The Syme Papers Read online

  l. April 1930. This morning, at ten o’clock, we set off … Departure, an entry in the journal, and then – well, yes, the thread has been cut. NOW the expedition begins. I have somehow the feeling, of having outrun a swarm of bees … into another nest, I have no doubt.

  4. May. The difficulties begin. In the course of the night we sailed into a line of ice, that lies between us and Umanak, our goal. So far south already! Our first attempt at breaking into the bay has failed. Already we must stray from the plan …

  And then, after a series of breakthroughs and delays, adventures and misadventures, Wegener continues:

  9. August. Catastrophe. We have only twenty days of hay left! Enough only for five or ten days of power feeding … Juelg is sick – it seems to be his nerves, a bad sign, for someone who hopes to survive a winter such as the one ahead. Vigfus suffers from rheumatism. Jon is trying to break his coffee habit, since we’re running low, and the Icelanders are mad for it. Even Weike suffers; his muscles bruised by weeks in the sled, till he can barely walk. Every day delays our setting off; and the days themselves getting shorter. I worry only that, without any real obstacle, my comrades have drifted into a muddled sense of time. Yes, the clouds are growing on the horizon of this expedition. I think I can manage myself but I cannot manage by myself. How will it all end? That question now is hot as coals.

  Another night. We’ve dried perhaps a few more days of grass for the horses – like drops of water on a hot rock, but vital nonetheless. My mood is still troubled; I hope it’s only the lice infecting my disposition. Simple discomfort can make a mountain out of the slightest inconvenience. Those damn lice! That is my hope – that we’re better off than I think we are, because of the cold and filth. I need a good sleep, a thorough sleep. If hard follows hard, we’ll show our teeth yet.

  l. September. Another foot of fresh snow, and not a sigh of wind. That is just what we need, to stick, like a fly in honey. And the petrol running low … and the propeller sleds failing; even when they work, the petrol lasts only half the distance we hoped for – a stupid mess of arithmetic, in which to blunder.

  We must, regardless of cost, fit out a dog-sled journey of such dimensions that the sled can supply everything we need on its own! Regardless of cost; that is easily said. This is the greatest crisis of our expedition. That we get through with honour seems doubtful; everything depends on the crew of dogs we can put together. God, what sort of fix have we stumbled into! And yet, last night, tucked in the seat of the motor sled, sliding over the waste of snow-dust, in the twilit sky, how wonderful!

  And then, in a final letter to his comrade Weike, his last words:

  6. October 1930 …

  We manage OK; nothing frozen yet, and we hope for a prosperous outcome. In the other event, let me enjoin you: never stray from the path of knowledge. Improve the road signs at least, stick in a few flags on your way!

  Best wishes,

  Alfred Wegener

  He died that winter, on his way west. His comrades found him much later buried in snow, between his upright skis. A courage of a different order altogether from Samuel Syme’s, so it seemed to me; for I had found no evidence of such faith, or, rather, such a profound sense of the obligations of faith, in my subject. The wit of Syme’s ironies rang somewhat hollow now, though they mocked the very certainty that led scientists to such fates. This, from Symmesonia:

  Mr Slim, the third mate, expressed some Apprehension, that great Danger might be encountered in high latitudes; that if we found land, the Ice might close upon us and prevent our return to our Country, as it once served a colony in Greenland. I was not much pleased with this. I have no Patience with an officer who suggests Doubt and Difficulties when I have a Grand Project in view. I marked him, but at the same time pretended to listen to his observations, as Objections of great Weight, and then proceeded to remove them from the minds of the officers and people, by advancing a Tide of Reasons for my belief that the supposition of extreme Gold at the Pole was altogether gratuitous.

  A good joke, perhaps, at the expense of scientific certainties, and prescient, too, given the fate of Wegener; but a rather easy target (I thought at the time) for a scientist who seemed to risk so little on his theories, who scarcely ventured any of them without a ballast of irony to support them. I learned in time, however, that there is more than one way to risk a life. (I, of all people, should have known that.)

  I had resurrected Syme, that much at least: brought him to life again, supplied father and mother, childhood, and even the occasion of his death. I had tasted something of his theories, a great deal of his wit; but of that lightning flash of insight (those ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’) that ignited the mind of Alfred Wegener a hundred years on – not a trace, not the least rumour of its distant thunder. I knew that notion had come to Syme, split the small night of a man’s thought with a wonderful burst of light. But I needed more than hunches, for Dr Bunyon, for my wife, for the approval of the tenure committee at the University of Texas. For Syme himself.

