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the muzzles of the cannons. Then they fired.”
    Below them the mountains shone jagged and white, clean and untenanted. Nearby were other Englishmen, and other Indians, working in apparent harmony in this landscape belonging to neither. Yet all this had happened only six years ago.
    “There was nothing left of them,” the chainman said. He rose and kicked snow into the fire; the kettle he emptied and packed tidily away. “Parts of them came down like rain, bits of bone and flesh, shreds of uniforms. Some of us were sprinkled with their blood.”
    “I …” Max had murmured. What could he say? “A terrible thing.” The chainman returned to work, leaving Max haunted and uneasy.
    The other story was this, which Michaels encouraged a triangulator to tell one night when three different surveying teams gathered in a valley to plan their tasks for the next few weeks. An Indian atrocity to match the British one: Cawnpore, a month after the incident reported by the chainman. Of course Max had heard of the massacre of women and children there. No one in England had escaped that news, nor the public frenzy that followed. But Michaels’s gruff, hard-drinking companion, who in 1857 had been with a unit of the Highlanders, told with relish certain details the newspaper hadn’t printed.
    “If you had seen the huts,” said Michaels’s friend: Archdale, Maxthought his name was. Or maybe Archvale. “A hundred and twenty women and children escaped the first massacre on the riverboats—the mutineers rounded them up and kept them in huts. We arrived not long after they were butchered. I saw those huts, they looked like cages where a pack of wild animals had been set loose among their prey.”
    “Tell about the shoes,” Michaels had called from the other side of the fire. All the men were drinking; Michaels had had a case of brandy carried in from Srinagar. His face was dark red, sweating, fierce. That night, as always, he ignored Max almost completely.
    “The shoes,” Archdale said. He emptied his glass and leaned forward, face shining in the firelight. “Picture this,” he said. “I go into one hut and the walls are dripping with blood, the floor smeared, the smell unthinkable. Flies buzzing so loudly I thought I’d go mad. Against one wall is a row of women’s shoes, running with blood, draped with bits of clothing.” The Indian chainmen and the Baiti porters were gathered around their separate fires, not far away. Could they hear Archdale? Max wondered. Was it possible Archdale would say these things within earshot of them? “Against the other wall, a row of children’s shoes, so small, just like those our children wear at home. And”—he leaned farther forward here—“do you know what was in them?”
    No one answered. Was Gillian wearing shoes yet? “What?” Max said, unable to stop himself.
    “Feet!” Archdale roared.
“Feet!
Those filthy animals, those swine, they had lopped off the children’s feet. We found the bodies in the well.”
    That terrible story had set off others; the night had been like a night in hell; Max had fled the campfire soon after Archdale’s tirade and rolled himself in a blanket in a hollow, far from everyone, carved into the rocky cliffs. When he woke he’d been surprised not to find the campground littered with bodies.
    Since hearing those tales he has wondered how there could be so much violence on both sides; and how, after that, Englishmen and Indians could be up in these mountains working so calmly together. How can hemake sense of an empire founded on such things?
Nothing,
he thought after hearing those stories. And still thinks.
I understand nothing.
    Dr. Hooker wrote at great length, in a letter Max didn’t mention to Clara, about the problems of packing botanical collections for the journey home: the weight, the costs; the necessity of using Ward’s cases; the crating of tree ferns and the boats to be hired. How kind he was, to take such trouble in writing to Max, and