Part 8 (1/2)

But they were gone. He was farewelling the bushes tossing in the breeze.

Small though it was, the hut seemed larger and emptier when they had gone. There was Montaigne on the bed where the women had turned its pages. There was the blanket, crumpled from where the majestic one had held it up to her cheek.

In the silence, the dripping of water from the roof was very loud.

'Marray, wet,' he said aloud. 'Paye wallan ill la be, concerning heavy rain.'

He drew a neat line across the page underneath the words. It said, This is all I know. Below, the s.p.a.ce of white paper waited. He thought of Silk's similar notebook, his similar, though more extensive, list of words. Budyeri, good. Bogul, a mouse.

But language was more than a list of words, more than a collection of fragments all jumbled together like a box of nuts and bolts. Language was a machine. To make it work, each part had to be understood in relation to all the other parts.

That required someone who could do more than collect words and learn them by rote. It required someone who could dismantle the machine, see how it worked, and put it to use: a man of system, a man of science.

Looking at the words he had written, he knew-in the way he knew a prime when he saw it-that he was that man.

And everything in his life had been leading here. He saw it as clearly as a map, the map of his life and his character. He had been born with the urge to understand how things worked. He could read in five languages. The unknown was his daily bread: astronomy was a profession of mysteries. Difference held no fear for him. He knew that strangeness was commonplace when you inhabited it.

Above all, his temperament suited him to the task. Those qualities that made him such a diffident social being were the very ones that equipped him perfectly for listening.

He knew, with as much certainty as he knew his own name, that this would be his proper work in New South Wales: to acquire the native language.

Having gone so far in his mind, he went further, and allowed himself to picture the day when he would brush his jacket and set off down to the governor's house with the notebooks in his hand. Sir, he would say. Perhaps it should be Your Excellency. Silk said that the governor liked to be addressed with his t.i.tle. Perhaps he should ask Silk to go with him as a sort of amba.s.sador.

Sir, Lieutenant Rooke seems to have found the basis on which the native language is founded!

In fact there would be no seems about it, but a certain modesty was becoming to a mere second lieutenant. Once the governor was paying attention, Rooke would find his voice.

I am pleased to be able to tell you, sir, that I am now able to speak with the natives such that a fruitful intercourse may be commenced.

The governor would be astonished. It was hard to picture that face expressing excitement, admiration, awe, but how could he not be excited, admiring and full of awe? Rooke would be presenting him not only with the means for the governor to fulfil his own ambitions in New South Wales, but with something bigger. The governor would be the first to learn of an addition to the world's sum of knowledge almost as dramatic as Galileo's or Kepler's. The earth moves around the sun. Gravity is a force that operates at a distance. The journey of discovery he had just embarked on was of that order of significance, a journey not simply into the language of a race of people hitherto unknown, but into the cosmos they inhabited: the ways they organised their society and the G.o.ds they wors.h.i.+pped, their thoughts and hopes, their fears and pa.s.sions.

After such a leap of learning, the world would no longer be the same.

The first problem was not one of meaning but of music: how to convey in the familiar twenty-six letters those alien sounds. Thinking out the way to start was like stretching a muscle that had been unused too long.

He turned over the first page of the notebook. Those first entries had given him the beginning, but they were not the way he meant to continue. On the inviting field of the following page drew up four columns: Letter. Name. Sound. As in the English word.

He felt a thrill, a physical thing, antic.i.p.ation like an appet.i.te.

He was reminded of what he had not thought of for years, his old copy of Lily's Grammar of the Latin Tongue: the worn maroon cover, watermarked as with dark clouds, the spine that was coming away from the binding-his father had got it cheap from a stall at Southsea-and the woodcut in the frontispiece of men picking fruit with grand studied gestures.

Recklessly he turned over page after page of the notebook, heading each with a letter of the alphabet as Lily had done: Native Tongue to English, then again for English to Native Tongue.

Now he took a second notebook and on its flyleaf he wrote: Grammatical Forms of the Language of N. S. Wales. Words were all very well, but with nothing more than words one was forever a child, piping out the names of things. Grammar was the gearing that made them useful.

To begin with, he would have to limit himself to actions that could be acted out: to eat, to go or walk, to drink, to yawn, to creep. Foreign they might be, but these people must walk and drink, eat and yawn and creep.

