by James Morrow
“Correct.”
“Not excluding Man himself?”
“That’s right.”
“What an exhilarating idea!” exclaimed Miss Martineau.
“‘Not excluding Man himself,’” echoed Mr. Holyoake. “I’m glad you warned me, Miss Bathurst, lest I betray an unseemly surprise when a baboon shows up at the next Holyoake family reunion.”
“My theory does not count baboons, chimpanzees, gorillas, or orang-utangs amongst your progenitors,” Chloe explained. “It suggests, rather, that today’s humans and modern apes boast an extinct common ancestor.”
“Fiddlesticks,” said Professor Owen. “For my money, your shrub is no more a disproof of God than an elf is an elephant.”
“I shall make one point in the petitioner’s favor,” said Mr. Chadwick. “To wit, I do not understand her argument and therefore scruple to call it worthless.”
“I confess to sharing the vicar’s perplexity,” said Woolfenden, whereupon the other rakehells murmured in agreement.
“Might I lay a proposition before this august body?” asked Chloe. “Sponsor an expedition to the faraway Galápagos archipelago, for it happens that those volcanic islands harbor vivid illustrations of my theory. I speak now of certain rare giant tortoises, bizarre marine iguanas, and strange terrestrial lizards—plus uncommon finches, flycatchers, and mockingbirds. To see such specimens in the flesh is to know that transmutation has occurred on our planet time and again.”
“We have already secured a ship and a captain,” noted Algernon, handing Runciter’s letter to Lord Woolfenden. “Were you to grant us three hundred pounds with which to engage officers, lay in supplies, and caulk the Equinox’s hull, we could set sail within a month, returning to Oxford in less than a year.”
“In summary, just as the Diluvian League asked the Shelley Society to finance a hunt for Noah’s ark,” said Chloe, “so do we now beseech you to patronize our quest for the Tree of Life. Give us the funds, plus a written commission whereby we might attract a crew, and we shall settle this pesky God question once and for all.”
“We’re prepared to endorse your project and seed it with cash, Miss Bathurst, provided that a majority of our judges is sympathetic,” said Woolfenden. “I assume that our freethinkers are keen to have you fetch these wondrous reptiles and birds.”
“Bring ’em on,” said Atkinson.
“I yearn to ride about town astride a giant tortoise,” said Miss Martineau.
“By its fruits ye shall know the Tree of Life,” declared Holyoake.
“Whereas our Anglicans are probably less eager to see you sail away on the Equinox,” said Woolfenden.
“The proposed expedition would be a waste of everyone’s time,” said Symonds.
A nay vote—and yet Chloe heard in his voice a whiff of equivocation.
“The object of Miss Bathurst’s quest is not a tree but a weed of corrupt pedigree,” said Owen.
Another nay vote—but again she detected a note of doubt.
Before delivering his verdict, Mr. Chadwick rose from the bench and stood at full height. Despite a certain gawkiness, the man cut an impressive figure. Chloe suspected that half the ewes in his flock accepted the Jehovah hypothesis largely in consequence of their infatuation with this bony Quixote of a cleric.
“I’ve already noted that Miss Bathurst’s argument eludes me in the main, and what I do comprehend of it strikes me as dubious at best.”
Chloe’s palms grew moist. Her bowels contracted into a knot of dread.
“Now permit me to fence with myself,” Mr. Chadwick continued. “I cannot but recall Mr. Holyoake’s response when asked to sanction the Diluvian League’s mission. An atheist, he insisted, has naught to fear from the facts. Surely the same holds true for a Christian. And so I say, ‘Send Miss Bathurst to Galápagos!’”
A mellifluous warmth rushed through Chloe’s veins. With a single sentence the Reverend Mr. Chadwick had crystallized the conditions whereby she might rescue Papa from the jaws of privation, pluck Algernon from the clutches of dissolution, and be awarded the plummiest part an actress could ever hope to play. Strutting towards the judges’ bench, she ascended the dais and pointed to the illustrative shrub.
“Until I come back from Galápagos, bearing the Tree of Life, you will have to make do with this facsimile,” she said. “I know you will supply it with the best imitation water and the finest artificial sunlight.” She turned and, humming the bawdy ballad through which Jack Rackham had wooed Anne Bonney, followed her little brother out of the library.
