Darwinia

And a few sultry days later the vessel was ready to sail. Guilford set up his cameras on the floating wooden pier, his bulky dry-plate camera as well as the roll-film box. Photography had not advanced much since the Miracle; the long labor struggles of 1915 had shut down Eastman Kodak for most that year, and the Hawk-Eye Works in Rochester had burned to the ground. But, as such things went, both cameras were modern and elegantly machined. Guilford had tinted several of his own plates from the Montana expedition and intended to do the same with his Darwinian work, and with that in mind he kept careful notes:

Fourteen members of expedition, pier at Jeffersonville, Europe: 1-r standing Preston Finch, Charles Curtis Hemphill, Avery Keck, Tom Gillvany, Kenneth Donner, Paul Robertson, Emil Swensen; 1-r kneeling Tom Compton, Christopher Tuckman, Ed Betts, Wilson W. Farr, Marion (“Diggs”) Digby, Raymond Burke, John W Sullivan.

B/ground: Naval vessel Weston, hull gunmetal gray; J/ville harbor turquoise water under deep blue sky; Rhine marshes in a light northerly wind, gold green cloudshadow, 8 a.m. We depart.

And so the journey began (it always seemed to be beginning, Guilford thought; beginning and beginning again) under a raw blue sky, spider rushes tossing like wheat in the wetlands. Guilford organized his gear in the tiny windowless space allotted to him and went up top to see whether the view had changed. By nightfall the marshy land gave way to a drier, sandier riverbank, the saltwater grasses to dense pagoda bushes and pipe-organ stalks on which the wind played tuneless calliope notes. After a gaudy sunset the land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God.

He slept fitfully in his hammock and woke up feverish. When he stood he was unsteady on his feet — the deck plates danced a waltz — and the smell of the galley made him turn away from breakfast. By noon he was ill enough to summon the expedition’s doctor, Wilson Farr, Who diagnosed the Continental Fever.

“Will I die?” Guilford asked.

“You might knock on that door,” Farr said, squinting through eyeglass lenses not much larger than cigar bands, “but I doubt you’ll be admitted.”

Sullivan came to see him during the evening, as the fever continued to rise and a rosy erythema covered Guilford’s arms and legs. He found it difficult to bring Sullivan into focus and their talk drifted like a rudderless ship, the older man attempting to distract him with theories about Darwinian life, the physical structure of its common invertebrates. Finally Sullivan said, “I’m sure you’re tired—” He was: unspeakably tired. “But I’ll leave you with a last thought, Mr. Law. How is it, d’you suppose, that a purely Darwinian disease, a miraculous microbe, can live and multiply in the body of ordinary mortals like ourselves? Doesn’t that seem more than coincidental?”

“Can’t say,” Guilford muttered, and turned his face to the wall.

At the height of his illness he dreamed he was a soldier pacing the margin of some airless, dusty battlefield: a picket among the dead, waiting for an unseen enemy, occasionally kneeling to drink from pools of tepid water in which his own reflection gazed back at him, his mirror-self unspeakably ancient and full of weary secrets.

The dream submerged into a long void punctuated by lightning-flashes of nausea, but by Monday he was on the mend, his fever broken, well enough to take solid food and chafe at his confinement belowdecks as the Weston moved deeper inland. Farr brought him a current edition of Finch’s Diluvian and Noachian Geognosy, and Guilford was able to lose himself for a time in the several ages of the Earth, the Great Flood that had left its mark in cataclysmic reformations of the mantle, for example the Grand Canyon — unless, as Finch allowed, these features were “prior creations, endowed by their Author with the appearance of great age.”