant to him.
No, said Humboldt, as if someone were whispering to him, he could measure it and he would never forget.
Kunth was moved, and sighed. Now he knew he would continue to receive his keep.
In the afternoon the servants watched Humboldt walking up and down in front of the castle, over the hills, round the pond, mouth wide open, face turned up to the sky looking like an idiot. They had never seen him this way. He must surely, they said to one another, be awfully shaken. And he was: he had never been so happy.
A week later he resigned his post. The minister couldn't understand it. Such high office at such a young age, and no limit to how high he might climb! So why?
Because none of it was enough, answered Humboldt. He stood there, a slight figure but ramrod straight, his eyes glistening and his shoulders relaxed, in front of his superior's desk. Because at last he was free to go.
First came Weimar, where his brother introduced him to Wieland, Herder, and Goethe. The latter greeted him as an ally. Any pupil of the great Werner would find a friend in him.
He was going to travel to the New World, said Humboldt. He had never confessed this to anyone before. No one would prevent him, and he didn't expect to come back alive.
Goethe took him aside and led him through a suite of rooms all painted different colors to a high window. A great undertaking, he said. His priority would be to investigate volcanoes, to support the theory of Neptunism. There was no fire under the earth's crust. Nature's heart was not made of boiling lava. Only spoiled minds could seize upon such repellent ideas.
Humboldt promised to take a look at volcanoes.
Goethe crossed his arms behind his back. And he was never to forget where he came from.
Humboldt didn't understand him.
He should think about who had sent him, Goethe gestured toward the brightly colored rooms, the plaster casts of Roman statues, the men who were conversing in lowered voices in the salon. Humboldt's elder brother was discussing the merits of blank verse, Wieland was nodding alertly, Schiller was sitting on the sofa stealing a yawn. You come from us, said Goethe, you come from here. You will still be our amb
assador across the seas.
Humboldt journeyed on to Salzburg, where he acquired himself the most expensive arsenal of measuring instruments ever to be possessed by one person. Two barometers for air pressure, a hypsometer to measure the boiling point of water, a theodolite for measuring land, a sextant with an artificial horizon, a foldable pocket sextant, a dipping magnetic needle to establish the force of earth's magnetism, a hydrometer for the relative dampness in the air, a eudiometer for measuring the oxygen levels in the air, a Leyden jar to capture electrical charges, and a cyanometer to measure the blue of the sky. Plus two of these pricelessly costly clocks which recently had started to be produced in Paris. They no longer needed a pendulum, but marked the seconds invisibly with regularly moving springs inside. When handled properly, they kept to Paris time, and if one determined the height of the sun above the horizon and then consulted tables, they made it possible to fix the degree of longitude.
He stayed for a year and practiced. He measured every hill around Salzburg, he took daily measurements of the air pressure, he mapped the magnetic field, he tested the air, the water, the earth, and the color of the sky. He practiced dismantling and reassembling every instrument until he could do it blind, standing on one leg, in rain, or surrounded by a herd of fly-tormented cows. The locals decided he was mad. But that too, he realized, was something he must get used to. Once he tied one arm behind his back for a week, so as to become accustomed to physical insult and pain. Because he was bothered by his uniform, he had another one tailored for him and wore it even to bed. The whole trick was never to let anything get to one, he said to Frau Schobel, his landlady, and asked for another glass of the greenish whey that made him feel sick.
Only after that did he go to Paris, where his brother was now living as a private person, to raise his dazzlingly intelligent children according to a strict system of his own. His sister-in-law couldn't stand him. He spooked her, she said, his constant activity struck her as a form of madness, and most of all, he seemed to her a distorted copy, a caricature even, of her husband.
He couldn't really contradict her, was her husband's reply, and it had never been easy to be so completely responsible for all his brother's follies, or be his brother's keeper.
At the Academy, Humboldt gave lectures on the conductivity of human nerves. He was standing right there in the drizzle on the trampled grass outside the city when the last section of longitude was measured that connected Paris to the Pole. As it was completed, everyone took off their hats and shook hands: one ten-millionth of the distance, captured in metal, would become the unit of all future linear measurements. People wanted to name it “the meter.” It always filled Humboldt with exultation when something was measured; this time he was drunk with enthusiasm. The excitement stopped him from sleeping for several nights.
He made enquiries about expeditions. A certain Lord Bristol wanted to go to Egypt, but soon landed in prison as a spy. Humboldt learned that the Directory wanted to send a group of researchers to the South Seas under the command of the great Bougainville, but Bougainville was as old as the hills, stone deaf, sat in a chair of state muttering into thin air and making gestures of command that nobody could make head or tail of. When Humboldt bowed to him, he blessed him with a pontifical hand movement and waved him away. The Directory replaced him with the officer Baudin. This man received Humboldt warmly and promised him everything. Shortly thereafter he disappeared along with all the money the state had given him.
One evening there was a young man sitting on the stairs of the house where Humboldt lived, drinking schnapps out of a silver flask; he cursed violently as Humboldt accidentally trod on his hand. Humboldt apologized and they got to talking. The man's name was Aimé Bonpland, and it turned out he had been hoping to sign on with Baudin. He was twenty-five, tall, a bit ragged, not much scarred by smallpox, and had only one missing tooth, right in front. The two of them looked at each other, and later neither of them would have been able to say whether they had shared an intimation that each was going to be the most important person in the other's life, or whether it just seemed that way in retrospect.
