THE HEM
The Office of Boundary Clarification sealed this file in the winter of 1893 and minuted that it did not intend to unseal it. It has been opened four times since — twice by clerks who were curious, once by a Chairman who wanted a precedent and did not find one, and once, at length and properly, by the person whose marks are in the margins of nearly every sheet in it.
She drew the charts they carried. She did not go.
What follows is the file as it stands: the resolution, the roll, the stores, a young man's notebook, a column of readings, and three letters that were never posted because there is no post out there. I have put them in the order in which they were made rather than the order in which the Office filed them, which was alphabetical, and which tells you most of what you need to know about the Office.
Nothing has been added. Two things have been left exactly as found and I would ask the reader to notice them when they come: the readings, and the last page.
#### Murkminster Office of Boundary Clarification · the 9th day of Rainmelt, 1893
RESOLVED, that the eastern limit of the realm has now gone unmeasured for four hundred years, which the Committee regards as an oversight rather than a decision.
RESOLVED FURTHER, that the standing notation at that limit — "Here maps end. Surveyors are advised to turn back" — is a counsel and not an instruction, and that the Committee, being the body that issued it, is entitled to disregard it.
RESOLVED FURTHER, that an expedition of twelve be appointed to proceed east from the Bogmoor to the fog-rim, to establish its position, to take such observations as the ground permits, and to return with a figure.
RESOLVED FINALLY, that the matter be filed, in accordance with custom, as a victory in preparation.
Carried. Sir Crispin Dampworthy, Chairman, in the chair and in some difficulty with the window.
> In the margin, small, in pencil: Four hundred years is not an oversight. It is four hundred years > of people going up to it and coming back and saying the same thing, and being right. > [a bucket, drawn quickly]
Twelve, as resolved. Entered in the Office hand, with the columns the Office keeps.
| | Name | Office | Entered | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Sir Crispin Dampworthy | Chairman; in charge of the party | by his own hand | | 2 | Mr Vance | Instruments; the readings | | | 3 | Mr Quigley | Cartography (Royal Geographical Society of Sogmarsh) | "and the Society's heron" | | 4 | Mr Ashe | Second chain | | | 5 | Mr Pardoe | Second chain | | | 6 | Mr Gill | Stores and beasts | | | 7 | Mr Rennick | Levels | | | 8 | Mr Sowerby | Levels | | | 9 | Mr Twite | Cook; also the ropes | | | 10 | Mr Marle | Waggoner | | | 11 | Mr Odgers | Waggoner | | | 12 | J. Hollis | Apprentice; the notebook | (Temporary) |
> In the margin, beside the twelfth line: They have written (Temporary) after the boy as well. It is > the same word they put after me. It means nothing except that we are the two they did not have to > think about. [a bucket, drawn]
Twelve men, six weeks, one waggon and two carts.
Salt beef · flour · a quantity of onions the Office declined to specify · lamp oil · nine lanterns · tarpaulins · forty feet of good rope and sixty feet of the other kind · two Gunter's chains · one theodolite, boxed · one theodolite, spare, boxed · levels, staves, arrows, pegs · ink, iron, four pints · paper, ruled and plain · one brass pocket-compass per man, sworn and numbered · bells, hand, six.
Struck from the list by the Chairman, with the note "not required": six further bells.
Added to the list by Mr Twite, without authority, and not struck: one goose, live, "for the eggs and the company."
> In the margin: Six bells kept, six struck. He will wish he had kept the twelve.
#### Rainmelt 14th — the first day out
I am to keep the notebook, which means I am to write down what everybody else is too senior to write down, and Mr Vance says that is the most useful post in the party and I think he was being kind.
I am nineteen. I have been in the Office two years. Before that I was in a counting-house and before that I was at school, and I have never been further east than the Poxbury gates, and this morning we went out past them with two carts and a waggon and a goose, and I have not been able to stop grinning since.
Sir Crispin gave an address at the gate. It was a good address. He said we would come back with a figure and that the Office had waited four hundred years for it, and everybody cheered, including the goose.
Mr Quigley has already lost a pencil.
#### Rainmelt 15th
Fifteen miles. Good going. The road is proper road as far as the Bogmoor Rest and then it is a track and then it is a decision.
I asked Mr Vance tonight what we would actually do at the Hem, in practice, with the instruments, and he put his cup down and thought about it for longer than the question seemed to want, and said: "We will measure to it, and we will measure along it, and if it will hold still we will fix it. And if it will not hold still we will write down that it would not, which is also a finding."
I said that Sir Crispin had said we would come back with a figure.
"Sir Crispin," said Mr Vance, "has said a number of things at gates."
#### Rainmelt 17th
We passed a shepherd today who asked where we were going and Mr Gill told him, and he did not laugh and he did not warn us. He said, "Aye," and looked at the carts for a while, and then he said the only thing anybody out here has said to us that I have written down twice:
"You've a lot of rope."
Mr Quigley says the local people are a fascinating geographical feature.
#### The east baseline. Readings taken morning and evening, both theodolites, both chains.
The Office requires two independent measures of every leg and the difference entered in the fourth column. Mr Vance kept this book himself for the whole of the journey out and did not delegate one line of it.
| Leg | Chain A | Chain B | Difference | |---|---|---|---| | Poxbury gate — the milestone | 1,760 yds | 1,760 yds | — | | Milestone — the Rest | 4,840 yds | 4,840 yds | — | | The Rest — Granite Foot | 3,300 yds | 3,300 yds | — | | Granite Foot — the ford | 2,200 yds | 2,200 yds | — | | The ford — first camp east | 5,280 yds | 5,280 yds | — |
Beneath the fifth line, in Mr Vance's hand:
> Five legs, ten measures, not a foot between any pair of them. I record this not because it is > remarkable but because it is ordinary, and because I should like it on the page, in ink, in my own > hand, that on the way out the instruments and the ground and the two chains and the twelve of us were > all in perfect agreement, and that this was so unremarkable that nobody but me thought it worth a line.
