This Thing Of Darkness (62 page)

‘Pirates,’ explained Corfield helpfully. ‘They used to loot the churches.’

‘I assure you, madam, that most of my countrymen are the most devout Christians,’ Darwin reassured her.

‘But how is that so, Señor Darwin? Do not your padres, your very bishops marry? It is a strange idea of Christianity’

‘It is a different sort of Christianity, madam, but it is Christianity all the same.’

‘What surprises me,’ said Major Sutcliffe huffily through a mouthful of ragoût, ‘is that here we are in the modern age, and I cannot walk down the street without being followed by a gaggle of wretched children shouting
pirata
at me.’

‘My servant,’ offered Señor Remedios from beneath a pair of extravagant white eyebrows, ‘saw your ships arrive in harbour. He said there was talk that your captain might be a pirate, or a smuggler.’

Darwin snorted. ‘The person who could possibly mistake Captain FitzRoy for a smuggler would never perceive any difference between Lord Chesterfield and his valet!’

Renous the German, whose hair bristled spikily like a hedgehog poised to defend itself, posed a direct question of the lawyer: ‘Tell me, Señor Remedios, what do you think of the King of England sending out a collector to your country to pick up lizards and beetles, and to break stones?’

‘Hay un gato encerrado aqui,’
replied the old man. There is a cat shut up here.

‘What does he mean?’ hissed Darwin to Corfield.

‘It is a local expression,’ Corfield hissed back. ‘It means all is not well.’

‘No man is so rich as to send out people to pick up rubbish,’ concluded the lawyer. ‘I do not like it.’

Renous gave Darwin a sympathetic look. ‘I am something of a collector myself, Señor Darwin. I once left some caterpillars with a serving girl, giving her orders to feed them leaves so that they might turn into butterflies. The news was rumoured through the town, and the padres were consulted. The governor had me arrested on charges of sorcery. I suffered an unpleasant few days in the town lock-up before the mix-up was corrected.’

‘So much for your modern age, Major Sutcliffe!’ said Mr Kennedy, laughing.

‘But are you not curious, Señora, concerning the works of nature?’ persisted Darwin. ‘Why a caterpillar turns into a butterfly? Why a volcano erupts? Why there are mountains here in Chili, but Patagonia to the east is as flat as a pancake?’

‘All such enquiries are useless and impious,’ replied Señora Campos with a sniff. ‘It is quite sufficient that God has made the mountains thus.’

One of the sultry young women giggled.

There was a moment’s awkward silence, before Corfield intervened, to steer the conversation discreetly on to other matters. Further dishes were brought, all of them of a fiery intensity, before the repast concluded with a very English jelly-pudding.

‘Thought I’d make you feel at home, old man,’ murmured Corfield, simultaneously managing a sly wink at the young lady to his right, as two scoops of jelly wobbled on to her plate.

Darwin waited for his own pudding to cease shimmying before he plunged in his spoon, but mysteriously, it refused to comply. Instead, the faintest of vibrations could be seen to agitate the translucent sheen of its surface. Inexplicably, the jelly seemed to tremble more, not less, the longer it sat on his plate.

One of the young women screamed. Señor Remedios hurled back his chair and jumped to his feet with an alacrity that belied his years. The servants were already running for the doorway, but it was a close contest between them and the guests. Even the English merchants had leaped up from their seats and were now hastening from the room. Darwin, dumbfounded, was left alone at the table. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘An earthquake,’ said Corfield, wiping his chin with his napkin and straightening his clothing as he, too, prepared to leave.

‘Oh,’ said Darwin stupidly.

‘We have them every day or two in these parts. It is why we always leave the doors open, in case they jam shut. The vast majority amount to nothing - just a little rumbling sound. But then again, the entire town of Copiapó was flattened a few years back. Are you coming?’

Darwin rose to his feet with as much dignity as he could muster. ‘That was rather a case of the devil take the hindmost,’ he said disdainfully.

‘There is a want of habit in governing their fear in these parts. Unlike your Englishman, it is not a feeling they are ashamed of.’

‘So I saw.’ Darwin gave Corfield a nod of mutual superiority, then made for the door with noticeably more haste than would otherwise have been necessary.

