At Home - Bill Bryson [204]
The boots were the greatest surprise of all. They looked like nothing so much as a pair of bird’s nests sitting on soles of stiffened bear skin, and seemed hopelessly ill-designed and insubstantial. Intrigued, a Czech foot and shoe expert named Vaclav Patek carefully fashioned a replica pair, using exactly the same design and materials, then tried them on a mountain walk. They were, he reported in some astonishment, “more comfortable and capable” than any modern boots he had ever worn. Their grip on slippery rock was better than modern rubber, and it was all but impossible to get blisters in them. They were, above all, exceedingly effective against cold.
Despite all the forensic probings, ten years passed before anyone noticed that embedded in Ötzi’s left shoulder was an arrowhead. Closer inspection showed also that his clothes and weapons were speckled with the blood of four other people. Ötzi, it turned out, had been killed in a violent showdown of some kind. Why his murderers chased him up to a high mountain pass is a question that is not easily answered, even speculatively. Even more mysterious is why the murderers didn’t help themselves to his possessions. Ötzi’s personal items, particularly his ax, had real value. Yet having evidently stalked him for quite a distance and engaged in a remarkably bloody fight at close quarters—clearly it takes a lot of lashing out to draw the blood of four people—they left him where he fell, with his possessions undisturbed. It is of course lucky for us that they did, for his personal effects provide answers to all kinds of otherwise unanswerable questions, except the one that seems bound to tantalize forever now—namely, what on Earth was going on up there?
We are in the dressing room—or what at least was called the dressing room on Edward Tull’s original plans. One of Tull’s many architectural curiosities was that he didn’t provide direct access between the dressing room and Mr. Marsham’s bedroom next door but had both decanting separately into the upstairs passage. So in order to dress or undress, Mr. Marsham would have had to leave his bedroom and walk a few steps along the corridor to the dressing room—rather an odd way to go about things, bearing in mind that just across the way was the “Female Servant’s Bedroom” (now the bathroom)—which is to say, that of the loyal spinster Miss Worm. Such an arrangement would almost certainly have guaranteed occasional encounters, which we may presume would tend to be awkward. But then again perhaps not. A separate oddity is how cozily proximate their bedrooms were, considering how rigorously their domains were separated by day. It is certainly a hard household to figure.
In any case, Mr. Marsham apparently had second thoughts. In the house as built, the dressing room and bedroom are in fact connected. The dressing room is now, and probably for the better part of a century has been, a bathroom. We still do some of our dressing in there, however, which is just as well, because the long and really quite mysterious history of dressing is what we have come here to talk about.
How long people have been dressing themselves is a question not easy to answer. All that can be said is that about forty thousand years ago, there stepped from the shadows the big-brained, behaviorally modern people commonly known as Cro-Magnons (after a cave in the Dordogne region of France where they were first found) and that among these new people was some ingenious soul who came up with one of the greatest, most underrated inventions in history: string. String is marvelously elemental. It is simply two pieces of fiber placed side by side and twisted together. That achieves two things: it makes a cord that is strong, and it allows long cords to be built up from short fibers. Imagine where we would be without it. There would