The Rings of Saturn

by W. G. Sebald

  to breathe the air. The name of the lady who had been cared for in this manner was Sarah Camell, who died on the 26th of October 1799. As the wife of the Ditchingham doctor, she would have been acquainted with the Ives family, and it is probable that Charlotte, together with her parents, was present at the funeral and perhaps even played a pavane on the pianoforte at the Camells' home after the service. The higher sentiments which were cultivated at the time in the circles in which Sarah and Charlotte moved are preserved in the elegant words of the epitaph which Dr Camell, who survived his wife by nearly forty years, had engraved on the south-facing side of the pale grey tomb:

  Firm in the principles and constant

  in the practice of religion

  Her life displayed the peace of virtue

  Her modest sense, Her unobtrusive elegance

  of mind and manners,

  Her sincerity and benevolence of heart

  Secured esteem, conciliated affection,

  Inspired confidence and diffused happiness.

  Ditchingham churchyard was the very last stop on my walk through the county of Suffolk. The afternoon was already drawing to a close, and so I decided to return to the main road and continue a short way in the direction of Norwich, to the Mermaid in Hedenham, where the bar would be opening soon. I would be able to phone home from there to be picked up. The route I had to take led me past Ditchingham Hall, a house built around 1700 in beautiful mauve-coloured brick, the windows of which are fitted with dark green shutters. It was situated well off the main road above a serpentine lake, and encompassed on all sides by extensive parkland. Later, while I was waiting for Clara in the Mermaid, it occurred to me that Ditchingham Park must have been laid out around the time when Chateaubriand was in Suffolk. Estates of this kind, which enabled the ruling elite to imagine themselves surrounded by boundless lands where nothing offended the eye, did not become fashionable until the second half of the eighteenth century. Planning and executing the work necessary for an embarkment could take two or three decades. In order to complete such a project it was usually necessary to buy parcels of land and add them to the existing estate, and roads, tracks, individual farmsteads, sometimes even entire villages had to be moved, as the object was to enjoy an uninterrupted view from the house over a natural expanse innocent of any human presence. It was for the same reason that fences were replaced with broad, grass-covered ha-has, which were dug out at a cost of many thousands of working hours. Naturally, such an undertaking, with its considerable impact not only on the landscape, but also on the life of the local communities, could not always be accomplished without controversy. At the period in question, an ancestor of Earl Ferrers, the present owner of Ditchingham Hall, having become embroiled in a confrontation with one of his estate managers, dispatched him with his gun, for which deed he was in due course sentenced to death by his peers in the House of Lords, and hanged publicly in London by a silken rope. —The least costly aspect of laying out a landscaped park was planting trees as specimens or in small groups, even if it was not seldom preceded by the felling of tracts of woodland and the burning-off of unsightly thickets and scrub that did not comply with the overall concept. Nowadays, given that only a third of the trees planted at the time are still standing in most parks, and that more are dying each year of old age and many other causes, we will soon be able to envisage once more the Torricelli-like emptiness in which the great country seats stood in the late eighteenth century. Chateaubriand also later made a modest attempt to realize the ideal of nature projected into that emptiness. When he returned in 1807 from his long journey to Constantinople and Jerusalem, he bought a summer house that lay hidden among wooded hills in the Vallée aux Loups, not far from the town of Aulnay. It is there that he begins to write his memoirs, on the first pages of which he speaks of the trees he has planted and tended with his own hands. Now, he says, they are still so small that I provide them with shade whenever I step between them and the sun. But one day, when they have grown, they will give shade to me, and look after me in my old age much as I looked after them in their youth. I feel a bond unites me with these trees; I write sonnets, elegies and odes to them; they are like children, I know them all by name, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them. —This picture was taken at