* * *
Although the Reverend Granville Heathway did not particularly mind his incarceration in Wormleighton Sanitarium, the food being palatable, his keepers agreeable, the appointments generous—he even had an escritoire—and the view from his barred window a pastoral panorama complete with shepherd, flock, and meadow, he worried that his residency in a lunatic asylum might prompt some people to suppose he’d gone mad. In Granville’s opinion his recent change of address, from his Down Village parsonage to this Warwickshire barmy bin, did not bespeak a permanent loss of reason. He’d simply mislaid that faculty for the moment, the better to travel unimpeded through his mind’s many terrae incognitae.
True, prior to his internment, Granville had exhibited behaviors that arguably indicated lunacy. His project of eating the Book of Revelation, for example. Just as the medieval Rabbi Löew had nourished his clay golem by feeding it written prayers, so had Granville sustained his soul by attempting to devour the Apocalypse. He’d gotten as far as the Whore of Babylon, whereupon his beloved Evelyn, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, declared that she would walk out the parsonage door and never return if he consumed even one more vision of Saint John the Divine.
But it was not until Granville had begun scouring the countryside for scarecrows and setting them on fire that Evelyn arranged for his residency at Wormleighton. The failure of his fellow Englishmen to appreciate the scarecrow menace was for Granville a continual source of frustration. By day these effigies were benign, keeping the nation’s crops from harm, but at night they transmogrified into agents of Satan, suffocating innocent citizens in their beds by cramming straw down their throats.
His promise to enter Wormleighton quietly had turned on two conditions. First, he must be allowed to bring along a dovecote, some unhatched pigeon eggs, and a hot-water bottle to serve as an incubator. Second, if the Mayfair Diluvian League, of which he was a charter member, ever mounted its search for Noah’s ark, the explorers must send him regular reports via the first generation of pigeons he raised in the asylum. Initially the leader of the hunt, the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple, dismissed this request as “the quintessence of impracticality.” But then Granville’s son, Bertram, having absented himself from his teaching duties at St. Giles Grammar School and joined the company of H.M.S. Paragon, agreed to collect all eight pigeons from his father’s cell, secure them aboard the ship, and dispatch them sequentially as the expedition progressed.
Right before they’d bid each other good-bye, Granville had received Bertram’s promise that the first pigeon he released would be Cassandra (the most intelligent of the birds and the one most likely to find her way back to the asylum). Day after day, Granville sat in his white-walled room, his gaze alternating between the window and the empty dovecote. Where was Cassandra? Had she fallen prey to a hawk? Gotten waylaid by a storm? Blasted from the sky by a scarecrow wielding a fowling piece?
And then one morning, shortly after Granville had consumed his breakfast of kippers and buttered oatmeal (not as nourishing as the Apocalypse but still savory), Cassandra came winging through the window bars, warbling triumphantly. O glorious dove! O blessed bird! O angel with a tawny beak! For a full minute she circled the cell, at last settling atop the cote. Deftly Granville unstrapped the capsule from her leg, then extracted and unfurled the scrip, only to be astonished by the minuscule hand in which Bertram had written his message.
Fortunately, amongst the personal
effects permitted to Granville was a brass-framed quizzing-glass for reading Holy Writ (his keepers having allowed him a Bible after he’d sworn not to eat it). The device proved equal to the infinitesimal, recovering Bertram’s words from the microscopic realm and displaying them before Granville’s incredulous gaze.
Dearest Father,
Greetings from the Orient! I hope that this, the first of my dispatches, finds you in better spirits than when we sat in the asylum garden discussing my imminent adventure and your recent internment. How infuriating that your keepers have failed to understand that your present mental state is in fact an extravagant form of sanity.
The month of August found us navigating the Mediterranean Sea, dropping anchor off the fabled isle of Crete. After reprovisioning in Ierápetra, we negotiated the Dardanelles, then crossed the Marmara and set our course for the Bosporus, until at last we reached the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Constantinople! Has ever a city been blessed with a more euphonic name? Speak the word slowly. Con-stan-ti-no-ple. Do you hear the enchantment in those syllables, Father? I’m sure you do, for this is the most mysterious, beautiful, and—if one believes the stories about a local hookah-den—magical metropolis on Earth.
