The Syme Papers Read online

  A mouthful of a theory, and, as they say in the charming lingo of this island, mad as a box of spiders at first glance. And yet, and yet, there was something in it, as Sober Ben Silliman must have spotted himself when he published it – an attention to detail (for Syme was nothing if not meticulous), but more than that, a genius of connection. Nobody before Syme had explored the question of magnetic variation as a means of determining the composition of the core – an obvious step, it might seem today, but Syme was the first to take it. Nobody had adopted the Plutonist account in order to press it to a conclusion. Hutton himself insisted that all journeys (no matter how speculative) to the beginning or end of World and Time were fruitless. The best you could do was discover the process of modification along the way; and, for the most part, his followers accepted this restriction. Syme did not.

  Yet there was no mention, not the slightest hint, of those ‘segments of the earth’s crust which float on the revolving core’ that would inspire Wegener a century on. Dig, Pitt, dig! I cried, and wrung the venerable pages of the American journal of Science, March 1818, for the last drop of madness, astonishing the stooped and silent readers in the Rare Books and Music chamber of the British Library by the agony of my researches. Dig and dig, to the bottom of this thing, the liquid, shifting core!

  But there was nothing there, no hint as yet of the theory that begot the theory that changed our world, no sign. And soon a hushed voice, issuing from a balding curly-haired young man, bearing the proud badge of ‘BL Staff’ swinging about his neck, above a cracked black T-shirt sporting the ensign Metal Head in agonized italics, asked me ‘not to badger the books so much, I was upsetting the readers’.

  So I forbore to badger and read over (in commendable quietude) Syme’s magnificent conclusion, which began to frighten me for its very plausibility:

  That a disposition to hollow cylinders does exist in nature, we think must be admitted; and that a similar principle exists in the planetary system, at least in some degree, appears to us certain. Every person has seen or heard of Saturn and his rings. At certain periods of time the appearance of this Planet, viewed through a stout telescope, represents him to be surrounded with two luminous Rings or Loops of matter, concentric with each other, and with the body of the planet. These rings nowhere adhere to that Body, but float distinct and separate, some considerable distance from him, and from each other, leaving a portion of vacant Space, through which we see the fixed stars beyond.

  The appearance of Saturn, we conceive, establishes the Fact, that the principle of concentric spheres, or Hollow Planets, does exist, at least in one instance, in the solar system. And if the fact be established in one case, is it not fair, nay, is it not almost a certain and necessary consequence, that the same Laws of Matter which formed a part of the Universe have operated upon the Whole?

  I began to wonder if I had gone too deep to look around me, having lost the light of common sense above, left only with those far dimmer guides – the intellect on one hand and my own ambition on the other – to feel my way through these deep passages of history, of cause and effect, error and inspiration. Yet I had ventured too far to turn back; the end of my grant stood before me, like the glow of an oncoming train, and I had nothing to show for a busy year as yet. All I could do was rush, as quickly as possible, through the darkness of the tunnel.

  *

  I found little record of Sam’s four years in the army. He seems to have enjoyed the routine; the early rising benefited his health, and the exercise composed his sleep without too great a burden of dreams. Though Syme possessed a robust physique, a barrel-chested, rosy-cheeked bravado of the constitution (somewhat, I flatter myself, after the fashion of his humble biographer), he suffered from a peculiar susceptibility of the imagination, which could grow sick at a suggestion – a liability which, owing to his ordinary vigour, rendered his periods of debilitation particularly painful. We often find in specimens of great natural good health a proportional rebellion of the constitution, as if their native strength were thrust upon them, and their psyches were too weak to bear the mass of so much vitality.

  But the routines of army life assuaged this susceptibility, and the four years appear to have passed, after the violence of his initiation, in a general contentment, if the silence of this period is anything to go by. (Silence, in my experience, being a great indicator of happiness. A restless spirit writes, confronts, obstructs, composes, entangles, and trails in its wake a thousand marks of its tumultuous passage; a happy nature passes smoothly over the years, barely touching the surface and leaving no mark as it glides.) The fury of whatever decision drove him from Yale College to the 53rd Infantry abated; the winds calmed, and Syme seemed bent on the course of an ordinary prosperity.