> In the margin, in pencil: He knew. Not what — nobody knew what. But he set down the last day the > world behaved, on purpose, in ink, because he thought somebody would want it later. > I am somebody. I wanted it. [a bucket, drawn]
#### Rainmelt 19th — east of the ford
Mr Vance made me re-chain a leg today, which I took at first for a rebuke and was not.
We had run the leg out — Ashe and Pardoe on the chain, me on the arrows, which is the apprentice's post and consists of sticking a spike in the ground and being shouted at about it — and got five thousand two hundred and eighty yards, which is a mile, and a very satisfactory thing to get.
Then Mr Vance said, mildly, "Again, please. Back the way we came."
So we chained it back. The same ground. The same chain. The same four of us, half an hour later, with the light no different.
Five thousand three hundred and ten.
Thirty yards. Over a mile, on flat ground, with a good chain, by men who do this for a living.
I said I was sorry and that it must have been my arrows. Mr Vance said it was not my arrows, and that he had watched me set every one of them, and that they were the best-set arrows he had seen from a boy of nineteen. Then he wrote both figures in his book, and the difference in the fourth column, which had been empty since the Poxbury gate.
I asked what it meant.
"It means," he said, "that we have a discrepancy of thirty yards, and four possible causes, and I shall now spend the evening eliminating three of them."
#### Rainmelt 20th
He eliminated all four.
I know because he told me at breakfast, cheerfully, the way a man tells you a puzzle. The chain had not stretched — he measured it against the standard bar before and after and it is true to a sixteenth. The ground is flat; he ran a level along it to be sure. The temperature was within four degrees at both measures and he has the allowance tables by heart. And it was not the men, because he swapped the men and got a third figure.
"So what is left, sir?"
"Nothing is left," said Mr Vance, "which is not the same as nothing being wrong. It only means the cause is not on my list. I shall want a longer list."
Sir Crispin, told of it, said the chain wanted replacing, and had it replaced.
The new chain gave five thousand two hundred and ninety-six.
#### East of the ford. Both chains, out and back, per leg.
| Leg | Out | Back | Difference | |---|---|---|---| | Camp 1 — the withy stand | 5,280 | 5,310 | 30 | | The withy stand — Camp 2 | 3,520 | 3,538 | 18 | | Camp 2 — the Grey Post | 4,400 | 4,437 | 37 | | The Grey Post — Camp 3 | 5,280 | 5,344 | 64 | | Camp 3 — the last firm ground | 2,640 | 2,719 | 79 |
Beneath the table, in Mr Vance's hand:
> The differences are not random. I have checked them for randomness, which is a thing you can check, > and they fail it. They grow. They grow with distance east and with nothing else I can name: not with > the hour, not with the weather, not with which men hold the chain, not with which chain. > > I record further, because it will be asked: the outward measure is always the shorter. Every time. > Going out is a shorter journey than coming back over the identical ground. I have no explanation and I > decline to offer a bad one. > > I have written to the Office for instruction. I do not expect instruction.
> In the margin, in pencil: Going out is shorter than coming back. He wrote that down in 1893 and the > Office read it and sent them further in. [a bucket, drawn]
#### Sir Crispin Dampworthy to the Committee, carried west by Mr Odgers and returned by him
Gentlemen,
The party is in good order and good spirits and has made better progress than the Office allowed for. We are past the last firm ground and the fog-rim is in sight from the rise, being a grey line across the whole of the east, considerably nearer than the charts have it.
Mr Vance reports certain irregularities in the chaining. He is a careful man and I am satisfied he has done everything a careful man can. I have replaced the chain and I have instructed him to enter his figures as provisional pending a proper survey at the rim itself, where the ground will be firmer and the conditions better for it.
I am confident that the irregularity is a matter of the ground and not of the instruments, and that it will resolve as we get onto better footing.
I have the honour to be, etc.
C. Dampworthy, Chairman.
> In the margin, in a much later and shakier hand — his own: > "I have instructed him to enter his figures as provisional." I have read this sentence perhaps four > hundred times. It is the worst thing I ever wrote and I wrote it in a good temper, in a warm tent, with > my boots off.
#### To his sister at Drudgeford. Never posted; found in the returned stores.
My dear Constance,
You will not credit the WEEK I am having.
The ground east of the ford exhibits a most remarkable property whereby it measures differently in each direction, which the party finds troubling and which I regard as the single most exciting geographical feature I have encountered in nineteen years of a career that has, as you know, not wanted for incident.
Mr Vance is put out. Mr Vance is a splendid fellow but he has the instrument-maker's disease, which is to believe that when a thing will not measure the fault must lie with the measurer. I have tried to console him with the observation that we are simply the first men ever to have noticed, and that the ground has presumably been doing this for four hundred years to the general indifference of everybody.
He did not appear consoled.
I have named the rise the Provisional Ridge, in honour of Sir Crispin's dispatch. I shall put it on the chart tonight. It is my belief that the Society will want a paper.
Your loving brother, Q.
P.S. — Twite's goose has taken to following me. Twite says it is an excellent judge of character. I have chosen to be flattered.
#### Rainmelt 22nd — the last firm ground
We can see it now.
I do not know what I expected. Something with an edge to it, I think — a wall, or a bank of weather, the sort of thing you could point at and say there. It is not that. It is a greyness that begins somewhere you cannot fix and gets on with being grey, and the odd thing, the thing I have not been able to put down properly all evening, is that it does not look like anything is happening in it. It looks like a page that has not been written on.
Mr Rennick says he has seen worse fog on the Cold Coast in a wet November.
He has. I have not. I keep looking at it.
Sir Crispin gave the order tonight, and it is a good order, and I have written it out fair because he asked me to and because I have understood since that mine is the only copy: the party to advance to the rim and no further; observations to be taken from firm ground; on no account is any man to enter the fog.
Mr Vance asked how, in that case, we were to establish the position of a thing whose position was the question. Sir Crispin said that was precisely what he had twelve surveyors for.
Mr Quigley has asked whether he might take the goose in with him, for scale.
He was told no. I have written that down because it was funny at the time and I should like to have it written down that it was funny at the time.