 

‘Come along - press it on! Lend a hand there, Covington!’

Darwin had set out for the Andes at dawn, on one of Corfield’s horses, sitting astride Corfield’s horsecloths, wearing Corfield’s boots, spurs, stirrups and hat. His father, he assured himself, would settle his account with Corfield in due course. He had also hired two guasos, Mariano and Gonzales by name, in an attempt to re-create the atmosphere of his Patagonian expedition; but these Chilean gauchos, who had formerly been in the service of Lord Cochrane, were far too deferential. They refused, for instance, to take their meals with him, preferring to eat with Covington instead. Their dress, excepting a pair of absurd six-inch spurs, had none of the extravagance of their Patagonian counterparts; they wore plain ponchos and worsted leggings of a muted green. They knew nothing of the
bolas.
They never ate meat. They were, decided Darwin, men of the serving classes rather than true men of action. He felt secretly glad that, at the last minute, he had decided not to don his own gaucho costume.

He had also recruited an
arriero -
a muleteer in a felt top hat — who brought with him ten mules, led by their
madrina
or godmother, an old steady mare with a bell around her neck that the other beasts would follow anywhere, even over a precipice if necessary. This was a handy arrangement, as it was only necessary to recapture the
madrina
after a night’s grazing, and the others would come obediently to heel. Each mule could carry a staggering three-hundred-pound load up the narrowest of defiles, which was why he had felt no compunction in bringing with him an entire bed, borrowed from Corfield’s house. True, the frame was an unwieldy shape, but Covington had been deputized to walk behind the animal, on watch for any awkward shifts of balance. The bed would certainly provide a solution to the lice problem that Corfield had warned him about.

The party trudged upwards for hours through delightful sunshine, the scenery becoming increasingly verdant the higher they climbed. They passed shepherds’ cottages, their shiny lawns smoothed out beside crystal-clear streams, and emerald fields studded with dairy cattle, all standing motionless like china figurines. There were groves of oranges and figs, and fluttering orchards of peach-blossom alive with humming-birds. Finally, a breathtaking view of Valparayso - Paradise Valley indeed - opened out far below, amid patchwork fields. It was, thought Darwin, joyfully, exactly like the colour-plates of the Swiss Alps one saw in annuals. He was not so carried away with enthusiasm, however, as to allow his sense of scientific enquiry to remain dulled. Where, he wondered, were all the wild animals? He had seen the occasional field-mouse, and indeed had succeeded in catching one. In the still of the evening, he had heard the faint cry of the
bizcacha,
a burrowing rodent, and the unpleasant call of the goatsucker bird, which was said to be able to milk tethered goats with its beak. But that was all. Paradise Valley seemed a strangely depopulated Eden, as if the world was indeed brand new.

Of marine life, however, there was evidence aplenty. There were thick shell-beds arrayed in terraces up the mountain slopes, so vast they had been hacked into by local farmers as a source of lime. What on earth had caused these terraces to bank up there, covered as they were in sand and sea-rolled shingle? Many of the shells were embedded in a reddish-black mould, which under Darwin’s portable microscope revealed itself to be marine mud, the minute, decomposed particles of organic bodies. He dug deeper, to find fragments of ancient pottery and the imprint of some plaited rush, long since rotted away. This made no sense. If, as Lyell insisted, shell-beds on mountainsides had been lifted gradually from the sea over limitless, timeless aeons, how could there be evidence of human habitation buried within? Perhaps FitzRoy was right after all. Perhaps the Old Testament was right. Perhaps this was the drowned detritus of the great flood.

Remember what Professor Sedgwick impressed upon you,
he told himself.
One piece of evidence proves nothing to the geologist. Only an overwhelming mass of evidence can prove anything. Hold your tongue until you know the truth.

‘What are you looking for, Don Carlos?’

Mariano, tugged by curiosity, had wandered across from lighting the campfire.

‘I am trying to establish what these sea-shells are doing here, halfway up a mountainside.’

‘They are not sea-shells, Don Carlos. They are mountain-shells.’

Clearly, the
guasos
knew even less of the natural world than their gaucho cousins.

