Read The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque for Free Online Page B

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    crys-talline form and logos being the word."
    "Very interesting," I said, "but could it mean that he listened to the discourse of salt?"
    She laughed. "No, he decoded the hieroglyphics of the sky. He searched for import in the formations of snow-flakes."

Page 16
    "No doubt he had incredible vision and the ability to read very rapidly," I said.
    "Nothing of the sort," she told me, "but his work did require that we live half of each year in a remote location high in the Catskill Mountains. From October to March, we were like castaways.
    It was of the utmost importance that we be present to read the first and last snowfalls of each cycle of the seasons. Up there at a great altitude, at the edge of an old-growth forest only a few hundred feet below the tree line, the flakes were unsullied by the soot from mills and the warmth of civilization. Back in those days that area was the stuff of fairy tales—wolves, dark days, crested drifts as tall as a man, a startling silence in which the only thing louder than your thoughts was the wind, and a seamless, unchanging solitude.
    "We had a large old house near a lake next to which sat my father's laboratory. The house, of course, was well heated, but the laboratory was colder inside than it was out. It was a rather solitary and bleak existence for a child. I had no brothers or sisters, and there were no playmates for hundreds of miles. When I finally reached the age where I could be of some use to my father, out of equal parts devotion to him and the sheer boredom of the situ-ation, I became his assistant.
    "We would work together as he had done with his own father, wrapped in cumbersome clothing, out in the frozen laboratory constructed from sheets of tin. Every inch of both the exterior and interior was covered by a film of frost throughout the days of winter. The mecha-nisms, the instruments, all had icicles hanging from them. Before each reading we would have to chip the buildup off the knobs that focused the huge optical magnifier through which he would gaze at the snowflakes. We had to be very cautious with the glass lenses for that device because, in the constant cold, the slightest tap would shatter them into pieces no bigger than the crystals we were studying.
    "It seemed the snow fell constantly, but of course that is merely a child's impression. In actuality, it probably did snow a number of times each week, usually at least flur-ries and sometimes great blizzards that lasted for days on end. When the conditions were right for taking a sample, the wind velocity not too high and the precipitation at the precise temperature to fashion the spindled, star-shaped formations that carried the most important information, my father would stand outside, holding up to the open skies a flat piece of wood wrapped in black velvet. As soon as his board's collection resembled an abundance of stars in a clear night sky, he would whisk it away inside the lab-oratory.
    "He would then place the board onto the stage of the optical magnifier; a tall black machine with a ladder that led up to a chair situated so that the occupant could stare into a lens no bigger than a circling of the index finger and thumb. While he took his position in the investigator's seat, I would place around the edges of the viewing stage clumps of a type of seaweed that gave off its own lumi-nescence. It was important that he have enough light with which to see, but we could not use candles or lamps because their heat would melt our specimens.
    "At the perimeter of the laboratory there were lamps, three to be precise, but even when they stayed lit, the light they gave was weak. The glow from the seaweed was a yellow green. This, mixed with the overall blue of the cold, imbued the laboratory with a strange underwater ambi-ence. 'Lu, more seaweed,’ he would call down to me as he sat peering into the eyepiece at his end of the long cylin-der.
    As the barrel of the device proceeded toward the viewing stage it flanged