Read Online Anatomy of Restlessness by Bruce Chatwin - Free Book Online
Authors: Bruce Chatwin
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unreflecting courage that lacked the imagination to turn round.
Her work has continued, but in lesser hands; I could say treacherous hands. In February of last year, her research student Dr (now Professor) Helmut Leander, of the Institute of Glacial Studies at Kydd College, Minnesota, published a 103-page attack on her Glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere . Then in September, at the Symposium of World Climatology in Tel-Aviv, he described her findings as âirresponsibleâ. That evening, in the bar of the Hilton Hotel, I overheard shreds of his conversation explaining, in German and to an audience of West Germans, how the Neumann Theory was the product of its authorâs incurable optimism. âOr else,â he added in a whisper, âshe was bought.â
I checked her figures. I double-checked them. The work took me six weeks: it left me red-eyed and exhausted. Estelle had scribbled her material over thirteen hip-pocket notebooks with black leatherette covers â equations, graphs and diagrams, which she alone could decipher, or someone as close to her as I. I was obliged to do it, as much for her memory as to reassure the organisations that had invested in our research. I found no fault with her data, her method or her conclusions.
Estelleâs work was bound to upset the catastrophists. She had proved beyond question that the injection of fossil fuels into the atmosphere had no effect whatever on the temperature of glaciers. The prospects of triggering off another Ice Age, at least within the next 10,000 years, were nil. And the pronouncements of Dr Leander and his colleagues merely reflected that bias for self-destruction now engrained in American academic circles. âThose dodos!â she would sigh. âThose dodos!â
Estelle published her thesis in 1965 and from that year her work attracted the attention of the chemical, the petrochemical and aerospace industries. The Cliffhart Foundation (a subsidiary of Heartland Oil) financed our first project to the tune of $150,000. For five months we studied the structure of Tyndall Flowers, the six-petalled cavities which appear in parallel layers on the surface of melting ice and resemble the superimposed calligraphies of some Japanese Zen Master. (The other expert in the field, Dr Nonomura Hideyoshi, had retired to a monastery near Nara.)
Before we had finished, nineteen other foundations pressed us to accept whatever money we needed. No expense seemed unreasonable to their trustees: they only wished the work to continue.
On 9 October 1974, a luminous fall day whirling with scarlet leaves, Estelle and I lunched at the Harvard Faculty Club to discuss our expedition to the Belgrano ice-cap. Our Eggs Benedict were all but uneatable, our conversation drowned by the braying accents of five Oxford historians at the next table.
Estelle was forty-three, a handsome, masculine woman with black hair cropped short and worn in a fringe above her considerable eyebrows. Years of exposure to sun, wind and snow had burnished her skin the texture of shoe-leather; when not beaming with self-satisfaction, her crowâs-feet showed up white.
Her dress was simple and unaffected, a sweater and tweed skirt for the laboratory, hardly anything more elaborate for the cheese-fondue parties she gave in her Cambridge apartment. But she was addicted to âprimitiveâ jewellery of the worst kind â Navajo turquoise, African bangles, amber beads. That morning a golden eagle of the Veraguas Culture was flapping between her breasts; I did not have the heart to tell her it was a fake.
Over lunch Estelle gave me a critical resume of the literature on Patagonian glaciers. She could remember if a pamphlet was printed in Valdivia or Valparaiso in 1897 or 1899. She drew my attention to some new work by Dr Andrei Shirokogoff, of the Antarctic Institute in Novosibirsk, who explored the north face of Cordon Tannhäuser during the Allende years. But her conversation
Her work has continued, but in lesser hands; I could say treacherous hands. In February of last year, her research student Dr (now Professor) Helmut Leander, of the Institute of Glacial Studies at Kydd College, Minnesota, published a 103-page attack on her Glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere . Then in September, at the Symposium of World Climatology in Tel-Aviv, he described her findings as âirresponsibleâ. That evening, in the bar of the Hilton Hotel, I overheard shreds of his conversation explaining, in German and to an audience of West Germans, how the Neumann Theory was the product of its authorâs incurable optimism. âOr else,â he added in a whisper, âshe was bought.â
I checked her figures. I double-checked them. The work took me six weeks: it left me red-eyed and exhausted. Estelle had scribbled her material over thirteen hip-pocket notebooks with black leatherette covers â equations, graphs and diagrams, which she alone could decipher, or someone as close to her as I. I was obliged to do it, as much for her memory as to reassure the organisations that had invested in our research. I found no fault with her data, her method or her conclusions.
Estelleâs work was bound to upset the catastrophists. She had proved beyond question that the injection of fossil fuels into the atmosphere had no effect whatever on the temperature of glaciers. The prospects of triggering off another Ice Age, at least within the next 10,000 years, were nil. And the pronouncements of Dr Leander and his colleagues merely reflected that bias for self-destruction now engrained in American academic circles. âThose dodos!â she would sigh. âThose dodos!â
Estelle published her thesis in 1965 and from that year her work attracted the attention of the chemical, the petrochemical and aerospace industries. The Cliffhart Foundation (a subsidiary of Heartland Oil) financed our first project to the tune of $150,000. For five months we studied the structure of Tyndall Flowers, the six-petalled cavities which appear in parallel layers on the surface of melting ice and resemble the superimposed calligraphies of some Japanese Zen Master. (The other expert in the field, Dr Nonomura Hideyoshi, had retired to a monastery near Nara.)
Before we had finished, nineteen other foundations pressed us to accept whatever money we needed. No expense seemed unreasonable to their trustees: they only wished the work to continue.
On 9 October 1974, a luminous fall day whirling with scarlet leaves, Estelle and I lunched at the Harvard Faculty Club to discuss our expedition to the Belgrano ice-cap. Our Eggs Benedict were all but uneatable, our conversation drowned by the braying accents of five Oxford historians at the next table.
Estelle was forty-three, a handsome, masculine woman with black hair cropped short and worn in a fringe above her considerable eyebrows. Years of exposure to sun, wind and snow had burnished her skin the texture of shoe-leather; when not beaming with self-satisfaction, her crowâs-feet showed up white.
Her dress was simple and unaffected, a sweater and tweed skirt for the laboratory, hardly anything more elaborate for the cheese-fondue parties she gave in her Cambridge apartment. But she was addicted to âprimitiveâ jewellery of the worst kind â Navajo turquoise, African bangles, amber beads. That morning a golden eagle of the Veraguas Culture was flapping between her breasts; I did not have the heart to tell her it was a fake.
Over lunch Estelle gave me a critical resume of the literature on Patagonian glaciers. She could remember if a pamphlet was printed in Valdivia or Valparaiso in 1897 or 1899. She drew my attention to some new work by Dr Andrei Shirokogoff, of the Antarctic Institute in Novosibirsk, who explored the north face of Cordon Tannhäuser during the Allende years. But her conversation
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