  Ditchingham about ten years ago, on a Saturday afternoon when the manor house was open to the public in aid of charity. The Lebanese cedar which I am leaning against, unaware still of the woeful events that were to come, is one of the trees that were planted when the park was laid out, and most of which, as I have said, have already disappeared. Since the mid-Seventies there has been an ever more rapid decline in the numbers of trees, with heavy losses, above all amongst the species most common in England. Indeed, one tree has become well nigh extinct: Dutch elm disease spread from the south coast into Norfolk around 1975, and within the space of just two or three summers there were no elms left alive in the vicinity. The six elm trees which had shaded the pond in our garden withered away in June 1978, just a few weeks after they unfolded their marvellous light green foliage for the last time. The virus spread through the root systems of entire avenues with unbelievable speed, causing capillaries to tighten and leading to the trees' dying of thirst. Even solitary trees were located with infallible accuracy by the airborne beetles which spread the disease. One of the most perfect trees I have ever seen was an almost two hundred-year-old elm that stood on its own in a field not far from our house. About one hundred feet tall, it filled an immense space. I recall that, after most of the elms in the area had succumbed, its countless, somewhat asymmetrical, finely serrated leaves would sway in the breeze as if the scourge which had obliterated its entire kind would pass it by without a trace; and I also recall that a bare fortnight later all these apparently invincible leaves were brown and curled up, and dust before the autumn came. It was then also that I noticed that the crowns of ash trees were becoming sparse, and the foliage of oaks was thinning and displaying strange mutations. At the same time, the trees themselves were producing leaves from hard old wood, and by mid-summer they were dropping masses of rock-hard, deformed acorns that were covered with a sticky substance. The beech trees, which until then had remained in good shape, were affected by several long droughts. The leaves were only half their usual size, and almost all the beechnuts were empty. One after the other, the poplars on the meadow died. Some of the dead

  trunks are still standing, while others lie broken and bleached in the grass. Finally, in the autumn of 1987, a hurricane such as no one had ever experienced before passed over the land. According to official estimates over fourteen million mature hard-leaf trees fell victim to it, not to mention the damage to conifer plantations and bushes. That was on the night of the 16th of October. Without warning, the storm came up out of the Bay of Biscay, moved along the French west coast, crossed the English Channel and swept over the south-east part of the island out into the North Sea. I woke at about three in the morning, less as a result of the thunderous roar than because of the curious warmth and the increasing air pressure in my bedroom. In contrast with other equinoctial gales which I have experienced here, this one came not in driving gusts but with an unrelenting and, it seemed, ever more powerful force. I stood at the window and looked through the glass, which was strained almost to breaking point, down towards the end of the garden, where the crowns of the large trees in the neighbouring bishop's park were bent and streaming like aquatic plants in a deep current. White clouds raced across in the darkness, and again and again the sky was lit up by a terrible flickering which, I later discovered, was caused by power lines touching each other. At some point I must have turned away for a while. At all events, I still remember that I did not believe my eyes when I looked out again and saw that where the currents of air had shortly beforehand been pouring through the black mass of trees, there was now just the paleness of the empty horizon. It seemed as if someone had pulled a curtain to one side to reveal a formless scene that bordered upon the und
erworld. And at the very moment that I registered the unaccustomed brightness of the night over the park, I knew that everything down there had been destroyed. And yet I hoped that the ghastly emptiness could be explained by some other means, for in the mounting din of the storm I had heard none of the crashing sounds that go with the felling of timber. It was not until later that I realized that the trees, held to the last by their root systems, toppled only gradually, and because they were forced down so slowly their crowns, which were entangled with each other, did not shatter but remained virtually undamaged. In this way, entire tracts of woodland were pressed down flat as if they had been cornfields. In the first light of dawn, when the storm had begun to abate, I ventured out into the garden. For a long time I stood choked with emotion amidst the devastation. It was like being in a kind of wind tunnel, so strong was the suction created by the onrushing air, which was far too warm for the time of year. The ancient trees on either side of the path leading along the edge of the park were all lying on the ground as if in a swoon, and beneath the huge oaks, ash and plane trees, beeches and limes lay the torn and mangled shrubs that had grown in their shade, thujas and yews, hazel and laurel bushes, holly and rhododendrons. With pulsating radiance the sun rose over the horizon. The gusts continued for a while, and then it was suddenly quiet. Nothing moved, apart from the birds which had lived in the bushes and trees and which were now flitting about amongst the branches that had remained green well into the autumn that year. I do not know how I got through the first day after the storm, but do recall that during the night, doubting what I had seen with my own eyes, I walked once more through the park. As there were power cuts throughout the whole region, everything was in deep darkness. There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child, or over the desert in my dreams. From the extreme north right down to the south where the view had before been blocked by trees, the sparkling constellations were spread out, the Plough, the tail of Draco, the triangle of Taurus, the Pleiades, Pegasus, the Swan and the Dolphin. Unchanged and, as it seemed to me, more magnificent than ever before, they revolved above me. The silence of that brilliant night after the storm was followed by the revving of chainsaws during the winter months. It took four or five labourers until March to cut up the branches, burn the rubbish, and haul away the trunks. An excavator dug large holes in which stumps and roots, some of them the size of a small house, were buried. Now, in the truest sense of the word, everything was turned upside down. The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay. All that grew in the hard-baked earth were tufts of swamp grass, the seeds of which had laid in the depths for goodness knew how long. The rays of the sun, with nothing left to impede them, destroyed all the shade-loving plants so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain. Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally even heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound.

