plateaus in what was then northern Mongolia. “As far as the eye could see around us, over the vast plain which had once been leveled by the Yellow River, waved the grass of the steppes.” The solitudes moved him: the “wide torrential valleys where herds of gazelles could be seen, nose to wind, among the pebbles and the sparse grass…. We were crossing the low steppes of San-Tao-Ho. The Mongolians are now no longer here…. The season of the yellow winds is over.”
The next morning, he broke camp by the waters of the Shiling-Gol and moved toward Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later, he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-fivemiles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the shore. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.
He resumed his teaching post in Paris the next year. In the next few years he lived again in China, undertook another Gobi expedition, returned to Paris, rode a mule on a geologic journey through the Mabla Massif in Ethiopia, and trekked for months digging bones and breaking rocks in both the Ordos and Manchuria.
In the field he wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. “This man with the clear regard,” a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. All his life he parted his short hair on the left. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archaeologists. Among them were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick, and Paul Valéry.
Sandstorms nauseate by generating static electricity—eighty volts per square yard. A Dutch geographer discovered a cure. Walking through a sandstorm, he dragged a car jack behind him; the jack grounded the voltage.
The paleontologist once called God “punctiform”: “It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that God is infinitely near.” Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform? I think so.
Of the gospel miracles he wrote, “I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles.”
C L O U D S We are fortunate to possess a kind of Domesday Book for the cloud population in the summer of 1869 in the California Sierra.
On June 12 of that year, John Muir noted from the North Fork of the Merced River: “Cumuli rising to the eastward. How beautiful their pearly bosses! How well they harmonize with the upswelling rocks beneath them! Mountains of the sky, solid-looking, finely sculptured …”
On June 21, he recorded a well-defined cloud: “a solitary white mountain … enriched with sunshine and shade.”
Crisp, rocky-looking clouds appeared on July 2: “keenest in outline I ever saw.”
On July 23: “What can poor mortals say about clouds?” While people describe them, they vanish. “Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significantas the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God’s calendar, difference of duration is nothing.”
We who missed witnessing them are yet certain that on August 26, 1869, at Tuolomne meadow, clouds occupied about 15 percent of the sky at noon. At evening, “large picturesque clouds, craggy like rocks,” piled on Mount Dana, clouds “reddish in color like the mountain itself.”
September 8: A few clouds drifted around the peaks “as if looking for work.”
Seventy-four years later, on August 11, 1943, a young woman wrote from Westerbork, a transition camp in the Netherlands: “It really doesn’t matter if it is I who die or another. What matters is that we are all marked men.”
N U M B E R S Ten years ago, I
The next morning, he broke camp by the waters of the Shiling-Gol and moved toward Kalgan in the Gobi, an area science did not know. He found fossils. Two days later, he was wielding a pick at the Dalai-Nor, a wet salt pan twenty-fivemiles long on the Mongolian steppe. He shook and spread his bedroll on a dune by the shore. Six oxcarts carried supplies and boxes of extinct Tertiary horse and rhino bones.
He resumed his teaching post in Paris the next year. In the next few years he lived again in China, undertook another Gobi expedition, returned to Paris, rode a mule on a geologic journey through the Mabla Massif in Ethiopia, and trekked for months digging bones and breaking rocks in both the Ordos and Manchuria.
In the field he wore a tough jacket and a wide-brimmed slouch hat. In one breast pocket he carried a breviary, and in the other a pack of Gauloises. “This man with the clear regard,” a friend called him. He was long-boned, sharp-faced, faintly smiling when serious, and merry in company. When he laughed his face split into planes. All his life he parted his short hair on the left. His friends were mostly geologists, paleontologists, priests, explorers, educated Paris and New York women, and archaeologists. Among them were an odd trio: Julian Huxley, Henry Clay Frick, and Paul Valéry.
Sandstorms nauseate by generating static electricity—eighty volts per square yard. A Dutch geographer discovered a cure. Walking through a sandstorm, he dragged a car jack behind him; the jack grounded the voltage.
The paleontologist once called God “punctiform”: “It is precisely because he is so infinitely profound and punctiform that God is infinitely near.” Is it useful and wise to think of God as punctiform? I think so.
Of the gospel miracles he wrote, “I feel obliged to admit that I believe not because of but in spite of the miracles.”
C L O U D S We are fortunate to possess a kind of Domesday Book for the cloud population in the summer of 1869 in the California Sierra.
On June 12 of that year, John Muir noted from the North Fork of the Merced River: “Cumuli rising to the eastward. How beautiful their pearly bosses! How well they harmonize with the upswelling rocks beneath them! Mountains of the sky, solid-looking, finely sculptured …”
On June 21, he recorded a well-defined cloud: “a solitary white mountain … enriched with sunshine and shade.”
Crisp, rocky-looking clouds appeared on July 2: “keenest in outline I ever saw.”
On July 23: “What can poor mortals say about clouds?” While people describe them, they vanish. “Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significantas the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God’s calendar, difference of duration is nothing.”
We who missed witnessing them are yet certain that on August 26, 1869, at Tuolomne meadow, clouds occupied about 15 percent of the sky at noon. At evening, “large picturesque clouds, craggy like rocks,” piled on Mount Dana, clouds “reddish in color like the mountain itself.”
September 8: A few clouds drifted around the peaks “as if looking for work.”
Seventy-four years later, on August 11, 1943, a young woman wrote from Westerbork, a transition camp in the Netherlands: “It really doesn’t matter if it is I who die or another. What matters is that we are all marked men.”
N U M B E R S Ten years ago, I
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