Thirteen of Sultan Abdülmecid’s courtiers awaited us on the docks, a delegation headed by the Grand Vizier, Mustafa Reshid Pasha, an urbane person with a remarkable beard, long and curved like a scimitar. I soon inferred that, prior to our departure, the Reverend Mr. Dalrymple had corresponded in French with Mustafa Reshid, who’d mastered that tongue during his diplomatic missions to Paris. And now these two worldly gentlemen were finally meeting face-to-face.
Mustafa Reshid and the courtiers directed our party into a coach drawn by four Arabian horses. Our first stop was the Hippodrome, built by the Romans as a chariot-racing arena and presently employed by the Turks for their own equestrian spectacles. Then came Hagia Sophia, formerly a Byzantine church, now a mosque ringed by soaring minarets. Next we saw the forum of Constantine, featuring an immense Roman column believed to contain, in the Grand Vizier’s words, “evidence that we are indeed in the land of Noah, including the adz with which he built the ark and the skull of the first African lion to come on board.”
The most curious item on our itinerary was the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin. Given the lateness of the hour, Mustafa Reshid declined to take us inside, but he assured us we weren’t missing much. He called it “a rank and shoddy establishment” that stayed in business only in consequence of “a legend more fabulous than anything Scheherazade ever told the Persian King.”
“Let me guess,” said Captain Deardon. “The ghost of Sinbad the Sailor is in there right now, puffing on a water-pipe and recounting his escape from a cyclops.”
“You are close to the mark,” said the Grand Vizier. “Our more credulous citizens will tell you that the den is frozen in the Christian year A.D. 1000, at the height of the Byzantine Empire, drawing its customers not only from distant towns and faraway lands but also from epochs yet to come.”
“That makes no sense,” I observed.
“You are correct, Effendi. The claim strains credulity. My bodyguards patronize Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin, and they have yet to meet a pilgrim from the future. Still, there is a certain logic to the legend. Constantinople has always been an intellectual crossroads, a place where a mad philosopher, visionary poet, or wandering soothsayer might find a sympathetic audience—and so in His beneficence Allah exempted one tiny patch of Byzantium from the laws of time and chance.”
As dusk shrouded the city, the Grand Vizier escorted our party to the Topkapi Palace with its spectacular view of the harbor. After assigning each of us a private suite, Reshid Pasha’s majordomo explained that we would next descend to the southwest courtyard, shed our clothing, and avail ourselves of “that most civilized of amenities, a haman,” by which he meant a Turkish steam bath. Striving mightily to avoid giving insult, Mr. Dalrymple explained that we English do not have nakedness in our culture, then hastened to add that he had no objection to public bathing per se, especially not the sort practiced in Constantinople.
The following morning, as we all sat in an elegant salon eating bread, cheese, honey, and fruit whilst drinking preternaturally strong coffee, I came to understand that the bond between Reshid Pasha and Mr. Dalrymple is more in the nature of a treaty than a friendship. It seems that several months ago they struck an accord whereby the Grand Vizier would assist the Diluvian League in excavating Noah’s ark, reprovisioning the Paragon, and granting both vessels safe passage through the Bosporus. For his part, Dalrymple will intercede with the Archbishop of Canterbury, who will in turn urge Her Majesty to form an alliance with the Ottoman Empire prior to Turkey’s coming clash with Russia (an inevitable conflict, Reshid Pasha believes, given the Tsar’s desire to drive the Moslem infidel out of Europe).
For the remainder of our repast, we discussed what lay ahead for the Diluvian League—a 700-mile voyage to Trebizond, followed by a 180-mile overland passage. Reshid Pasha proposed not only to equip the expedition with victuals, sweet water, sailcloth, rope, and sledges but also to lend it the talents of Ahmed Silahdar, commander of his bodyguards, who has considerable experience negotiating the harsh terrain of Anatolia. Most auspiciously, Captain Silahdar will bring along his twenty best men.
Ere the conversation ended, I learned to my astonishment that Reshid Pasha endorses the Diluvian League’s mission (which he sees as “a quest to glorify Almighty Allah and by extension the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him”). Nevertheless, he has misgivings, which he did not forbear to share with Mr. Dalrymple—to wit, he is reluctant to commit soldiers and supplies to an Ararat adventure when, according to the Holy Koran, the ark resides on Mount Al-Judi. By our third bowl of coffee a compromise was reached. Initially the party will search the location suggested by Genesis 8:4, but should that venture fail, everyone will proceed to the place specified in Sura 11:44. I hope Mr. Dalrymple performs a meticulous survey of Ararat. How scandalous it would be if the League left the true Judaic ark sitting where Noah abandoned it and instead brought back a false Moslem ark from Al-Judi.