He had better start modestly, with the indicative mood. I eat. You eat. He, she or it eats. Nothing much could be communicated without a sense of past and future, so he had better try for that too: I will eat, you will eat. I have eaten, you have eaten. And of course he must gather the useful imperative: Eat!

On the left-hand side of the page he wrote the English. Beside each entry were the s.p.a.ces that would be filled, word by systematic word, with the unknown tongue. He headed the page opposite the empty verb templates with a t.i.tle he hoped might gather up some of what was missing: other inflexions of the same verb.

He laid the notebooks out side by side on the table. The Vocabulary, the Grammatical Forms. The books were like the jaws of some ingenious machine. Between them they would crack open the nut of this language.

It would be an extraordinary task. Even Kepler, even Newton, had not been presented with a tabula rasa but had built on other men's work. Unlike them, he would be setting off to meet the unknown with only his ears, his pen and these little notebooks.

Rooke was aware of a tightness in his chest that was new to him. It took him some time to recognise that this was how it felt to be in the grip of a vision. Destiny was a grand word, but perhaps not too grand for what lay ahead.

The natives did not return for nearly a week. Rooke busied himself with the rain gauge and the barometer, wrote up his notes on the south celestial pole in a fair hand. He filled his kettle, he gathered wood for his fire. But as he worked he was watching from the corner of his eye for a movement at the top of the ridge. Branches fooled him, and the swift shadows of clouds. He would straighten up and begin a wave, and the ridge would mock him in its emptiness.

So when they arrived at last, he was half angry. But the little boy leapt down the rocks in his eagerness to reach Rooke and started pouring out a stream of words.

Rooke could not go on being haughty. After all, had they made him any promises?

The women came down the rocks slowly, babies on their hips, and behind them were the girls: the shy one, and the other one, Tagaran.

'Good afternoon! Good afternoon!' he cried. 'I am glad to see you again!'

It was just a form of words, he had said them a thousand times. But he meant them now in a way he had not on most other occasions.

The women had brought a piece of smouldering wood with them and set about lighting a fire near the hut. They moved in such a leisurely way, almost absent-mindedly, talking to each other, that it seemed the thing would never work-surely those pieces of wood were too large, surely that kindling was too far from the smoking stick? One woman bent down and blew-so briefly, he did not think it would have any effect-but shortly there was a fire and they sat down around it, the babies in their laps, sinking into the ground as if planting themselves.

The children came into the hut, the boy shouting at Rooke as though he would understand words said loudly enough.

'Well, yes, my young friend,' Rooke said, 'but I wonder if you will give me some words one by one? Will you tell me what this is?'

He pointed at his ear, but the boy covered his fine teeth with a hand, bending himself in two in hilarity. The girls called out to each other, a muddle of words in which he could not fix a single individual sound. It seemed that these children were too young and too cheerful to be useful to a man who needed conversation one syllable at a time.

The girl Tagaran was over at the table where the s.e.xtant sat out of its box. She reached for it and he put out a hand to stop her, flus.h.i.+ng with the fear of it coming to harm. Courteous as a lady in a drawing room, she drew back. She turned to him and spoke with a question in her tone.

's.e.xtant,' he said. 'It's a s.e.xtant.'

With thumb and finger he made a circle around his eye and peered up through it. She watched gravely and followed his gaze to the s.h.i.+ngles.

'No, not there,' he said. 'For measuring the vertical angle between the horizon and a celestial body. Such as the sun. For instance. Or the moon.'

She watched his words trail away.

'Daniel Rooke,' he said, 'at your service, and you'-he pointed to her-'you are Tagaran. But who are your friends, what are their names?'

He pointed at the boy and the girl, and Tagaran saw what he wanted. She spoke to the girl, gesturing towards Rooke, who bowed and pointed to himself.

'Daniel Rooke.'

But the girl could not seem to look at him, much less answer. Surely he was not frightening?

But perhaps he was. Large, male, a stranger, and clad in incomprehensible coverings: flaps and folds and bulges and puckers of a tissue that was soft like skin, but not skin.

The girl murmured some syllables, more or less into her armpit.

'Again, if you please?'