According to Bonpland, he came from La Rochelle and had endured the low skies of the provinces like the roof of a prison. Every day he had wanted to get out, had become a military doctor, but the university wouldn't recognize his title. While he was finishing his final exams, he had studied botany, he loved tropical plants, and now he had no idea what he was going to do. Back to La Rochelle—he'd rather be dead!
Humboldt enquired if he might embrace him.
No, said Bonpland, appalled.
They both had similar things behind them, said Humboldt, and the same ahead of them, and if they got together, who was going to stop them? He put out his hand.
Bonpland didn't understand.
They could go together, Humboldt explained, he needed a traveling companion and he had money.
Bonpland looked at him closely and screwed the lid on the flask.
They were both young, said Humboldt, and they had both made up their minds, and together they would become great. Or didn't Bonpland feel this way?
Bonpland didn't feel this way, but Humboldt's excitement was infectious. For this reason, and also because it was impolite to leave someone standing with outstretched hand, he followed suit, suppressing a yelp of pain: Humboldt's grip was stronger than he would have expected from the little man.
And now what?
Where else, said Humboldt, but Spain of course.
Not much later on, the brothers took leave of each other with the gestures of two monarchs. Humboldt was overcome with embarrassment when strands of his sister-in-law's hair brushed his cheek as they kissed goodbye. He asked if they would see each other again. Of course, said his elder brother. In this world or the next. In the flesh or in the light.
Humboldt and Bonpland mounted their horses and rode away. The amazed Bonpland noticed that his companion was able to refrain from turning round even once until brother and sister-in-law were out of sight.
On the way to Spain, Humboldt measured every single hill. He climbed every mountain. He hammered rock samples off every cliff face. Using his breathing machine he explored every cave back to its farthest chamber. Locals watching him fix the sun through the eyepiece of his sextant decided they were heathen worshippers of the stars and stoned them until they had to leap onto their horses and flee at a gallop—the first couple of times they escaped unscathed, but the third one left Bon-pland with a bad if superficial wound.
He began to wonder. Was it really necessary, they were just passing through after all, they were headed for Madrid, and it would be a lot quicker if they made straight there, dammit.
Humboldt thought. No, he said, he was sorry. A hill whose height remained unknown was an insult to the intelligence and made him uneasy. Without continually establishing one's own position, how could one move forward? A riddle, no matter how small, could not be left by the side of the road.
From now on they traveled at night so that he could do his measuring undisturbed. The coordinates on their maps needed to be fixed more precisely than had been done to date. These Spanish maps were inaccurate, Humboldt explained. One wanted to know where exactly one's horse was headed.
But we know that, cried Bonpland. This was the main high road and it went to Madrid. Who needed more than that?
It wasn't a question of the high road, Humboldt replied. It was a question of principle.
As they approached the capital the daylight took on a silvery tint. Soon there were almost no more trees. The middle of Spain was no basin, Humboldt explained. Once again the geographers were wrong. It was much more of a high plateau and had once been an island that towered up out of a prehistoric sea.
Obviously, said Bonpland, taking a pull from his flask. An island.
Madrid was run by the minister Mariano de Urquijo. Everyone knew he was sleeping with the queen. The king was powerless, his children despised him, the country thought him a joke. It couldn't
be done without Urquijo, for the colonies were closed to foreigners, and there had never been an exception. Humboldt sought out the Prussian, the Belgian, the Dutch, and the French ambassadors. At night he learned Spanish.
Bonpland asked if he ever slept.
Not if he could help it, replied Humboldt.
After a month, he succeeded in being granted an audience with Urquijo in the Aranjuez palace. The minister was plump, nervous, and full of worries. Because of a misunderstanding, and perhaps also because he had once heard mention of Paracelsus, he thought Humboldt was a German doctor and enquired about an aphrodisiac.
Beg pardon?
The minister led him to a dark corner of the stone hall, laid a hand on his shoulder, and lowered his voice. It wasn't about satisfaction. His power over the land rested on his power over the queen. She was no longer a young woman, nor was he a young man now.
Humboldt blinked and looked out of the window. In the white midday glare the park spread out its unreal symmetry. A jet of water rose sluggishly over a Moorish fountain.
There was still much to do, said Urquijo. The Inquisition was still powerful, there was a long way to go before the abolition of slavery. People were plotting in every corner. He didn't know how long he could hold up. Literally. Was he making himself clear?
Slowly, balling his fists, Humboldt walked over to Urquijo's desk, dipped the quill into the ink, and wrote out a prescription. Cinchona bark from the depths of the Amazon, extract of poppies from central Africa, Siberian moss from the high plains, and a flower that had entered legend from Marco Polo's account of his travels. Make a strong decoction of the above, and draw off the third infusion. Drink slowly, once every two days. It would take years to gather all the ingredients. Hesitantly he handed Urquijo the piece of paper.
Never before had foreigners received such documents. Baron von Humboldt and his assistant were to receive every kind of support. They were to be sheltered, handled well, given access to whatever interested them, and could travel in any ship belonging to the crown.