DEPTH NOT ESTABLISHED

A Tale of Sogmarsh — being the complete history of the Committee's attempt to find the bottom of the Great Slough, in eleven requisitions.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

The Grand Cartographic Revision Committee has been trying to establish the depth of the Great Slough since 1841.

It has not established it. This is not the interesting part. The interesting part is how it has not established it, which is with enormous diligence, at considerable expense, over four generations, in a straight line, without at any point stopping to consider whether the method might be the difficulty — and the whole magnificent history is preserved, because the Committee preserves everything, in the one place where this office's soul is fully visible: the requisitions.

I have read them all. It took an afternoon. It is the funniest document in the realm and I do not think one word of it was meant to be.

REQUISITION THE FIRST. 1841. One sounding line, 100 ft, hemp.

The party proceeds to the margin of the Slough, pays out the line, and reports:

Depth not established. Line paid out to 100 ft. Line came back wet and short.

Now: a person outside this realm reads came back short and thinks about it for a moment and arrives, fairly quickly, at the answer. The bog is not a lake. It is not water with a floor under it. It is a suspension of peat and fibre and cold water, and it closes on things, and a hemp line paid into it comes back wet, and swollen, and fouled, and — over enough time in enough peat-acid — shorter, because the bog is quietly eating it.

There is no bottom to find in the sense the Committee means. There is only a gradient of increasing unwillingness.

Nobody at the Committee has ever written that down. Not once, in a hundred and eighty years. And I want to be careful here, because it would be easy and wrong to call them fools: every single man on those parties knew the bog. They were fen surveyors. They had walked it their whole lives. Ask any one of them in a taproom what the Slough does to a rope and he would tell you, at length, with feeling.

What none of them could do was put it in a return. Because the return has a box that says DEPTH, and the box takes a figure, and "the bog ate the line" is not a figure, and a return that does not fill its boxes is a return that will come back for amendment. So they filled in the only box the form gave them — Depth not established — and requisitioned a longer line, because a longer line is a thing the form does have a box for, and everybody could sign that with a clear conscience and go home.

REQUISITION THE SECOND. 1843. One sounding line, 200 ft, hemp.

Depth not established. Line paid out to 200 ft. Line came back wet and short.

(The Committee has re-issued the survey party with a longer line. The Committee is aware of how the previous sentence reads. The requisition stands.)

That parenthesis is real. It is in the minutes. It is, I maintain, the single greatest sentence any institution in this kingdom has ever written about itself: the Committee is aware of how that reads. They saw it. They saw exactly how it looked. And they ordered the longer line anyway, because seeing how a thing looks and having a different thing to do about it are separate problems, and only the first one is free.

REQUISITION THE THIRD. 1851. One line, 400 ft. Result as before.

THE FOURTH. 1869. One line, 600 ft, and one drum, iron, to wind it. The drum is the first sign of a Committee beginning to suffer: you do not requisition a drum unless the line has got heavy enough to require machinery, and a line that requires machinery is a line nobody is going to pull in by hand and notice the state of.

THE FIFTH. 1877. One line, 600 ft, chain, in place of hemp.

⭐ This is the near miss, and it is the great tragedy of the sequence. Somebody — the requisition is initialled and the initials belong to a junior — worked it out. Chain does not swell. Chain does not rot. Chain does not come back short. If that line had gone out, the Committee would have learned, in one afternoon, that its problem was the rope, and the whole subsequent century would not have happened.

The chain was struck from the requisition by the Chairman of the day, on grounds of cost, with a note that hemp had been found satisfactory in previous years.

Satisfactory is doing a very great deal of work in that note, and it has been doing it for a hundred and forty-six years.

THE SIXTH through THE NINTH. (1884, 1897, 1911, 1934.) Longer lines. Better drums. A boat. A second boat, the first having been retained by the Slough under maritime bog-law, which the Scuttles enforced promptly and which cost the Committee more in argument than in boat.

The returns are identical. I do not mean similar; I mean somebody copied the wording forward, year on year, because it had been accepted before and a form of words that has been accepted is worth more to a clerk than a form of words that is true.

Depth not established. Line paid out to [—] ft. Line came back wet and short.

THE TENTH. 1961. One line, 1,200 ft. And appended to it, for the first and only time in the entire sequence, a note from the officer in charge of the party, a woman, in her own hand, not on a form:

I have paid out twelve hundred feet of line into a bog that everyone in the party has walked across on a dry August with a plank. I would like this noted somewhere that a person will read.

It was noted. It was filed. It was not read, until I read it, which is what filed means in this realm.

THE ELEVENTH, AND CURRENT. Standing, since 1989.

One sounding line, 2,000 ft, hemp; one drum, mechanical; and the party to attend annually at the margin.

They still go. That is the thing I want to leave you with. There is a survey party of the Grand Cartographic Revision Committee that attends the Great Slough once a year, in the wet, with two thousand feet of rope on a mechanical drum, and pays it out, and winds it in, and measures what comes back, and enters the result on a form whose wording has not changed since 1841.

They are good at it. They are efficient, and polite, and they have got the operation down to a day and a half from what used to take a week. There is a young man on that party at present who is, by common account, the finest hand with a drum in the profession.

And they know. Every one of them knows. I asked. The senior of them, a man of sixty, gave me the answer that is the whole of this realm, and gave it without any bitterness at all, wiping his hands on a rag:

"Course it's the rope, son. Everyone knows it's the rope. Been the rope since before my grandad."

And when I asked why nobody had ever written that on the form, he looked at me with the mild patience of a professional explaining his trade to an enthusiast, and said:

"There's no box for it."

Here is what a hundred and eighty years of that has produced, and it is not nothing, and this is the part the joke does not cover.

The Committee has no depth for the Great Slough. It has, instead, the most complete record of the behaviour of hemp in peat-acid ever assembled by anybody anywhere: a hundred and eighty years of lines, of known lengths, in known conditions, measured going out and coming back, annually, by careful people. Three separate trades now use those figures. The rope-makers at Saltgate price by them. It is, by a comfortable margin, the most valuable thing that office has ever produced.

It is filed under DEPTH: NOT ESTABLISHED.

An institution that cannot say a true thing will not stop working — it will go on working, beautifully, for a hundred and eighty years, and produce something magnificent and entirely unlike what it set out to find, and file it under the heading it was given at the start. If you would change such a place, do not argue with its conclusions. Widen its form.