#### Rainmelt 24th — the rim
We have been three days trying to survey a thing that will not hold still long enough to be pointed at, and I have learned more about my trade in three days than in two years in the Office, and none of it is any use.
Here is the difficulty, and Mr Vance set it out for me on the second evening with two pegs and a bootlace, because he says a man who has had a thing explained with a bootlace never forgets it.
To fix a point, you need two known positions and an angle to it from each. That is the whole of surveying; everything else is arithmetic and boots. You must have something to point at.
There is nothing to point at.
Not "the fog is thick." The fog is not particularly thick — you can see a good way into it, further than you would think — and that is the trouble. There is no edge. There is no first thing. It does not begin; it accumulates. You look for the place where clear becomes grey and you find that you passed it a while back and that it is now somewhat behind you as well.
Mr Vance took eleven sightings on the second day. He got eleven positions. He then took eleven more from the same station, in the same hour, and got eleven different ones, and entered every one of them, and did not swear, and I have never respected a man more.
#### Rainmelt 25th
Mr Twite solved it. Not Sir Crispin, not Mr Vance, and not, I am sorry to say, the Royal Geographical Society of Sogmarsh. The cook.
He said, over the pot, that if there was nothing out there to point at, we should put something out there to point at, and that this was how you found a sheep in weather.
You send a man in on a rope with a lantern and a bell. He walks out until the rope stops him. He rings. You take the angle to the light from both stations, and you measure the rope, and there is your distance — twice over, by two methods, which is exactly what the Office likes.
Mr Vance sat very still for a moment and then said it was the best piece of survey thinking he had heard in fifteen years and asked Mr Twite whether he had ever considered the profession.
Mr Twite said he had a goose to think of.
We have forty feet of good rope and sixty of the other kind, and six hand-bells. There were twelve bells on the requisition. Sir Crispin struck six as not required. Nobody has said anything about this and everybody has thought it, and tonight Mr Gill said, to the fire and not to anybody, "Six'd have let us work two parties." Sir Crispin was ten feet away and heard him. He did not answer, and Mr Gill did not say it again, and I have written it down because somebody ought to.
#### The lantern trials. Distance to the light, by angle and by rope.
| Trial | Man | Rope paid out | Distance by angle | Difference | |---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | Ashe | 40 ft | 40 ft | — | | 2 | Ashe | 100 ft | 101 ft | 1 | | 3 | Pardoe | 100 ft | 100 ft | — | | 4 | Pardoe | 300 ft | 314 ft | 14 | | 5 | Rennick | 300 ft | 331 ft | 31 | | 6 | Rennick | 600 ft (both ropes bent together) | 704 ft | 104 |
Beneath the sixth line:
> The rope is a hundred feet of hemp and I have measured it against the bar. The angles are taken with > the good theodolite from two stations 220 feet apart, which I chained myself, three times, and which > agree. Both methods are sound. Both methods are mine. They disagree by a hundred and four feet and I > can find no fault in either. > > Trial 6 further: Mr Rennick reports that he walked out steadily, that the rope was taut the whole way, > and that he was gone — by his own reckoning — about four minutes. He was gone eleven. Mr Sowerby > and I both held a watch on him and the watches agree. > > I am discontinuing the fourth column. Not because the differences have stopped. Because a column of > differences implies that one of the two figures is the right one, and I no longer believe that is the > shape of the problem.
> In the margin, in pencil: "I no longer believe that is the shape of the problem." Read that twice. > He is not saying the instruments failed. He is saying the question was wrong — and he wrote it down > plainly, in the Office's own book, five days before they went in. [a bucket, drawn]
#### From Hollis's notebook, Rainmelt 26th, written up that night
The last of it was not an argument. I want that clear, because I have heard it told since as though there were an argument, and there was not. Everybody was polite. That is the part I cannot get past.
Sir Crispin said that the Office required a figure, and that we had six trials and no figure, and that he would not take a party home to Murkminster with a book full of discrepancies and a story about a cook.
Mr Vance said that the discrepancies were the figure. That the finding of this expedition was that distance does not behave at the rim, that he could demonstrate it six ways, and that it was the most important thing the Office had learned in four hundred years.
Sir Crispin said the Office would call that a failure of instruments.
"Then the Office," said Mr Vance, "will be wrong, in writing, and I shall have signed the page."
And then Mr Rennick — who had been in twice, and who had been quiet since — took out his copy of the standing orders and read out the notation. The one every junior in the Office is taught. The one that has been printed at the eastern edge of every sheet the Committee has ever issued, and that we have all said to each other a hundred times as a joke, in the way you do:
> "Here maps end. Surveyors are advised to turn back."
He read it in an ordinary voice, all the way through, and then folded the paper up and put it away.
Nobody laughed. I have heard that line raise a laugh in the Office fifty times. Out there, read out flat by a man who had been in the fog twice, it is not a joke at all. It is a sentence somebody wrote after something happened to them, and I do not know how I failed to hear that in it before.
Sir Crispin said, "It is a counsel, Mr Rennick. Not an instruction."
And Mr Rennick said, "Aye, sir. That's what I thought too."
#### In the hand of J. Hollis, fair copy, signed by the Chairman
The order of Rainmelt 22nd is amended as follows:
The prohibition upon entering the fog is set aside for the purpose of survey only.
A party of eight, under Mr Vance, is to advance beyond the length of the rope, taking with them the lanterns, three bells, and the good theodolite, and to proceed only so far as is required to establish a station from which the rim may be fixed. They are to return within the day.
The Chairman and the apprentice are to remain at the last camp with the instruments and the record. The record is not to leave the camp.
The party is reminded that this office does not send men into ground it has not surveyed. This ground has now been surveyed to the extent that circumstances permit.
C. Dampworthy, Chairman.
I wrote this out fair because I was asked to, as I wrote out the first one. I have thought since about the difference between them, and it is one clause. The first order said no man was to go in. This one says eight may, for the purpose of survey only, and must be back by evening.
I did not say anything. I was nineteen and it was not my place, and I have had a great deal of time since to consider what my place was.
Mr Twite gave me the goose to hold.
