The Art of Travel - Alain De Botton [29]
What may be accomplished in a lifetime—and seldom or never is.
3.
It was a maid who was ultimately responsible for my own voyage of exploration around Madrid. Three times she burst into my room with a broom and basket of cleaning fluids and, at the sight of a huddled shape under the sheets, exclaimed with theatrical alarm ‘Hola, perdone!' before leaving again, taking care to let her utensils collide loudly with the door as she slammed it. Because I did not wish to encounter this apparition a fourth time, I dressed, ordered a hot chocolate and a plate of batter sticks in the hotel bar and made my way to a part of town identified by one of my guidebooks as ‘Old Madrid':
When Felipe II chose Madrid as his capital in 1561, it was a small Castilian town with a population of barely twenty thousand. In the following years, it was to grow into the nerve centre of a mighty empire. Narrow streets with houses and medieval churches began to grow up behind the old Moorish fortress, which was later replaced by a Gothic palace and eventually by the present-day Bourbon palace, the Palacio Real. The sixteenth-century city is known as the ‘Madrid de los Austrias ‘ after the Habsburg dynasty. At this time, monasteries were endowed and churches and palaces were built. In the seventeenth century, the Plaza Mayor was added and the Puerta del Sol became the spiritual and geographical heart of Spain.
I stood on the corner of the Calle de Carretas and the Puerta del Sol, an undistinguished half-moon-shaped junction in the middle of which Carlos III (1759—1788) sat astride a horse. It was a sunny day, and crowds of tourists were stopping to take photographs and listen to guides. And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
4.
Humboldt was never pursued by such questions. Everywhere he went, his mission was unambiguous: to discover facts and to carry out experiments towards that end.
Already on the ship carrying him to South America, he had begun his factual researches. He measured the temperature of the seawater every two hours from Spain to the ship's destination, Cumanä, on the coast of New Granada (part of modern Venezuela). He took readings with his sextant and recorded the different marine species that he saw or found in the net he had hung from the stern. And once he landed in Venezuela, he threw himself into an exhaustive study of the vegetation around Cumanä. The hills of calcareous rock on which the town stood were dotted with cacti and opuntia, their trunks branching out like candelabras coated with lichen. One afternoon, Humboldt measured a cactus {Tuna macho) and noted its circumference: 1.54 metres. He spent three weeks cataloguing many more plants on the coast, then ventured inland into the jungle-covered New Andalusia mountain range. He took with him a mule bearing a trunk containing a sextant, a dipping needle, an instrument for calibrating magnetic variation, a thermometer and a Saussure's hygrometer, which measured humidity and was made of hair and whalebone. He put all of these to good use. In his journal he wrote, ‘As we entered the jungle the barometer showed that we were gaining altitude. Here the tree trunks offered us an extraordinary view: a gramineous plant with verticillate branches climbed like a liana to a height of eight to ten feet, forming garlands that crossed our path and swung in the wind. At about three in the afternoon we stopped on a small plain known as Quetepe, some 190 toises above sea level. A few huts stood by a spring whose water was known by the Indians to be fresh and healthy. We found the water delicious. Its temperature was only 22.5°C, while the air