  *

  Now, I confess to you that I never did find that elusive journal, the New Platonist, the Holy Grail of my researches, printed privately, I believe, and discovered, posthumously as it were (after death by fire and water) in a catalogue of the library of Wegener’s father. And I exhort all Americans, all owners of attics and forgotten basements, of chests and old wallpaper, to search up and down for that vital missing link between the hollow world and our own. Knock against the plaster of your walls; tap into the hollows of your floors; explore the gloomy reaches of your attics, stooped in the stifling heat, for a slim volume, I suppose, whose cover bears some portion of the following:

  The New Platonist

  A journal establishing the Revolutionary American Science

  Edited by Professor Samuel Syme

  Then, having lifted your prize from the family papers, from beneath the wallpaper, from the lining of an old chest, open the first delicate page, and I believe you may discover a table of these contents:

  I. Aristotle and the New Science, by Prof. Syme

  II. Inventions: The Fluvia and its Uses, by Prof. Syme

  III. The Inverted Cosmos: A Primer, by Prof. Syme

  IV. What It Means to Pactaw County: Local Predictions, by Prof. Syme

  V. The New Medicine: Wax!, by Dr Friedrich Müller

  VI. Speculations: a curious coincidence

  Our special Appreciation to Mr Harcourt, Esq. of Richmond, Virginia, who may properly be termed the Medici of the New Science, our Prince and Patron.

  Clasp this precious treasure to your bosom; insure it as a ‘national heirloom’; then contact at once myself, Dr Douglas Pitt, at the Department of the History of Science, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

  I place all my faith in that sixth item, those ‘speculations on a curious coincidence’; surely, there, if anywhere, lies the inspiration of Wegener, the seed of thought, buried in a century of neglect, that grew into such a flower. But I find that I have overreached myself; step back, Pitt, before you step forward! And I must explain my knowledge of the cover and the table of contents; above all, the history of that curious character, the doctor of wax, mein Herr Friedrich Müller, Syme’s sole company in the revolutionary American journal – and, by the sounds of him, as ‘foreign as a Frankfurter’ at that.

  There is scant need to describe the countless false trails I followed and the gloomy woods into which they led me. I suffered a most particular frustration over that Humboldt clue; for Syme had listed among his mock protectors, in that grand petition to the United States Congress, the same Alexander von Humboldt with whom Alfred Wegener’s great-grandfather had attended the University of Frankfurt. But after a lengthy beating of my brows and a still fiercer beating of my books; after stumbling through a dozen blind alleys, head first, into the brick walls of history; after a most painful exhumation of my college German, which demanded a tortuous reconfiguration of the language wires in my brain, f
rom which, to this day, I have only partly recovered (a fact to which the reader, no doubt, will testify in court, suffering, as it were, vicariously from the inflammation of my sentences); after all that, I say, I was forced to conclude, that Alexander von Humboldt was not guilty of a connection to Syme, owing only to the insufficiency of the evidence against him. Perhaps the list of Syme’s protectors – from Werner, dead as Syme wrote, to H. Davy, a chemist at heart, to the Baron Humboldt, an explorer – was meant to serve as some kind of coda to the satire of Symmesonia. In any case, it did not serve me, nor connect Syme to Wegener in the end, though it pointed me, at least, in the right direction – towards Germany at last.

  I need hardly describe, I say, the countless red herrings and the stench of them; nor, indeed, the battles with Miss Pitt, my tender wife (whose faith in her husband’s sagacity had long diminished; whose faith in her husband’s assiduity was beginning to fade). Nor relate the circumstances of my financial embarrassment; my assurances, my guarantees, of being ‘hot on the trail’, the begging to which I was at last reduced, and the whimsy of despair that persuaded my wife to dip into her own private funds (secured by the religious suspicion of her father from the depredations of his goyish new son-in-law, so often indeed does the unity of the flesh between man and wife stop short at the unity of the bank account) in order to finance the extension of my researches, and one crucial, final flight.

  Tom Stoppard has said (I myself starred as the Hermit in an amateur production of Arcadia, performed by our little troupe of Austin Blue-stockings in front of a house filled, almost to the second row, with the remaining members of our little troupe of Austin Blue-stockings) that genius is the ability to open a door before the house is built. Syme had that very gift (as I hoped to prove), and opened the door, with the courtesy of the dead, to Alfred Wegener, who built his mansion around it. But genius, alas, is also the ability to fall out of the window before the house is built. And Syme took far too many such tumbles.

  He spent his working life on three great ideas – so far as I could make out from a careful study of the letters in his father’s collection, the newspaper reports, and Syme’s own publications. One of them, fabulous; one of them, false; one of them, visionary. I will not include in this list the series of devices he invented along the way. These were only means to an end, the fruits of idle hours, on which he often wasted the cream of his energies: the fluvia, the compression piston and the early seismograph. Nor the various public projects through which he hoped to support his researches: the lectures, the journey to the Pole (for which Symmesonia served as an advertisement), even the New Platonist itself began as a temporary solution to financial difficulties, rather than the conduit to his posterity it proved (I prove) to be. No, the three ideas on which Syme spent his life were simply these:

  The Great Dig

  The Triple Eclipse

  The ‘Revolving Fragments’

  The Great, or Big Dig, as Reverend Jenkyns delighted in calling it, involved the ‘compression piston’ Syme had developed for his experiments in the elasticity of water. Though Syme became broadly Huttonian or Plutonistic in his beliefs (after the early affair with Neptunism alluded to in Symmesonia), he disliked the incomprehensible Scotsman’s suspicion of practical proofs. For all his speculative genius, Syme was an American, a great believer in the virtue of eye and hand. He proposed the simplest of solutions to the question of the nature of the earth’s core: dig for it. Of course, like most simple solutions, the practical application of the Great Dig proved to be far from simple. Syme tinkered with the compression piston to the end of his life; in those last dry years his faith in the scientific value of a massive excavation revived, and he died in the fever of renewed speculation, on haw to dig himself a deeper hole.