  Yet out of this prosperous calm was born his strange fixation on the ‘theory of concentric spheres’. We have no record of the circumstances that precipitated such an eruption, of the moment of inspiration, of the mounting degrees of his obsession. The essay was published in the March issue of the Journal of American Science; Syme effected his discharge from the army two months later, wandering from the well-trod path before him into such impressionable ground that history still bears the prints of his diversions. I could only guess – hunched over the mottled paper of the Journal, turning the delicate leaves with my ham fists, still strapped, and bound and forbidden the use of a pen – the tyranny of inspiration that drove Syme, from the comfortable progress of a fashionable career to such strange prospects: a life of disappointment and betrayal, and an early, desired death.

  But a century of winds dispersed his theories, until, like a piece of grit (as I hoped to prove), one stuck in the thoughts of Alfred Wegener and produced a pearl. A pearl that eventually cost the German scientist his life, a pearl whose perfect brilliance drove me, another century on, to carve within it and discover the source of the original infection. We are at the mercy of our own inspiration and helpless to prevent the spread of a faith, once started, even in ourselves. Who can say where or when the notion will strike?

  *

  I pursued my researches now at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, a noble Victorian red-brick building in the middle of suburban nowhere – in a loose field protected by a sagging fence, a set of football posts kneeling in the high grass beside a pile of cement rubble littered with Coke cans. I sat at the top, looking over the green wasteland, while a single fan, perched in the crack of a tall window, blew the hot air around and around the high room.

  A tall young man with a pinched nose and a racking sneeze pushed the squeaking trolley towards me and lifted out the book of old Baltimore papers, bound together but surprisingly light, as if the news had thinned with age. ‘That’s what we’ve got,’ he said, pinching his pinched nose and twisting it to the side to sniff, ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s what’s left. Try not to smudge it, will you?’ And then, like an ailing Charon, he steered the trolley back to the comfort of the other shore, among the air conditioning and the forgotten papers.

  The pages of the Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser (1818–20) were less yellowed with age than cast into the burnished hue of a dusty summer cloud, the paper thick and softening at the edges, and blotched occasionally with a deeper yellow, like the smear of fat or oil. It was slow work, trawling through the advertisements for ‘Cohen’s lottery’ and the offer of a reward for an ‘eloped Negroe – of fine upright carriage, rather thin in figure than otherwise’. There were accounts of the spread of hydrophobia and the death of a young schoolboy; there was the shipping news, arrivals and departures; stories of sea-monsters discovered; records of the sessions in the Senate. More advertisements, for ointments, liniments, potions, pipsissiway (a root that cured cancer). An account of a man reputed to be a hundred and thirty years old, who had seen with his own eyes the coronation of Queen Anne. And then, with a growing palpitation of the heart, and an extra stickiness of the stubborn thumbs, I discovered the following:

  Pactaw – we have been favoured b
y an account of a remarkable new Science practiced in the humblest of our districts, by our own American Lavoisier, and a southern gentleman at that. The letter comes to us from Mr Topliff, apothecary and post-master in Pactaw, Virginia, via the Richmond Intelligencer.

  ‘There, in the back-room of my shop, attended by a host of the eager and the sceptical, Lt Samuel Syme, lately of Yale College, offered the following remarkable demonstration of the actions of the interior of the earth. Into an admixture of gray slop, containing, among other things, a sprinkling of sugar! Mr Syme administered a single drop of sulfuric acid and immediately leapt into the cranny of the side-door. His audience had no such recourse, and with what astonishment, delight, discomfort and, I confess, terror, we observed the result.