> In the margin, in the shaking later hand: > "This ground has now been surveyed to the extent that circumstances permit." That is mine as well. I > wrote it to mean: we have done what we can. It reads now as: we know nothing, and are proceeding. > > Both readings are correct. That is the whole of my case and there is no defence in it.
#### Rainmelt 27th — the morning
They went at twenty minutes to eight, on a bearing of ninety-four degrees, which Mr Vance took himself three times and had Mr Sowerby take twice more, and all five agreed, and I have thought about that a good deal since: the last thing that agreed about anything out there was the direction they went in.
Eight of them. Mr Vance at the front with the good theodolite in its box, which he would not let anybody else carry. Mr Quigley beside him talking. Ashe and Pardoe with the chains. Gill and Rennick and Sowerby with the lanterns and the staves. Mr Twite at the back with the three bells on a strap, because he was the only one who had thought about how you carry three bells.
They were in good spirits. I want that written down. There was no dread about it. Ashe said something to Pardoe about the two of them being owed a fortnight's leave for this and Pardoe said he intended to spend it in a chair.
Mr Twite gave me the goose. He said she would only get under his feet, and to keep her fed, and that he would want her back.
Sir Crispin shook each of them by the hand. He did it properly, and unhurriedly, one at a time, and said a word to each, and I could not hear what he said and I did not try. It took some minutes. Nobody was impatient.
Then they walked out on the bearing and the grey took them the way it takes everything — not suddenly. You do not watch men vanish. You watch them get less definite, over about two hundred yards, until you are no longer certain which of the shapes is which, and then until you are no longer certain that any of the shapes are shapes.
Sir Crispin told me to keep the watch and to write down everything I heard and the time and the bearing of it. He said it in the voice of a man giving a junior a job to keep him busy.
It is the only record there is.
#### Kept at the last camp by J. Hollis, apprentice, at the Chairman's instruction. Times by the camp watch, which was wound and set against Mr Vance's before the party left. Bearings taken with the spare compass from the camp station.
| Time | What was heard | Bearing | Note | |---|---|---|---| | 07:40 | — | 094° | Party away. Eight men, three bells, no rope. | | 08:12 | One bell, three rings | 094° | Clear. Answered from camp. | | 08:51 | One bell, three rings | 096° | Clear. Answered. | | 09:35 | One bell, three rings | 088° | Fainter. Answered twice. | | 10:20 | One bell, three rings | 041° | See below. | | — | nothing further | | |
Note entered at 10:24, in Hollis's hand:
> The bearing at 10:20 is not an error. I took it three times and Mr Odgers took it twice and we agree. > It puts them north-north-east of this camp. They went out east. To be where that bell was, they would > have had to walk a mile and a half across our front, in fog, having said they were going straight, and > without any of us hearing them cross. > > Sir Crispin ordered the camp bell rung continuously from 10:30. Mr Marle and I rang it in turns for > five hours and forty minutes. > > Nothing answered.
Entered later the same day:
> 11:00 — lanterns hung on the staves, all nine, in a line facing east. > 13:00 — Mr Odgers proposed going in on the rope. Sir Crispin refused. Mr Odgers proposed it again at > 14:00 and at 15:30. Refused both times. At 15:30 Mr Odgers said something to Sir Crispin that I did not > write down at the time and am not going to write down now. > 16:00 — still ringing. > 18:00 — dark. Rang on.
#### That night
The goose knew before we did.
I do not offer that as anything. I have been asked about it twice since, by men who wanted it to be something, and it is not; a goose is a nervous animal and there was a great deal of bell. But she had been quiet all afternoon in the crook of my arm and at about ten past seven she came up off my lap and stood and looked east and would not sit again.
Mr Quigley walked into camp at eleven minutes past seven.
Not from the east.
He came in from behind us — from bearing two hundred and fifty degrees, from the west, from the way we had come, from Sogmarsh. He walked up the track from the direction of the Bogmoor with his coat over his arm because he was warm, and he was whistling, and he said:
"Ah! Hollis. Splendid. Is there tea?"
I could not say anything at all.
He said the station was fixed. He said they had got two good angles and a base and that Vance had the figures, and that it had taken rather longer than expected but that the walking had been easy and the ground firmer than anybody had led him to believe. He said the fog was "much overrated."
Sir Crispin came out of the tent. He asked Mr Quigley where the others were.
And Mr Quigley — and I have gone over this a hundred times, and there was nothing wrong with him, nothing at all, he was exactly the man who had walked out that morning — Mr Quigley looked back over his shoulder, in a mild sort of way, at the empty track behind him, and said:
"Just coming, I should think. Ashe was setting the theodolite. I came on ahead — I wanted to get the Provisional Ridge down while the light was in my head."
Then he asked again about the tea.
He has never, in the thirty-one years since, said anything different. He is not lying and he is not mad. He believes he came out of that fog five minutes behind seven other men, on the east side, in daylight.
He came out on the west side, alone, in the dark, eleven hours and thirty-one minutes after he went in.
| Time | What was heard | Bearing | Note | |---|---|---|---| | 19:11 | — | 250° | Mr Quigley walked into camp. From the west. Alone. | | 19:15 | — | — | Camp bell resumed. | | 23:00 | — | — | Ringing. | | 02:40 | — | — | Ringing. | | 05:55 | — | — | Ringing. | | 06:20 | One bell, one ring | 094° | Answered. Answered again. Answered for one hour. | | 07:48 | — | 094° | Mr Vance walked out of the fog on the bearing. Alone. Carrying the theodolite. |
Entered by J. Hollis:
> He was twenty-four hours and eight minutes out. He was not distressed. He put the box down where it > belonged, beside the other instruments, and squared it up, and then he sat down on the chest. > > Sir Crispin asked him the question. Mr Vance said: > > "I have the figures." > > And Sir Crispin said no, the men, Vance, where are the men. And Mr Vance thought about it — he did > think about it, he took his time, he was not being cruel — and he said: > > "I could not keep them in sight and I could not keep them in hearing, and after a while I could not > keep them in mind. I am sorry. I know how that sounds. It is the accurate way to say it." > > Then he asked whether the boy had been keeping a watch, and whether he might see it, and he read my > column of times and bearings all the way down without saying anything, twice. > > And then he said the only other thing he said that day, which was: > > "Ring it a while longer, please." > > We rang until the evening of the 29th. Sir Crispin stopped it himself. Nobody argued.
