Part 8 (2/2)

I could see that Ryman was similarly enraptured. Like master and pupil, we watched until at 800 feet there was a sharp explosion-a flash in the sky. At the same time, the tail of my lizard came loose, plummeting down. The igniter from the cracker left a puff of smoke in the air. This dispersed as it fell, floating over the trees like a gauze.

Ryman and I then had a technical conversation about the implications of averaging out the different horizontal winds to produce a mean and what was really entailed, philosophically, by cla.s.sing turbulence as a deviation from this already artificial measure. He said the nature of an eddy was difficult to define precisely because its ident.i.ty was involved with its context; and that despite the mean's artificiality, eddies could not be specified independently of it.

It soon became too dark to continue, so we agreed to go home. Ryman seemed pleased with the balloons and we parted on good terms. He invited me to visit again soon.

”Maybe we might do some work together?” I ventured, aware that I had not got very much out of him about the Ryman number.

He gave me something half between a nod and a negative shake of the head, as if he wanted to say no but was trying to be polite.

I thought I should try to insist. ”It would be an honour for me if it were possible. Is there a chance?”

He looked at me mistrustfully. ”Perhaps. But as I say, I have found I do my best work alone.”

As he spoke, the heavens opened again. (What a curious saying that is! As if there were a vault above. Levers and a hinge, operated by a divine magnet...) I desperately wanted to get an undertaking from Ryman. But it was soon raining heavily. Without further ado we ran across the field for shelter in our respective houses.

As the rain battered the slate roof of the cot-house, I dried my hair and boiled the kettle for a cup of tea. Having drunk it, I lay on the bed, smoking, worrying about what I was going to do. I wondered whether I should write a letter to Sir Peter. He had already written to me asking how I was getting on. I needed to reply. The invasion was ahead. But what would I tell him? The truth was that I'd got nowhere.

My mind turned to the flimsy blue missives from my parents that used to arrive at my boarding school. The mathematical gift had showed itself relatively early, and I won a scholars.h.i.+p place at Douai, a Benedictine public school in Berks.h.i.+re. It was a wrench leaving Nyasaland and I looked forward to my holidays like nothing else.

My early schooldays were plagued by bedwetting and sleepwalking. My fellow pupils use to tease me, imitating my sleepwalking during the day. I apparently walked completely erect, but head down, with my chin on my chest. Once, on the eve of a test of French verbs, I climbed out of bed and wandered downstairs in a trance and started banging about in the kitchen, opening cupboards and throwing aside the battered tin pans in which we were served rice pudding. On being discovered by a member of staff and asked what I was doing, I told them I was 'looking for je suis je suis.

I wasn't much good at French, but in sciences I was a bit of a phenomenon at school. I had less difficulty with German and Latin, and this was a good thing because in those days you had to pa.s.s a Latin examination to get into Cambridge, and many of the most important scientific papers of the time were in German.

Once the holidays finally came, along with other colonial children I would join a s.h.i.+p of the Union Castle line to Cape Town. I would then take the mail steamer up the coast to Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika, where my father would pick me up. It will be strange to see that place again.

The drive across to Nyasaland across a highland escarpment which marked the edge of the Rift Valley was always very exciting; though being somewhat long and arduous the journey was of great concern to my mother as she waited at home on the farm. With the image in my head of her greeting us, one time or another-wearing a dress printed with flowers as the mud-spattered Land Rover pulled up outside the verandah, Vickers jumping manically up beside-I fell asleep, secure once again in those happy times, before the event. Before the kizunguzungu kizunguzungu, which was the Swahili word for the spinning dizziness to come.

I don't know what the Chichewa word was. We spoke kitchen Swahili to the servants because that's what my father had picked up in Kenya. I ought to apologise for it now, and I will happily do so, but at the time such an apology would have been inconceivable.

That was just how it was in those days. Whites didn't give politics a second thought. I myself certainly had no conception, as a boy, that it might be better not to talk to Cecilia and Gideon and the others in a lingua franca lingua franca of command which was as foreign to them as to us. Everyone in the house spoke English well enough but, ridiculously, it was used only when pidgin Swahili failed either them or us. Now, looking back, remembering Cecilia's mothering of me and Gideon's fond scolding of Vickers, I wish I had learned Chichewa. Some boys did, but they lived on farms even further off the map than ours. of command which was as foreign to them as to us. Everyone in the house spoke English well enough but, ridiculously, it was used only when pidgin Swahili failed either them or us. Now, looking back, remembering Cecilia's mothering of me and Gideon's fond scolding of Vickers, I wish I had learned Chichewa. Some boys did, but they lived on farms even further off the map than ours.

We were all in the Great Rift, that long strip of African country which, mostly let down through faults and slips and sudden fallings away, stretches from the lower Zambezi in the south to Ethiopia in the north. Related rifts continue across the Red Sea into the Jordan Valley. But beginning with Lake Nyasa and bifurcating at its top end into Lakes Tanganyika, Kivu, Edward and Albert on the western side, and a vast series of mountainous gulfs and plunges up through towards Lake Rudolf and beyond in the east-my rift, the Great Rift, was formed when rigid bas.e.m.e.nt rocks buckled during the last continental s.h.i.+ft, lowering and raising great blocks of land as if they were nursery bricks. In between these two arms sat Uganda and the vast basin of Lake Victoria, and volcanic extrusions such as the Ruwenzori.