  I think the flame must have gone up to the ceiling, casting a black shadow against the paintwork which remains to this day, a towering inferno of living smoldering ash and fire. The room became intolerable with heat and fume, and though the application of an opened window somewhat diminished the torpor of its effect, none among us but covered our mouths with the hem of our shirts in an effort to prevent from choking. The air positively swam with small lumps of half-burned charcoal and a surprising and overpowering smell of caramel. After the initial shock, the gathering issued abruptly through the side-door whence Mr Syme himself had fled, others effecting a more instantaneous exit through the opened window.

  This little demonstration has consumed our thoughts and tongues the remaining week, engendering a great variety of opinions and consequent discussions, between those that consider his display the actions of a conjurer and a charlatan and those who believe we have stumbled across our very own Newton, or at the least, an American Mr Jameson, and a grand geognosist, as Lt Syme insists on calling himself. Regardless of these debates, no one disputes that Lt Syme has offered us a most convincing picture of Hell-fires, and effected more for our virtue in this brief experiment than the Priest has accomplished through a whole season of sermons.’

  After the initial excitement of my discovery, I confess I was troubled by a certain lightness suggested by the tone of Syme’s demonstration. Tippy Adams remarked on a ‘kind of vengeful humour’ in Sam, and though the volcanic experiment seemed rather teasing than angry, nevertheless it displayed a sense of trickery, the delight of the charlatan, a word broached by the humble apothecary himself. Naturally, the chemistry involved was old hat to a man of Sam’s education (Silliman impressed his first-year students with such demonstrations); and no doubt Sam revelled in the ignorance of his parochial neighbours. Still, this very desire to impress what must have been a collection of farmers with the rudiments of his art embarrassed me. It did not indicate a ‘mute, inglorious’ Newton buried in small-town life, but a somewhat shabby gentleman playing upon the superstitions of his boorish friends. At best, he appeared a tease; at worst, a sham, desperate for the meanest of admiration. In all likelihood, he was something of both. This did not augur well, I thought, for the role I had in mind for Syme.

  I stared out at the waste-green field, falling away from the stretches of suburban neighbourhoods towards London, and wondered if after all I had been barking up the wrong tree, or, worse still, barking where there was no tree. There is a peculiar loneliness to historical research. One acquires a taste, a distinct taste, for footprints, the intimate evidence of past lives, marks left in newspaper and letter, even in the items of a will. I had almost forgotten the touch of ordinary days, almost forgotten the courtesies of ignorance – accustomed as I was, by a lonely year away from wife and boys, to rummaging rudely through old lives, stepping on this and that and taking what I could. I missed my home; my wife had scarcely practised the trick of love – for it is a trick, a sleight of hand, a gift of eloquence – over the phone in two weeks, that particular intimacy of mouth and ear across oceans of air, conveyed by the warm oily plastic of the telephone. We talked but the heart was gone in us – she harboured some obscure resentment, which expressed itself in politeness and concern. Much has been made in the literature of the past century of the animal within us, unabated by ages of civility. In my experience, even our basest appetites need constant replenishment, they die for want of nourishment, flaring up only now and again in a kind of weak fever. I have known more harm done out of simple human dryness than out of any passion or taint in the blood. And there I sat, in the Colindale Newspaper Library, unearthing the life of a dead man who suddenly seemed to me better left buried. I was homesick, and the thick air dampened the splint between my thumb and forefinger till it stank; and I stared out of the window, hoping the rain would come soon.

  Once more into the breach, I thought, when the fellow with the pinched nose delivered, sniffing greatly, a little box of microfilm to my table. ‘Norfolk Weekly Intelligencer,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve got there; 1821, I shouldn’t imagine. The dates are all in a muddle. That’s what we have, I’m afraid; the rest is buggered.’ And he sniffed his way back to his desk.