#### Rainmelt 30th to Frostgate 4th — the road west
Four men, two carts, a waggon we did not need, nine lanterns, eleven compasses, two theodolites, three chains, forty feet of good rope and sixty of the other kind, and a goose.
We did not talk about it. I have read since that parties in our situation talk of nothing else. We talked about the axle, and about whether the ford would be up, and about a man Mr Odgers knew at Drudgeford who could re-shoe the near-side horse cheaply. On the second evening Mr Marle told a long story about his brother-in-law that had no end to it, and we let him, and I was grateful, and I think he knew.
Mr Quigley worked the whole way home. He has forty pages of notes from that expedition and they are, I am told by men entitled to say so, the best descriptive cartography of the eastern Bogmoor ever produced. There is not one word in them about the others. Not a line. He inked the Provisional Ridge on the third evening and asked me to hold the lamp, and while I held it he said, quite comfortably, that Ashe would want to see the shading on the eastern slope because Ashe had been right about it after all.
I held the lamp. I did not say anything. What would you have said?
The goose rode on the tailboard of the second cart the whole way and would not be put in a crate. Mr Twite had said he would want her back. I have written that down in this book three times now on three different days and I am aware that I have, and I am leaving all three in.
#### The homeward legs. Out and back, per leg, as before.
| Leg (westward) | Out | Back | Difference | |---|---|---|---| | The last firm ground — Camp 3 | 2,719 | 2,681 | 38 | | Camp 3 — the Grey Post | 5,320 | 5,297 | 23 | | The Grey Post — Camp 2 | 4,412 | 4,401 | 11 | | Camp 2 — the withy stand | 3,526 | 3,522 | 4 | | The withy stand — Camp 1 | 5,281 | 5,280 | 1 | | Camp 1 — the ford | 5,280 | 5,280 | — | | The ford — Granite Foot | 2,200 | 2,200 | — | | Granite Foot — the Rest | 3,300 | 3,300 | — | | The Rest — Poxbury gate | 6,600 | 6,600 | — |
Beneath the last line:
> It lets go of you. > > That is not a scientific statement and I shall not put it in the report, but it is what the column says > and I am writing it here because this book is mine until I hand it in. The differences do not stop at a > boundary. They thin, westward, like a smell going out of cloth, and by the ford there is nothing to > record and by the Rest a man could believe he had imagined the whole business. > > Which is, I think, why nobody has ever brought a figure back. Not because they did not get one. Because > by the time they were home it no longer seemed to want explaining. > > I am writing mine up tonight, at the Rest, while I still find it strange.
> In the margin, in pencil: He wrote his report early on purpose, in an inn, because he did not trust > his own settled mind to take it seriously. There is no braver thing in this file. > [a bucket, drawn]
#### Mr Vance to the Grand Cartographic Revision Committee · Frostgate 4th, 1893 · at the Bogmoor Rest
Gentlemen,
I was sent to bring back a figure. I have brought back six, and none of them is the figure you asked for, and I am satisfied that the figure you asked for does not exist. What follows is what the ground actually did, in the order in which it did it. I have kept every working.
One. Any leg chained out and back over identical ground returns two different lengths. The outward measure is invariably the shorter. Chains, chainmen and temperature were varied and eliminated in turn.
Two. The difference grows with easting and with nothing else. It is not random; I have tested it for randomness and it fails.
Three. Distance to a fixed light, taken by rope and by angle from a measured base, disagrees. Both methods are sound and both are mine. At six hundred feet of rope the disagreement was one hundred and four feet.
Four. Time within the fog and time at the camp do not run to the same length. A man reporting four minutes was absent eleven by two watches that agreed with each other before and after.
Five. A bearing taken within the fog bears no reliable relation to a bearing taken upon it from outside. On the 27th a signal was heard from 041° by three men from a party known to have departed on 094°.
Six. All of the above diminishes westward and is unmeasurable by the ford.
I am asked, informally, what causes it. I do not know, and I will not guess, and I would ask the Committee to notice that these are two different statements. A guess entered in this Office becomes a fact in eleven years. I have seen it happen with the Griddle and I decline to do it here.
What I will say is this. The instruments did not fail. I have checked every one of them against the standard and they are true, and I would stake my ticket on them. The instruments were correct and the answers were still wrong, and the Committee has no procedure for that, and that is the finding — not the fog, not the distances. That there exists ground in this realm upon which correct measurement does not produce a correct answer, and that we have been marking it for four hundred years with a sentence advising men to turn back, and that whoever wrote that sentence had been there.
I recommend: that no further party be sent; that the notation be restored from a counsel to an instruction; and that this report be printed entire in the next Survey, so that the next man who is told it is a counsel has something to put beside it.
Six men did not come back. Their names are on the roll and I have set them out again below in case the roll is filed and this is not.
Ashe · Pardoe · Gill · Rennick · Sowerby · Twite
I have the honour to be, etc.
Vance, Instrument Officer.
#### Murkminster · Frostgate 19th, 1893
The Committee received the report of the Instrument Officer and thanked him for his diligence in trying circumstances.
RESOLVED, that the discrepancies described are attributable to instrument failure under conditions of extreme damp, and are so recorded.
RESOLVED FURTHER, that the recommendation to print the report entire is not adopted, the Committee being of the view that publication would occasion unnecessary alarm and would not assist the survey.
RESOLVED FURTHER, that the expedition be entered in the Register as twelve surveyors lost, that being the establishment of the party, and the Office not being in a position to certify the movements of individual members after the 27th.
RESOLVED FINALLY, that the file be closed and lodged, and that the standing notation remain as it stands.
The Instrument Officer's dissent was received and is appended.
No further entry is required or invited. The matter is regular.