Darwin sat in silence until Mariano had wandered away, watching the valleys blacken and the snowy peaks of the Andes turn ruby in the setting sun. In the half-light, he perused Corfield’s copy of Lyell’s
Principles of Geology Volume 3
once again. Lyell was utterly unequivocal. The sea had been uplifted to the mountainsides. The process had occurred gradually, over countless millennia: like the formation of sedentary rock, it could never be witnessed by the naked eye. It was a process that was now completed, and indeed had been completed long before man had ever walked the face of the earth.

He gazed once more at the inexplicable staircase of shell-terraces below, marching down the mountain slopes to the sea. The evidence simply did not fit. Perturbed, he crossed the field in which they had made camp, changed into his nightclothes, jammed on a new night-cap, pulled back the sheets and climbed into bed.

 

In the clammy light of dawn, the view had all but disappeared. A fog bank had rolled in far below, curling into ravines, turning solitary hillocks into islets, and washing in slow-moving waves against the implacable black rocks. Shivering with cold, a warming cup of
maté
clasped between his hands, Darwin entertained the thought that the caves and bays of Tierra del Fuego must look like this from the air. Even as he shared the observation with himself, a gentle, rippling sea breeze caused the fog to eddy and break upon a shell-terrace far below, like a wave furling upon a beach.

Suddenly, his blood seemed to stand still in his veins. His heart felt as if it had stopped. His hands fell limp, and the cup of
maté
tumbled soundlessly to the grass at his feet. The answer - the answer to everything - had come to him so suddenly he almost believed for a moment that he had been shot. The shell-terraces were
beaches
. Each terrace was a beach. Each one had been wrenched into the air by an earthquake - a big earthquake, not the constant, minuscule tremors that plagued the inhabitants of Valparayso. The mountains were indeed rising from the sea. But they weren’t doing it gradually. They were doing it in a series of violent lurches. They hadn’t stopped rising - they were still doing it. Much of the uplift had occurred within the lifetime of man. That was why he had found pottery. It was why so few animals lived here - it was new country. Lyell was wrong. FitzRoy was wrong. The Bible was wrong. He - Charles Darwin - had the answer. How he burned with excitement, with pride, and with an overwhelming sense of
ownership
of this amazing, incredible idea.

‘Is everything all right, sir?’ Covington had spotted the teacup at his master’s feet.

‘Yes - no ... That is, everything’s fine.’

Dare he try to share his discovery with the mule-headed Covington? How he wished that FitzRoy were here. How he wished he could send a semaphore telegraph, right this minute, all the way to Henslow in Cambridge.
Dare
he try?

‘Do you see these shell-terraces on the mountain slopes?’ he began.

‘Shell-terraces, sir?’

‘Yes. Shell-terraces. Do you see how they rise, in steps?’

‘Steps, sir?’

‘Yes. Steps. They ... Oh, never mind.’

‘I’m sorry sir, I don’t — ’

‘Go and ... go and pack up my linen. I shall be there directly.’

‘Aye aye sir.’

Still bewildered as to where he had gone wrong, Covington stomped off to see to his master’s bedding.

 

‘As for London - what is London? We can do anything in my country.’

This man Should meet Lieutenant Sulivan
, thought Darwin. His chest pulled taut and his head feeling light from the altitude, he sat upon a wrought-iron chair at the centre of a sunlit lawn, drinking chardonnay with Mr Dawlish, a mine-owner from Cornwall.

‘You have never been to London, I take it?’

‘Of course not,’ said Dawlish. ‘Whatever for would I wish to visit London? What is London?’

‘What indeed?’ said Darwin, for the avoidance of argument.

At the edge of the lawn, where ugly mounds of scarred earth formed primitive ramparts about an ink-dark mineshaft, a wiry, sweat-bathed Chilean miner in a leather apron emerged blinking into the light. He stood shaking on the rim of the shaft, ribs protruding, nostrils distended, muscles quivering, knees trembling with exertion. On his bare back, a two-hundred-pound load of copper ore strained against his shoulder-straps. He stared at the seated pair boldly from beneath his tight-fitting scarlet skullcap. Unsure how to respond, Darwin waved back limply, a gesture he regretted the moment he had made it.

‘The shaft is four hundred and fifty feet deep,’ explained Mr Dawlish, to account for the miner’s shaking knees.

‘There is a ladder?’