Angels and Insects Read Free Page B

shipped back by all three collectors. It was Stevens who had introduced William to the Reverend Harald Alabaster, who had inherited his baronetcy and his Gothicmansion only on the death of his childless brother in 1848. Alabaster was an obsessive collector, who wrote long letters to his unknown friend, which arrived at infrequent intervals, and asked about the religious beliefs of the Natives as well as the habits of the hummingbird hawk-moth and the Saüba ant. William wrote back to him, the letters of a great naturalist from an untrodden wilderness, spiced with an attractive self-deprecating humour. It was Harald Alabaster who had told him of Wallace’s calamitous fire at sea in 1852, in a letter that had taken almost a year to reach him. William had somehow supposed that this was a statistical insurance against another naturalist being wrecked on the return voyage, but it had not been so. The brig,
Fleur-de-Lys
, had been rotten and unseaworthy, and William Adamson, unlike the vaguer Wallace, had not been properly insured against the loss of his collection. He was still full of the survivor’s simple pleasure in being alive when Harald Alabaster’s invitation reached him. He packed up what he had saved, which included his tropical journals and the most valuable butterflies, and set off for Bredely Hall.
    His tropical journals were much stained—by the paraffin in which their box had once been doused to prevent their being eaten by ants and termites, by traces of mud and crushed leaves from canoe accidents, by salt water like floods of tears. He had sat alone under a roof woven of leaves in an earth-floored hut, and scribbled descriptions of everything: the devouring hordes of army ants, the cries of frogs and alligators, the murderous designs of his crew, the monotonous sinister cries of the howler monkeys, the languages of various tribes he had stayed with, the variable markings of butterflies, the plagues of biting flies, the unbalancing of his own soul in this green world of vast waste, murderous growth, and lazily aimless mere existence. He had peered into these pages by the light of burning turtle oil, and had recorded his solitude, his smallness in the face of the river and the forest, his determination to survive, whilstcomparing himself to a dancing midge in a collecting bottle. He had come to be addicted to the written form of his own language, which he spoke hardly at all, although he was fluent in Portuguese, the
lingoa geral
spoken by most of the natives, and several tribal tongues. Latin and Greek had given him a taste for languages. Writing gave him a taste for poetry. He read and reread
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
, which he had by him, and an anthology of
Choice Beauties of our Elder Poets
. It was to this he turned now. It must have been one in the morning, but his blood and his mind were racing. He was not ready for sleep. He had bought a new notebook, an elegant green with marbled covers, in Liverpool, and now opened its first blank page. On this he copied out a poem by Ben Jonson which had always intrigued him and had now suddenly taken on a new urgency.
    Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
    Before rude hands have touched it?
    Have you marked but the fall o’ the snow,
    Before the soil hath smutched it?
    Have you felt the wool o’ the beaver?
    Or swan’s down ever?
    Or have smelled o’ the bud o’ the briar?
    Or the nard i’ the fire?
    Or have tasted the bag o’ the bee?
    O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
    That was what he wanted to set down, exactly. O so white! O so soft! O so sweet, he wanted to say.
    Beyond that was unknown territory. He remembered a sentence from a fairy story of his childhood, a sentence spoken by a Prince of Araby about the lovely Princess of China, brought briefly to him in her sleep by mischievous spirits. ‘I shall die if I cannot have her,’ the Prince had said, to his servant, to his father and mother. William poised his pen above his paper and