> In the margin, in pencil, beside the third resolution: > > Six came home. I watched them come up the road. The Office has written twelve because twelve is the > number it sent and it does not keep a column for men who come back from a place it has decided nobody > comes back from. > > Mr Quigley is entered here as lost. He was in the building when they wrote it. He signed the minute. > [a bucket, drawn twice — the first scratched out]
#### Held at the Office of Boundary Clarification, Frostgate 22nd, 1893, to receive the dissent of the Instrument Officer. Present: the Chairman (Sir C. Dampworthy); Mr Culp; one other, unnamed in the record.
Taken down verbatim at the Instrument Officer's request. He asked that it be verbatim before he would sit down, and the request is minuted because he made it twice.
THE CHAIRMAN: Mr Vance. You have read the resolution.
MR VANCE: I have.
THE CHAIRMAN: You dissent from it.
MR VANCE: From one word of it. The word is damp.
MR CULP: The Committee is entitled to form a view on the condition of its own equipment.
MR VANCE: It is. It is not entitled to form a view on the condition of equipment it has not looked at. The instruments are in the outer room. They have been there since Tuesday. Nobody has been to see them.
(Pause.)
MR CULP: We may take that as read.
MR VANCE: You may not. That is the entire difficulty and it is why I am sitting here. Taking things as read is what the Office does instead of going and looking, and I have just come back from the one place in the realm that punishes it.
THE CHAIRMAN: Four questions, Mr Vance, and then we need not detain you. First. Are you certain of your measurements?
MR VANCE: Yes. Not confident. Certain. Every leg was taken twice by two methods and I have the workings, and any man in this building may repeat them in an afternoon on the Murkminster road and get the answer I got, which is: nothing at all. That is what a control is. Do it on the road and it comes out. Do it east of the ford and it does not. The difference is not in my arithmetic. My arithmetic is the only thing in this affair that behaved.
THE CHAIRMAN: Second. Could the men have become separated in the ordinary way? Fog, poor discipline, a wrong bearing?
MR VANCE: They could have. That is what I assumed for the first two hours.
I would put it to the Committee that eight surveyors do not become separated in the ordinary way while roped in threes, in sight, with three bells, on a bearing all five of us took separately and agreed. And that if they had, we should have found something afterwards — a lantern, a stave, a chain, a bell. There were nine lanterns hung on that line for two nights and a camp bell rung for forty hours.
But I will not tell the Committee it is impossible, because I cannot, and this Office has enough men in it who will tell you a thing is impossible.
THE CHAIRMAN: Third. (pause) Third. Could they still be alive?
MR VANCE: I have thought about very little else.
Mr Quigley walked out eleven and a half hours after he walked in and believes it was five minutes. I walked out at twenty-four hours and eight and would have sworn to you it was a long afternoon. Whatever the ground does to the length of a walk, it does not do it evenly, and it does not do it the same way twice.
So: I do not know. And I would ask that the file be left open on that ground alone. Not for hope. For arithmetic — because a party that can lose nineteen hours in a day cannot be declared anything by an office working off a calendar.
MR CULP: The Register requires a determination.
MR VANCE: Then the Register requires something nobody has got.
THE CHAIRMAN: Fourth. (The Chairman was some moments putting this question.) What is out there, Mr Vance?
(The witness did not answer.)
THE CHAIRMAN: Mr Vance.
MR VANCE: I heard the question.
THE CHAIRMAN: You were in it for twenty-four hours. You are the only officer of this Committee who has ever been in it and come out with his instruments and his wits. What is out there?
MR VANCE: Sir Crispin — with respect, and I mean the respect — that is not a question. It is a shape that questions come in.
I can tell you what I measured. I have. Every figure is in the report and the workings are with it, and if the Committee will send me back with twenty men and a year I will bring more, and better, and I would go tomorrow.
But you are not asking me to measure. You are asking me to say. And the moment I say — the moment I put one word to it, any word, fog, weather, ground, nothing — that word goes in the Register, and in eleven years it is what the Office knows, and no man ever goes and looks again, because why would he? It is written down.
I will not be the man who did that. I would rather be the man who came back with a column of numbers and looked a fool.
MR CULP: The Committee may draw its own conclusion from a refusal to answer.
MR VANCE: It always does. That is what I am trying to prevent.
THE CHAIRMAN: (after a pause) Thank you, Mr Vance. That will do.
MR VANCE: Sir. One thing, and then I have finished.
Six men are on that roll and the Committee has entered twelve, and I understand why — I have read the resolution and the reasoning is sound and I could not draft it better. But the six are the six. Ashe. Pardoe. Gill. Rennick. Sowerby. Twite.
Twite was the cook. He is not on any list of surveyors this Office will ever print, and he solved the survey. The lantern on the rope was his, out of nothing, over a pot, in one sentence, when four qualified men and a knight of the realm had been three days at it. I should like that in the minutes.
(It is in the minutes.)
#### Archivist's note, in pencil
The dissent was appended to the file, as the resolution required, and the file was closed three days later.
I have examined the fold. A paper that is read acquires a soft crease and a dirty edge within about a year; the Office's papers are handled constantly and it shows on all of them. The dissent is clean. The fold is sharp. Nobody opened it between 1893 and the day I did.
It is the best document in this Office. It is the only one in which a man says plainly that he does not know a thing, gives his reasons, and declines to improve on them.
It has been in a box for the whole of my working life.
> [a bucket, drawn]
#### Frostgate 22nd — Murkminster
I waited on the stairs because apprentices are not called.
Mr Vance came out after about an hour and he was not angry, and I had expected him to be angry, and it was much worse. He looked like a man who has finished a job.
He asked whether I still had my watch-book. I said I did. He said to keep it — not to hand it in with the rest, to keep it — and that one day somebody would want a column of times and bearings taken by somebody with no theory to prove, and that mine was the only such column that would ever exist, because it was written by a boy who did not know what he was writing down.
Then he asked after the goose.
I said she was at my mother's, in the yard, and doing well, and that she would not be crated and had to be carried.