When the Paragon sails again, I shan’t be amongst her passengers. True, I could accompany the expedition as far as Trebizond—but then I would have to stay on board, tending the birds, for Captain Deardon has told me he cannot allow his crew or Silahdar’s men to “waste their energy bearing the dovecote south to Ararat.” So it appears that the next three months will find me in residence at the palace. One day soon I may revisit Hagia Sophia, the better to appreciate its splendor. I may even slip into Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin’s establishment, though I doubt that I’ll encounter any travelers from the future.
Your loving son,
Bertram
Upon reading his son’s message, Granville knitted his brow and furled the scrip, as momentous in its own way as the paper prayers that had nourished Rabbi Löew’s golem. He deposited the pigeon missive in the drawer of his nightstand. Although the news from Constantinople was heartening—how marvelous that the Grand Vizier had decided to help facilitate the ark hunt—Granville was troubled by Bertram’s dismissal of the Hookah-Den of Yusuf ibn Ziayüddin. Once again the dear boy was being unreasonably chary of the irrational. To paraphrase Saint Anselm’s Ontological Proof, the only thing more perfect than an imaginary way station for time travelers would be an actual way station for time travelers, and because a person can conceive of such a place it must ipso facto exist.
Certainly Granville, if given the opportunity, would gladly enter Yusuf Effendi’s establishment and sit down amongst the water-pipe users. The chances were excellent that the hookah-den would one day be honored with a visit from Jesus himself—not the Galilean carpenter of the Gospels, of course, but rather the Lord of the Parousia, eager for some peace and quiet amidst the hurly-burly of the Second Coming. Granville would happily buy Christ a bag of hashish and listen to his troubles. It was the least he owed the Word made flesh.
* * *
Although Chloe Bathurst’s acting career officially began with The Haunted Priory, her stage debut had in fact occurred in a school pageant written and directed by her parish priest. Chloe had portrayed Little Aggie Teal, whose parents had neglected to baptize her, a lapse that assumed cosmic proportions when, after being run down by a horse, she arrived unshriven at the gates of Perdition. Before Satan could take the child under his membranous wing, the Redeemer himself materialized in the Bottomless Pit bearing a christening font (a development that, even at age ten, Chloe thought inane). Aggie begged to be sprinkled, Jesus complied, and she was whisked heavenward like smoke up a flue.
Fifteen years later, as Chloe and Algernon approached their father’s place of imprisonment, her irony bone began to sing. Whereas the fake Hell that had nearly claimed Aggie Teal announced itself as Lucifer’s domain, all leaping flames and prancing imps, the real Hell of Holborn Workhouse presented to the world a soothing and fastidious aspect. Its stone façade was whitewashed, the path neatly raked, the hedges meticulously trimmed.
The inner reaches told, or rather exuded, a different story—a narrative of fumigants locked in a losing battle with proliferating vermin and unemptied chamber pots. After wandering the facility for several minutes, Chloe and Algernon found their way to a courtyard where the cottage of the superintendent, Mr. Wadhams, stood in isolation from the stench. Upon learning that the intruders were Phineas Bathurst’s offspring, Wadhams, a pompous autocrat who seemed to be concealing turnips beneath his waistcoat, insisted that, contrary to whatever rumors their father might have circulated during his furlough, he was neither underfed nor overworked. As for the proposed visit, Wadhams would allow it provided Mr. Bathurst continued picking oakum throughout and received from his children no gift of food or spirits.
The superintendent now summoned a cudgel-carrying overseer, one Squibble, who led Chloe and her brother down a spiral staircase to a subterranean chamber lit only by ensconced candles. As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, a grid of refectory tables materialized, each piled high with rigging and towlines. Dressed in paupers’ uniforms and supervised by two sentinels armed with truncheons, the inmates took no notice of the newly arrived party but instead pursued their bloody-fingered toil, tearing apart the ropes and shoving the wads of fiber into bushel baskets. Squibble cleared his throat, then thrice banged his cudgel on the stone floor, the harsh reports echoing off the moist walls. Seated at the nearest table, flanked by a pockmarked man and a snaggle-toothed woman, Phineas Bathurst looked up, squinted through the murk, and, recognizing his daughter, smiled like a child eating Christmas pudding.
