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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask, ‘Why is there good and evil?' ‘How does nature work?' ‘Why am I me?' If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at some point we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing. The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up wondering about flies on the sides of mountains or about a particular fresco on the wall of a sixteenth-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years' War.

The chain of questions that led Humboldt to his curiosity about a fly on the ten-inch-wide ledge of Mount Chimborazo in June of 1802 had begun as far back as his eighth year, when, as a boy living in Berlin, he had visited relatives in another part of Germany and asked himself, ‘Why don't the same things grow everywhere?' Why were there trees near Berlin that did not grow in Bavaria, and vice versa? His curiosity was encouraged by others. He was given a microscope and a library of books about nature; tutors who understood botany were hired for him. He became known as ‘the little chemist' in the family, and his mother hung his drawings of plants on her study wall. By the time he set out for South America, Humboldt was attempting to formulate laws about how flora and fauna were shaped by climate and geography. His seven-year-old's sense of inquiry was still alive within him, but now it was articulated through more sophisticated questions, such as, ‘Are ferns affected by northern exposure?' and ‘Up to what height will a palm tree survive?'

On descending to the base camp below Mount Chimborazo, Humboldt washed his feet, had a short siesta and almost immediately began writing his ‘Essai sur la geographie des plantes', in which he defined the distribution of vegetation at different heights and temperatures. He stated that there were six altitude zones. From sea level to approximately 3,000 feet, palms and pisang plants grew. Up to 4,900 feet there were ferns, and up to 9,200 feet, oak trees. Then came a zone that nurtured evergreen shrubs (Wintern, Escalloniceae), followed, on the highest levels, by two alpine zones: between 10,150 and 12,600 feet, herbs grew, and between 12,600 and 14,200 feet, alpine grasses and lichens thrived. Flies were, he wrote excitedly, unlikely to be found above 16,600 feet.

9.

Humboldt's excitement testifies to the importance of having the right question to ask of the world. It may mean the difference between swatting at a fly in irritation and running down a mountain to begin work on an ‘Essai sur la geographie des plantes'.

Unfortunately for the traveller, most objects don't come affixed with the question that will generate the excitement they deserve. There is usually nothing fixed to them at all; when there is something, it tends to be the wrong thing. There was a lot fixed to the

Geographie des Plantes Equinoxiales from Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland's Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, 1799—1803

Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, which stood at the end of the long traffic-choked Carrera de San Francisco, but it hardly helped me to be curious about it:

The walls and ceilings of the church are decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes and paintings, except those in the chapels of saints Anthony and Bernardino, which date from the eighteenth century. The Captila de San Bernardino, the first chapel on the north side, contains in the centre of the wall a Saint Bernardino of Siena preaching before the King of Aragon (1781), painted by Goya as a young man. The sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.