  10

  Amongst the miscellaneous papers left by Sir Thomas Browne treating such diverse subjects as practical and ornamental horticulture, the urns found at Brampton in Norfolk, the making of artificial hills and burrows, the several plants mentioned in Scripture, the Saxon tongue, the pronouncements of the Oracle at Delphos, the fishes eaten by our Saviour, the behaviour of insects, hawks and falconry, and a case of boulimia cetenaria which occurred in Yarmouth, amongst these and various other tracts, there is also to be found a catalogue of remarkable books,

  listing pictures, antiquities and sundry singular items that may have formed part of a collection put together by Browne but were more likely products of his imagination, the inventory of a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letter son the page. In a short prefatory note to an unknown reader, Browne compares this "Musaeum Clausum" with the Musaeum Aldrovandi, the Musaeum Calceolarianum; the Casa Abbellita at Loretto, and the repositories of the Emperor Rudolf at Prague and Vienna, all of them famed collections of his day. Among the rare books and documents in Browne's "Musaeum" are King Solomon's treatise on the shadow cast by our thoughts, de Umbris Idearum, previously reported to have been in the library of the Duke of Bavaria; a collection of Hebrew epistles, which passed between the two most learned women of the seventeenth century, Molinea of Sedan and Maria Churman of Utrecht; and "a Sub Marine Herbal" describing in exhaustive detail all that grows on the mountain ranges and in the valleys under the sea, the many kinds of algae, corals and water ferns never seen by man, sargassum borne along by tropical currents, as well as whole islands of plants drifting from continent to continent in the path of the trade winds. Browne's imaginary library further includes a fragment of an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond Thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs, and moreover a poem by Ovidius Naso, hitherto supposed lost, written in the Getick language during his exile at Tomi and found wrapt up in wax at Sabaria, on the frontiers of Hungary, where there remains a tradition that he died in his return towards Rome from Tomi, either after his pardon or the death of Augustus. Apart from all manner of other curiosities, Browne's museum has in it a drawing in chalk of the great fair of Almachara in Arabia, which is held at night to avoid the great heat of the sun; a painting of the famous battle fought between the Romands and the Jaziges on the frozen Danube; a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coast of Provence; Solyman the Magnificent on horseback at the siege of Vienna, and behind him a whole city of snow-white tents extending as far as the horizon; a seascape with floating icebergs upon which sit walruses, bears, foxes and a variety of rare fowls; and a number of pieces delineating the worst inhumanities in tortures for the benefit of the observer: the scaphismus of the Persians, the living truncation of the Turks, the hanging sport at the feasts of the Thracians, the exact method of flaying men alive, beginning between the shoulders, according to the meticulous description of Thomas Minadoi. Occupying some undefined position between the natural and the unnatural is also a fair English lady drawn al negro, or in the AEthiopian hue excelling the original white beauty, with the motto: "Sed quandam volo nocte nigriorem". In addition to such astonishing writings and artworks, the Musaeum Clausum also contains medals and coins; a precious stone from a vulture's head; a neat crucifix made out of the crossbone of a frog's head; ostrich and humming-bird eggs; bright-hued parakeet feathers; spirits and salt of Sargasso excellent against the scurvy; extract of cachundè or liberns employed in the East Indies against melancholy; and a glass of spirits made of aethereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure daylight, and therefore shown only in winter, or by the light of a carbuncle, or Bononian stone. All of these things are recorded by Browne the doctor and naturalist in his register of marvels, all of these and many more that I do not propose to list in this place, excepting perhaps the bamboo cane in which, at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinianus, two Persian friars who had long been in China to discover the secrets of sericulture had brought the first eggs of the silkworm over the Empire's borders into the Western world.