  Syme’s interest in the ‘Triple Eclipse’ could indeed be called a corollary of the Great Dig. Essentially, he hoped to let nature provide the hole for him (as she does for us all in the end). Syme believed that the internal spheres of the earth rotated, like a nest of balls, each providing a socket for the sphere within. Occasionally, the holes or cracks in these spheres aligned themselves into what Syme called an ‘internal eclipse’ – a gust of fluvia (the internal air) usually followed these alignments, the gas catching fire as it fled outwards, accounting for earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis in its progress. Syme constructed tables to calculate the ‘rising’ and ‘setting’ of these internal cracks; he believed he could predict natural disasters on the strength of them. And he hoped that a local triple eclipse, the alignment of cracks in three sequent internal spheres, would provide the groundwork for the Great Dig, creating a fissure in the outer sphere along which he could quarry into the heart of the earth. There is no question that, of all his mad ideas, this one caused him the greatest, the most particular, unhappiness.

  I have said that it is the privilege of the biographer to sift the mass of his subject’s work for gold. In the process we often find that the weight of his life falls away, while the slightest of his curiosities sticks in time. So it was with Syme. For the third idea on which he spent his life occupied the least portion of it. The notion of ‘Revolving Fragments’, which inspired Wegener a century on, almost died stillborn (as I eventually learned on the discovery of a most remarkable cache of Syme’s papers), and received in the end only a moment of his distracted attention. A glimpse into the falling of a thought, soft as dew:

  I lay on the ottoman reading Waverley, and bored at length with the hero’s irresolution, rose to give Syme some companionship in his solitary labour and stood over his shoulder. Certain figures he had consulted me upon lay scattered over the rough table, lying across a well-thumbed map of the globe.

  ‘Phidy,’ he said in a still small voice, sensing the weight and heat of my presence at his shoulder. I placed my palm in the softness of his hair. He sat staring at the map, spread beneath his hands. ‘Have a look at this.’ And he traced his fingers along the edge of Africa, lovingly bending with the curve. ‘Does nothing strike you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘An old … coincidence, I suppose, is the best word,’ as I touched my own thumb lightly along the pregnant swell of Brazil. ‘The Americas and Africa might once almost have been lovers, along the lines of Aristophanes’ account, of a split self, searching for its dislocated half

  ‘Suppose the shell had cracked …’, he said, in a voice as quiet as blown dandelions.

  ‘Yes,’ I prompted …

  ‘Lay floating,’ he said, trailing off into the mists of a speculation.

  Then Tom asked, looking up, ‘Have you prepared the acid of sulphur for the volcano, at tomorrow’s lecture?’

  Sam remained silent, the butt of his palm banging against his stubborn chin, as if to dislodge an Idea.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  The banging stopped. ‘Suppose a great eclipse – along the lines we’ve discussed – had at some point – inconceivably distant – only suppose …’ Andresumed.

  ‘Have you prepared the acid of sulphur for the volcano,’ Tom repeated, ‘at tomorrow’s lecture?’

  ‘Hush, Tom,’ I whispered, mostly to myself. Perhaps he envied my place at Sam’s shoulder; but, to do Tom justice, Sam could be most wonderfully slack in his own cause, forgetful of anything that did not serve his present thought, never mind his future honour. While Tom himself laboured in a swarm of minor perplexities, just such niggling considerations – as time and place, engagements, equipment, lodgings, etc. – as Sam delighted to neglect.

  ‘Just so,’ Sam said. ‘Now, Phidy, give heed. Consider the eclipse – overlapping cracks in the concentric spheres etc.’ He took my hand in his and squeezed it, once, as if to relieve the pressure of his thought. ‘But suppose now that currents in the fluvia itself – occasioned by these flaws – produced a friction – that in turn …’ He released it again – I touched the palm, involuntarily, with the tip of my finger – and the banging resumed.

  ‘I am not in the habit’, Tom said, in a passion at the
edge of tears, ‘of being ignored, for this,’ he added, sniffing and squinting at once.

  Then louder: ‘Have you prepared the acid of sulphur for tomorrow’s lecture?’

  There was to be no more speculation that evening. Syme said nothing, and Tom rose at last to his feet.

  ‘What are you about?’ he said in a tight voice. Another storm was brewing, not to be put off by Syme’s silence. ‘Turn to me when I speak to you. What are you about?’

  ‘What he was about’, I would allege, was nothing short of scientific revolution. The earth itself, after the century of small discoveries precipitated by this sudden flash, would undergo a change of heart. For Syme, in that moment, had had the thought – the shadow of a door fell on him from a house yet to be built. ‘Fragments’ drifted at last over the sea of his speculation into those famous ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’ to which Wegener himself alluded in that careful introduction to his ground-breaking work On the Origin of Continents and Oceans. Syme for an instant suspected the truth: the outside sphere was the only one that mattered; it had cracked and pushed the continents with it.