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By Root 313 0

could unselfconsciously decide what interested him. He could create his own categories of value without either following or deliberately rebelling against the hierarchies of others. When he arrived at the San Fernando mission on the Rio Negro, he was free to think that everything, or perhaps nothing, might be interesting. The needle of his curiosity followed its own magnetic north and, unsurprisingly to the future readers of his Journey, ended up pointing at plants. ‘In San Fernando we were most struck by the pihiguado or pirijao plant, which gives the countryside its peculiar quality. Covered with thorns, its trunk reaches more than sixty feet high,' he reported at the top of his list of what was interesting in San Fernando. Next Humboldt measured the temperature (very hot), then noted that the missionaries lived in attractive houses that were matted with liana and surrounded by gardens.

I tried to imagine an uninhibited guide to Madrid; how I myself might have ranked the city's offerings according to a subjective hierarchy of interest. I had three-star levels of interest in the underrepresentation of vegetables in the Spanish diet (during the last proper meal I had eaten, only a few limp, bleached and apparently tinned spears of asparagus had appeared between a succession of meat dishes) and the long and noble-sounding surnames of ordinary citizens (the assistant in charge of organizing the conference, for example, had owned a train of surnames connected by de and la, an appellation that suggested an ancestral castle, faithful servants, an old well and a coat of arms, a projection in sharp contrast with the reality of her life: a dust-coated SEAT Ibiza and a studio flat near the airport). I was interested in the smallness of Spanish men's feet

Esmeralda, on the Orinoco, engraved by Paul Gau ci after a drawing by Charles Bentley

and in the attitude towards modern architecture evident in many newer districts of the city—specifically, the fact that whether or not a building was attractive appeared to be less important than that it was obviously modern, even if this meant giving something a vile bronze facade (as though modernity were a longed-for substance that one needed in extra-strong doses to compensate for an earlier lack). All these matters would have appeared on my subjective list of interesting things in Madrid if my compass of curiosity had been allowed to settle according to its own logic, rather than being swayed by the unexpectedly powerful force field of a small green object by the name of The Michelin Street Guide to Madrid, which pointed its needle resolutely towards, among other targets, a brown-looking staircase in the echoing corridors of the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales.

8.

In June 1802, Humboldt climbed up what was then thought to be the highest mountain in the world: the volcanic peak of Mount Chimborazo in Peru, 6,267 metres above sea level. ‘We were constantly climbing through clouds,' he reported. ‘In many places, the ridge was not wider than eight or ten inches. To our left was a precipice of snow whose frozen crust glistened like glass. On the right lay a fearful abyss, from eight hundred to a thousand feet deep, with huge masses of rocks projecting from it.' In spite of the danger, Humboldt found time to notice elements that would have passed most mortals by: ‘A few rock lichens were seen above the snow lines, at a height of 16,920 feet. The last green moss we noticed about 2,600 feet lower down. A butterfly was captured by M. Bonpland [his travelling companion] at a height of 15,000 feet and a fly was seen 1,600 feet higher.'

Friedrich Georg Weitsch, Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland at the Foot of Chimborazo, 1810

How does a person come to be interested in the exact height at which he or she sees a fly? How does he or she begin to care about a piece of moss growing on a volcanic ridge ten inches wide? In Humboldt's case, such curiosity was far from spontaneous: his concern had a long history. The fly and the moss attracted his attention because they were related to prior,