?
Walton was fond of round numbers. When a news account of a disaster cited “thousands,” he entered 10,000 in the red notebook, the thickest of the dozen. When dates were unclear, he invariably chose those with the most resonance, the anniversary of another earthquake or a moment that coincided with an eruption a thousand miles away. He tended to include small earthquakes in Europe and North America, while an event in Asia or South America needed hundreds of fatalities to earn an entry. If he could find no fatalities in a Western quake, he still put a question mark: no one could be sure that a miner somewhere hadn’t had a rock drop on his head, or that a fisherman hadn’t been swallowed by a wave.
The list was organized by season, rather than by area or by year, because after his first earthquake in 1868, Walton had become convinced that events were likelier in times of flux—fall and spring—than solstices. By 1872 he’d decided that it was all about the moon, all a matter of magnetism: ocean tides were echoed under the crust in magma. Even when he’d realized there was no pattern in historical accounts, he continued to maintain that events like the Corinth quake near the winter solstice of 856 were an anomaly, and he remained in love with nature’s machines of destruction. He traveled to earthquake and volcano sites searching for variables—vulcanism, tides, storms on the sun, orbits of other planets, fermenting rocks—and he believed that a code would make itself clear someday. The earth knew what it was doing, and shivered in concert, with a goal in mind.
By the end, he believed:
that earthquakes and vulcanism were all of one piece;
that gravity and tides informed the movement of magma;
that certain elements akin to uranium, as yet largely unidentified, actually fermented, and acted, under the considerable pressure of the earth’s mantle and lower crust, not unlike soda when it came in contact with vinegar. This led to subsets: the notion that magnetism and vulcanism happened because of a chemical reaction, or
the notion that it happened because the inside of the earth was alive with microscopic organisms.
He also believed:
that some minerals had been created by these tiny microorganisms in caves underground, and
that some minerals had been created by impacts and fires from meteorites and comets, and
that other minerals had been carried into older rocks as microscopic seeds by water, which cracked open these rocks, allowing these seeds to fill these cracks and mature as veins, and
that the earth had once been upside down (or was currently upside down, and had once been right side up), and
that amber and tiger’s eye and lapis and opals and turquoise came from ancient drowned crustaceans and forests, still remembered in myth.
Someone’s myth. Walton had listened to the nurses who’d pummeled and plunged him in Europe and Asia and Africa: these were the stories Henning patiently transcribed, thinking that someday he could make them visible. A woman in Danzig had told Walton of an amber forest under the Baltic, surrounding a drowned castle; a woman in Syria told of the sap of blue roses melting into lapis; a woman in Ceylon spoke of shimmering tigers transformed to wood. “It would be convenient if I could believe in gods and the whole load,” said Walton. “But I can’t, and so I’ll pick and choose, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” said Dulcy. One of the only things that could make their existence worse would be Walton finding God. Once, in London, he’d parked her at the British Library, and after hours reading current geologic journals, she’d realized they had nothing in common with her father’s version of events. It was a daunting moment—they were in this together. “The minerals in water aren’t alive, Dad,” she said.
“They are,” he said. “Pure science. But for the stories—I can’t believe the bit about opals and fossil teeth anymore. I’ve seen the veins—simply not so. Perhaps ground shell, washed down crevasses in some great flood. But we forget old fables at our peril.”
He wouldn’t forget anything, and he liked his nightmares. Every Cornish bugaboo from childhood, every phantasm glimpsed in the ocean, every dead body was given its own place, its own rosary bead. He’d grown up in the dark, underground. Dulcy, having been down in mines only a handful of times when she was a child, believed in forgetting, but she couldn’t begrudge him any mumbo jumbo, because the sense of the old world waiting at the end of the tunnel or bottom of a shaft had been overwhelming, a given. She’d heard the hot, wet walls gnash their teeth. Everything that had gone before had come here to hide; everything that might be alive could rise up from these places again.
Therefore, when Walton began having child-sized nightmares about sexually rampant witches and goblins coming to take him home, such screaming fits that Victor decamped for a different hotel one night, Dulcy sent another ultimatum to Carrie, and she wired her brothers as well. She did not show the response—bring him to New York—to Walton; any slight chance she could bundle him on a train would evaporate if he heard that tone. But when a letter arrived from his brother, Christopher, Walton read it off and on all day long.
I have been thinking of a visit in the spring, given that neither of us is spring-like. Dulcinea was kind enough to let me know that you have been to Africa again, and your mother-in-law has gone to heaven (or some other strange afterlife with rich food and good manners) or hell; I hope you are sobbing yourself to sleep on her behalf, and I hope you are well, but I doubt both.
We have had a shooting star this last week which seemed to land at the entrance of an old mine filled with buried dead men: even I felt some excitement. Some melted rock and burned trees on the ground, as if it exploded just before impact.
Jane has gone to visit our Marcia in Veracruz, where she has been delivered of a boy. They intend to move to New York, and I am melancholic, but that will give us two reasons to visit.
With love from the small boy
“Why visit now?” asked Walton. “Do you suppose he’s ill?”