  The silkworm moth, Bombyx mori, which lives in white-fruited mulberry trees is a member of the Bombycidae or spinners, a subspecies of the Lepidoptera which, together with the Saturnidae, includes some of the most beautiful of all moths—the Kentish Glory, Endromis versilcolor, the Great Peacock, Bombyx atlas, the Large Ermine, Harpyia vinula and the Emperor moth, Saturnia pavonia. The fully developed silkworm moth, however, is an unprepossessing creature measuring a mere one
and a half

  inches across and an inch lengthways. Its wings are ashen white with pale brown stripes and a crescent-shaped, often barely perceptible mark. The only purpose it has is to propagate. The male dies soon after mating. The female lays three to five hundred eggs over the course of several days, and then also dies. The silkworms that hatch from the eggs, an encyclopaedia dating from 1844 informs me, are enrobed in a black, velvety fur when they enter this world. During their short lives, which last only six or seven weeks, they are overcome by sleep on four occasions and, after shedding their old skin, emerge from each one re-made, always whiter, smoother and larger, becoming more beautiful, and finally almost completely transparent. A few days after the last sloughing one can notice a redness on the throat, which heralds the onset of metamorphosis. The caterpillar now stops eating, runs about restlessly, and, seeking to leave the low earth behind, strives to gain greater heights, until it has found the right place and can start to weave its cell from the resinous juices produced in its insides. If one slits open a caterpillar that has been killed with ethyl alcohol along the length of its back, one sees a cluster of intertwined small tubes that resemble intestines. They end by the mouth, in two very fine orifices, through which the juices pour forth. During its first day of work, the caterpillar spins an extensive, disorderly, fragmented web which is used to secure the cocoon. And then, constantly moving its head back and forth and reeling out an uninterrupted thread almost a thousand yards long, it constructs the actual egg-shaped casing around itself. In this shell, which admits neither air not moisture, the caterpillar changes into a nympth by sloughing off its skin for one last time. It remains in this state for two to three weeks in all, until the butterfly described above emerges. —The Silkworm's native habitat seems to include all those Asian countries where the white mulberry trees grow in the wild. There it lived in the open, left to its open devices, until man, having discovered its usefulness, was prompted to foster it. Chinese history notes that, two thousand and seven hundred years before the beginning of the Christian calendar, Huang Ti, the Emperor of the Earth who reigned for more than a century and taught his subjects how to build wagons, ships and grain mills, persuaded his first wife, Hsi-ling-shi, to attend to the silkworms, to devise trials for their employment, and increase, by means of this her especial task, the happiness of the people. Hsi-ling-shi thereupon took the worms from the trees in the palace garden and into her own care, in the imperial apartments, where, protected from their natural enemies and the unpredictable and often inclement spring weather, they thrived so well that this marked the beginning of what was later to be developed into domestic silkworm culture. Together with the unravelling of the cocoons and the weaving and embroidering of the materials, this was to become the principal occupation of all the succeeding empresses, and passed from their hands into those of the entire female sex. Promoted in every conceivable way by those in authority, the rearing of silkworms and the production of silk had, in the course of a few generations, taken such an upturn that the name of China came to be synonymous with an inexhaustible wealth of silk. Chinese merchants traversed the length and breadth of Asia with their silk-laden caravans, taking some two hundred and forty days to travel from the Chinese sea to the coast of Mediterranean. Because of this enormous distance, and also because of the horrific punishments awaiting those who disseminated the knowledge of sericulture beyond the borders of the Empire, the fabrication of silk was restricted to China for thousands of years, until the two aforementioned friars with their hollowed-out walking staffs arrived in Byzantium. After the raising of silkworms had become established at the Greek court and on the Aegean islands, it took a further millennium for this elaborate form of husbandry to pass via Sicily and Naples to Piedmont, Savoy and Lambardy, where Genoa and Milan soon flourished as the European centres of silk cultivation. Within half a century, the art of silk-making had reached France from northern Italy, thanks to Olivier de Serres, who is still considered the father of French agriculture. His manual for landowners, published in 1600 under the title Théatre d'agriculture et mesnage de Champs, which went through thirteen printings in a very short space of time, made such a deep impression on Henry IV that he summoned him to Paris, offering him copious honours and favours, to be his first counsellor, on a par with Sully, his prime minister and minister of finance. De Serres, who was reluctant to surrender the management of his own estates to someone else, demanded one favour as a condition for accepting the office he had been offered: that the cultivation of silk should be introduced in France, and that to that end the native trees in the royal gardens throughout the country be uprooted and mulberry trees planted in their stead. The king was enthralled by de Serres' plan, but before it could be put into practice he had to overcome the resistance of Sully, whom he normally held in high esteem and who opposed the idea of producing silk, either because he genuinely considered it the height of folly or because he saw in de Serres a rival in the ascendant.