Ugandans, Kenyans, Tanganyikans, Nyasalanders, the white settler on his farm, the Indian merchant selling soap and sugar at his duka duka -we were all turning in the lava that runs in the splits between cultures, all spinning and tumbling as we fell like sc.r.a.ps of paper into those running streams. Some individuals were burned in an instant. Many whole tribes were choked and scorched and incinerated. Some were bloodied by floating boulders. Others there were who were overwhelmed simply by the smoke of distant battle. -we were all turning in the lava that runs in the splits between cultures, all spinning and tumbling as we fell like sc.r.a.ps of paper into those running streams. Some individuals were burned in an instant. Many whole tribes were choked and scorched and incinerated. Some were bloodied by floating boulders. Others there were who were overwhelmed simply by the smoke of distant battle.

But of the white tribe we can say one thing with certainty. We were the most stupid. Some of us had no idea whatsoever it would ever end, no conception at all that at imperial sunset another formation might appear, rising like a sea monster out of the molten depths.

Out of the fault.

The Rift.

The Great Rift.

There is every cause to believe that there is more extraordinary geological activity to come in the Great Lakes region. A man named Bullard who had been a research student in Rutherford's laboratory, and was still at Cambridge when I turned up there, did some fascinating work on this subject. He showed that gravity is lower than it ought to be in some of these Rift lakes. This negative gravity means there is material down there that's lighter than its surroundings, material that's longing to rise-and would do so in an instant were it not for side-pressing rocks holding it down like a pair of pliers. Bullard's anomalies mean some of the Rift is not just foundered valleys, the consequence of a fall.

Some of it must have been pushed down. If there is a s.h.i.+ft of plate tectonics, that material will come flying up.

Fifteen.

A week after my lunch with the Rymans I was working over some charts in the cot-house when there was a knock on the door. It was Gill. She was carrying a round wooden tray on which stood tall tumblers full of ice and a jug of straw-coloured liquid. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse: some kind of heavy, yellowish, iridescent silk for the skirt and another material, the colour of limestone, for the blouse. Her figure seemed fuller, somehow, as if it were a fold one might enter. I felt a s.h.i.+ver of desire. week after my lunch with the Rymans I was working over some charts in the cot-house when there was a knock on the door. It was Gill. She was carrying a round wooden tray on which stood tall tumblers full of ice and a jug of straw-coloured liquid. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse: some kind of heavy, yellowish, iridescent silk for the skirt and another material, the colour of limestone, for the blouse. Her figure seemed fuller, somehow, as if it were a fold one might enter. I felt a s.h.i.+ver of desire.

It made me nervous to see her. Although taking any opportunity to see Ryman himself, I'd been keeping a low profile so far as his wife was concerned, for obvious reasons.

”I thought you might like some lemonade,” she said.

”Lemons? At this time of year? In Scotland?”

Her high heels ticked across the tiled floor. I had never seen her in anything but flat shoes before.

”We use lemon essence, actually. And citric acid. Wallace makes it.” She came over and put the tray down on the desk where I was working, peering over my chart as she poured a gla.s.s. ”What are you working on?”

”Some rather intricate upper-air conditions.”

”Oh,” she said. ”That.” She went to the bed and sat down, smoothing her skirt. ”You know, Wallace once had a plan to chequer the globe with reporters who'd send in upper-air data to computers in his forecast factory, all calculating away.”

In those days the word computer was used to refer to human beings with slide-rules. Effectively, back then, it meant mathematicians. It was another term she used which seemed strange to me at the time. ”Forecast factory?” I queried.

”Yes, a large hall like a theatre in which all the computers, men as well as women, would sit doing their calculations, keeping pace with the weather as it was reported-by telegrams.”

”That would mean a lot of telegrams.”

”Or by radio. Or telephone, though that would be expensive. Every three hours each of the sixty-four thousand computers would receive a message from his or her area of the world.”

”Sixty-four thousand people? In one room?”

”Yes, working in parallel as the weather moved across the globe.”

I humoured her. ”It would have to be an awfully big theatre. More like a football stadium.”

”He has in mind something like the Albert Hall, overseen by a conductor.”

She stood up and swept her hands across the room. ”A map of the world is painted on the walls of the chamber: the Arctic on the ceiling, England in the gallery. In the upper circle, the tropics. Dress circle? Australia. Antarctic in the pit. Desk by desk, each computer attends to the mathematical quant.i.ties, broken down by type-pressure, temperature, humidity-for his or her region. Then works them through the appropriate equations. Do you see?”

”Sort of.” I took a hesitant sip of the lemonade. I was right to be doubtful. It was frightfully bitter and chemical. ”Each computer pa.s.ses the solution to his equation to his neighbour, and so on.”

”Oh no, it's much better than that. On each desk is a visual display showing the values for that equation once it is worked out. These are read by one's neighbours and by a higher official who co-ordinates the work of each region and maintains communication throughout the system, reporting to the central conductor.” She paused. ”All the basic-level computers wear a uniform to encourage discipline-though I don't suppose Wallace would want it to be anything like a military one. Perhaps something like the police, with the higher officials displaying special chevrons to distinguish them from the ordinaries. No one speaks, it's all done by writing on slips.”

It took me more than a few seconds to absorb all this. As I was doing so, with ever more animated gestures, Gill explained how the 'conductor' would co-ordinate information about the future weather as it flowed north and south, east and west, each flow mirrored by what was happening on the floor of the forecast factory.

It was a pretty bizarre scenario, effectively treating men as machines working in parallel, but it was the issue of representation that puzzled me most.

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