And Mr Vance said, "Good," and went down the stairs, and that is the last thing an officer of the Grand Cartographic Revision Committee ever said to me about the expedition of 1893.
He did not retire.
He was entitled to at sixty and again at sixty-five, and the Office minuted its regret on both occasions and re-elected him, and he sat in that chair for thirty-one more years and chaired one thousand four hundred and eleven meetings of the Grand Cartographic Revision Committee, which is a record that will not be broken because nobody else has ever wanted it.
He was, by every account, a good chairman. Ask anybody who served under him. He was patient with juniors, scrupulous about expenses, and he never once in thirty-one years sent a party anywhere without going out to the yard himself at dawn to see them off, which the Office regarded as an amiable eccentricity.
He also — and this is in the standing orders to this day, entered 1894, unamended —
> No survey party of this Office shall proceed east of the ford. There is no exception to this order and > the Chairman has none to give.
Beneath it, in his own hand, in the margin of the order book:
> Asked three times in the first year whether this was excessive. It is not excessive. It is nine years > too late, and I have made it as strong as I know how, and it is still only ink.
Mr Quigley read a paper to the Royal Geographical Society of Sogmarsh in the spring of 1895. He was the Society's only member. He read it to the heron and, on that occasion, to eleven other people, which remains the Society's record attendance.
The paper is called Observations upon the Eastern Bogmoor, with a Note on the Provisional Ridge, and I should like to say plainly, because it has been sneered at, that it is excellent. It is the finest descriptive cartography of that country ever produced and half the shading on the modern sheets is lifted from it without acknowledgement.
It runs to forty-one pages. It contains no mention of the expedition, no mention of the fog, no mention of the loss, and no mention of any of the six.
It is dedicated:
> To my companions of that week, whose company made the work light, and who will I hope forgive the > shading on the eastern slope, about which Ashe was right and I was wrong.
He is not being brave and he is not being discreet. He does not know. He has been told — by Sir Crispin, by me, twice by his sister, and once, terribly, by Mr Rennick's widow at a Society dinner — and each time he receives it politely, and is sorry, and does not retain it, the way you cannot retain a language you have not got.
He lived to be eighty-one and was cheerful to the end and never lost a pencil again, having bought, in 1896, a box of two hundred.
Mr Vance did not resign. He simply did not take another commission, and after some years the Office stopped offering, and after some more it stopped writing.
He took a room on the Cold Coast, at the inn on the village green that is the first real stop out of Saltgate — the one with the fireplace built into a rusting boiler shell, and the maps pinned up beside it that curl northward however you pin them, and the name over the door that nobody in that parish has ever been able to account for and that I am not going to speculate about here.
He kept the room thirty-one years. He paid it monthly and was never late.
And he became — by no design of his own, and to his considerable irritation at first — the man you went to when a thing did not make sense.
They came up from Saltgate and down from the Bogmoor with the whole miserable inventory of the realm: a haunted well, a cow that spoke, a light on the marsh, a curse on a boat, a child who knew things. And Mr Vance would put down his cup, and take it seriously — that is the part everybody remembers, that he never once laughed — and ask his questions, and go and look if it was walkable, and come back, and tell them what it actually was.
It was murrain. It was damp. It was a drunk surveyor. It was a lamp on a boat on the far side of a spit, seen through weather. It was, four times out of five, somebody's uncle.
He was right so consistently that the coast made a kind of proverb of him, and I have heard it in three parishes: "Ask Vance and it turns out to be the weather."
Nobody there ever knew he had once been asked a question he could not answer and had refused, in front of a sub-committee, to guess.
I asked him about it, at the end, when I went down with the book. I asked whether it did not gall him — thirty-one years explaining wells to fishermen, when he had the one finding in the realm's history that nobody would print.
He thought about it as long as he thought about everything.
> "They come to me frightened and they go away with an answer that is true. That is the whole of the > trade. I got it wrong once by never being given the chance to be right, and I have been getting it right > ever since in matters that do not matter, and I would rather that than the other way about. Ask the > Office which of us has been more use."
I stayed in the Office. I have no dramatic account of it. I was a junior and then I was not, and I did the work, and I was good at the part of it that is counting and adequate at the rest.
I married. She is from Drudgeford and she is not much impressed by the Office, which has been the saving of me. We have two, and the elder one measures things, God help her.
I kept the watch-book in a drawer for thirty-one years and did not once take it to the Office, because Mr Vance had told me to keep it and because I had worked out, by about my fourth year, exactly what would happen to it if I handed it in. It would be appended. Appended is a word this Office uses for a drawer.
And I kept the goose.
She lived twenty-nine years, which the man at Nettlewick told me is a very great age for a goose and that somebody must have been feeding her properly, and I said somebody had. She never would be crated. She had to be carried, in both arms, like a bad-tempered parcel, and she was carried, every time, for twenty-nine years, by a man who got progressively worse at lifting.
She died in the spring of 1922 in the yard at Drudgeford in the sun.
Mr Twite said he would want her back. I have had thirty-one years to think about that sentence and the best I have got is this: he did not say it to me, he said it at me, over his shoulder, on his way to work, the way you speak to somebody you are going to see at dinner.
I fed his goose for twenty-nine years and I could not give her back and there was nothing else that was his to keep.
Sir Crispin went back to the South Elevation in the last year of his life.
He had not surveyed anything in decades. He was a chairman by then and had been one so long that the juniors thought the word meant a man in that chair. And in the spring of 1924 he asked for the plate — the great blue sheet, folded eight times and folded wrong — and had it brought up, and sat with it.
He did not correct a measurement. There was nothing wrong with the measurements; the assistant had drawn them true thirty-seven years before.
He entered two revisions in the log, in a hand that would not keep still.
> J · 01/01/24 · Turnip retired. > K · 07/07/24 · Turnip still better than committee.
He died that winter.
And I want to set down, because I am the only person left who was in both rooms, that I do not think that last line was about the drawing.
He sat in a chair for thirty-one years signing minutes that said twelve surveyors lost, and attributable to instrument failure, and the matter is regular — and at the very end, in the one column those men could not strike out, he wrote down that the nobody who held the lantern had been worth more than the whole Committee.