  The Microfilm Chamber adjoined the reading room through an old arched set of double doors that at first appeared to be locked, until I read the proud notice across it: THESE DOORS ARE NOW AUTOMATIC. I waited, counting the slow beat of blood in my ears from the hot day; peered along the crack down the middle of the doors. Nothing happened. Perhaps their stiffness, their silence, their immobility were automatic, unconscious, requiring no particular effort of the will. They stayed put automatically, unblinkingly, unflinchingly. I lowered a shoulder against them; a bruise upon the nub of bone persuaded in me a grudging admiration for them. These doors knew what they did well; in true English fashion, they remained unmoved. As I remained, unmoved, before them, staring them out. The timeless silence of a hot day in an old library passed over me. I let it pass, in utter absence of mind, the blankness that follows the first leg swung over the edge of a bed in the morning, and precedes the second sudden brisk step towards the bathroom. I was almost spent, barred from a cave of treasures I suspected in that weak hour of containing fool’s gold.

  I stood on the casual verge of turning back (by such threads do the secrets even of our own dispositions hang) when I perceived that, far from being locked, the doors had begun to open of themselves and at their own pace – automatically and incrementally slowly. They wheezed slightly as they shuddered outwards, as if they had yet to enjoy the first cigarette of the day to clear their lungs. So I waited, until the ancient portals like old men on canes inched away from the middle, and I could squeeze my thick frame between them into the coldest room I have ever encountered in a lifetime of air-conditioned academic chambers.

  Once more into the breach, I muttered, braver than before. I seemed to have travelled from the Plutonist fires to the frozen waters of Neptunian theory. Hunched and huddled men stared at the flicker of the microfilms in a darkened room, like cavemen around a fire, rubbing their bare arms, roughened with goose pimples, to thaw the red blood in them and ease the flow. Nobody spoke, only the occasional clatter and whirl of a reel rewinding broke the white hum of the monitors. I had entered the ice-box of history, where the most delicate ephemera are frozen in photographic amber, revealed for an instant by a whizzing electric light, then cast into darkness again. Our memories are at the mercy of chance both ways, I reflected; the luck of what’s left behind and the luck of the eye that falls upon them. For as brief as the window of time that preserves us can be the passage of the single gaze that may light upon us later, and remember us to the world. As I flicked through the pages of the Norfolk Weekly Intelligencer, racing across the glow of the white screen, I thought not only of the footprints I hoped to find, but the tracks I was sure to miss.

  The Intelligencer was a collection of clippings from around the country, selected and printed by Bishop Perkins of Norfolk, for the ‘curious and pious Mind, which delights in all the works of the Lord’. Each issue opened with a half-dozen pages of ecclesiastical notes, interpretations of scripture, records of sermons; there followed a brief section titled ‘Arts & Science &
Culture’, and finally a page of ‘Remarkable Occurrences’, such as the interrupted interment of a woman presumed dead, until a tumble occasioned by a clumsy undertaker opened a cut in her forearm, which ‘bled freshly to general astonishment’. After a consultation of doctors, and the several applications of a scalpel to her skin, each resulting in a renewed flow, she was pronounced dead again ‘on account of the absence of breath’ and buried at last. It was not among these phenomena, thank God, but in the previous section that I discovered at last the following news of my ‘undiscovered genius’, recorded by a Mr Thomas Jenkyns, and picked up from the Southern Courier, October 1819:

  We yesterday afternoon witnessed a very ingenious and interesting experiment made by Lt Syme of Pactaw, Virginia, by which the fact is completely demonstrated that water is compressible and also elastic, contrary to the hitherto received opinions of Philosophers upon that subject. The experiment was made with a hollow brass Cylinder 36 inches in length, divided in 1000 equal parts and filled with water. A Piston so fitted as to be perfectly watertight was introduced, and by means of a Force ingeniously applied, equal to the pressure of about forty atmospheres, the column of water within was reduced in height by thirty parts out of the thousand, or 3 percent. The utmost degree of compression hitherto ascertained we believe to be about the thirtieth part of one thousandth, or the third part of 1 percent.