He never learned her name either. I checked. It is not in any of his papers.
He knew what he had done and he could not say it in the minutes, so he said it in a revision log about a turnip, thirty-one years late, and then he stopped.
#### Archivist's note, in pencil
Mr Hollis came to this Office in the autumn of 1924, some months after the Chairman died, and asked for me by the name on the sheets, which is A. Turnip (Assistant) (Temporary), and was told there was no such officer, which is true and is not.
He waited two hours.
He gave me a notebook with a column of times and bearings in it, and eleven letters, and a goose feather he did not explain and I did not ask about, and he said the Office had never wanted any of it and that Mr Vance had told him somebody would.
I asked why me. He said: because your hand is on every sheet in that file and your name is on none of them, and I have spent thirty-one years in a building where that is how you tell who is doing the work.
Then he asked whether the file could be opened.
I said it was sealed by resolution and that I am an assistant and temporary.
He said: "So was I."
> [a bucket, drawn]
Made in the ordinary way, on the ordinary form, by an officer entitled to make it.
> Applicant: A. Turnip (Assistant) (Temporary), draughtswoman, this Office. > File: the eastern expedition, 1893. Sealed by resolution, Frostgate 19th, 1893. > Grounds for application: That the file contains a report by an officer of this Office which the > Committee resolved not to print; that the resolution not to print was taken on the ground that > publication would occasion unnecessary alarm; and that thirty-one years having passed without alarm of > any kind, the ground has expired. > Purpose: To print it.
Refused. Frostgate 4th, 1925. The applicant is reminded that the maintenance of Committee files is not within the assistant's commission.
Applied again, Frostgate 4th, 1926. Refused.
Applied again, 1927. Refused.
Applied again, 1928. Granted, the Chairman of that year being new, and having read it, and having been, as it happens, the junior who held the horses in the yard at dawn on twenty-six occasions and been spoken to each time by an old man who never explained why he came out.
Nothing.
I set that down plainly because I have been asked, by people who were kind enough to be excited on my behalf, what was in it — and the answer is that there is no such thing in this file and there never was.
There is a resolution. There is a roll of twelve. There is a requisition with a goose added to it without authority. There are four dispatches, a bundle of letters that were never posted because there is no post out there, a boy's column of times and bearings, an instrument log in a very good hand, and a dissent that nobody read for thirty-five years.
There is no account of what is past the Hem, because nobody who went past it came back to write one, and the two who came out of it could not say — one because he did not know, and one because he would not guess, and I have come to think those are the same act of honesty performed by two entirely different men.
The Office sealed a box that had nothing in it but its own conduct.
That is what it was protecting. Not a secret. A minute.
#### Printed entire, by resolution, thirty-five years late
> The Committee prints below the Report of the Instrument Officer upon the eastern expedition of 1893, > together with his dissent, without abridgement, correction or comment. > > The Committee's resolution of Frostgate 19th, 1893, attributing the observations therein to instrument > failure, is withdrawn. The instruments were examined in 1925, having stood in the outer room since 1893, > and were found true. > > The Register entry is amended. The expedition is recorded as twelve sent, six returned, six lost, > and the six are named. > > Ashe · Pardoe · Gill · Rennick · Sowerby · Twite > > Mr Twite was the party's cook. The method by which the rim was surveyed — a lantern and a bell upon a > measured rope — was his, devised in one sentence over a cooking pot, and the Committee records it as > his. > > The standing notation at the eastern limit is restored from a counsel to an instruction, in the terms > recommended by the Instrument Officer in 1893. > > Here maps end. Surveyors are advised to turn back.
Set from the original by the draughtswoman of this Office.
I had three struck off before the plates came down, which I was not entitled to do.
One went to the Cold Coast, to a room at an inn that had been paid for monthly and never late for thirty-five years. He was very old. He read it through twice in front of me, at the table by the fire with the boiler shell in it, and did not say anything for long enough that I thought I had done a cruel thing.
Then he said: "They have printed the workings."
I said they had. All of them. Every leg, both columns, and the fourth.
And Mr Vance said — and I want it written exactly, because it is the last thing he said about the whole affair and he said it to the fire and not to me —
> "Then it is measured. Somebody else can go and be frightened."
He died the following winter. The room was let again in the spring. The maps by that fireplace still curl northward and nobody there has ever been able to tell me why the house is called what it is called, and I have stopped asking, because it is not my business and because some things in this realm are simply the name of a pub.
Two went to Drudgeford, to a man of fifty-four with two children, the elder of whom measures things.
He wrote back one line: "She has read it. She asked which one was the cook."
Three I kept.
#### J. Hollis, apprentice. Rainmelt 27th, 1893. Reproduced in facsimile as the frontispiece of Appendix C, at the applicant's insistence and over the objection of the printer.
The final entry in the watch-book is not a sentence. It is the last line of the table, ruled by hand, by a boy of nineteen who had been ringing a bell for five hours and forty minutes and had been told to write down everything he heard and the time and the bearing of it.
He ruled the row. He wrote the time. And then, having nothing to enter in the second column, he did not leave it blank and he did not write nothing, because he had been given a job and he was doing it properly.
He wrote what he had been told to write, which was what he heard:
| Time | What was heard | Bearing | Note | |---|---|---|---| | 10:20 | One bell, three rings | 041° | | | 11:00 | — | — | lanterns hung | | 13:00 | — | — | | | 15:30 | — | — | | | 18:00 | — | — | dark | | 19:11 | — | 250° | Mr Quigley | | 06:20 | One bell, one ring | 094° | | | 07:48 | — | 094° | Mr Vance | | | | | | | | | | |
The two ruled rows at the foot are empty. He ruled them and did not fill them.
Nobody instructed him to rule them. Nobody instructed him to stop.
He was nineteen, and he had six men still out, and he ruled two more lines for them and kept the book in a drawer for thirty-one years.
That is the whole of what is in the box, and it is enough, and I have printed it.
> [a bucket, drawn] > A. Turnip (Assistant) (Temporary)
THE END