The Isle of Ely.
The Great Level.
July and August, 1649.
Fine summer weather.
And so our work begins. Van Hooghten, with some of the two dozen men come from Holland, geographers and navigators in equal numbers, has the charge of surveying the whole of the Great Level. He and his men will determine its outer limits, which task means covering it with their triangulations, all five hundred square miles that Mijnheer Vermuyden spoke of. His geographers will begin also to survey the middle and northern sections, while I and my men take the southern part.
To redeem the drowned land it is necessary for us to understand it; that is to say, to measure it. I will measure the breadth of every channel and all the islands as we find them. We will calculate also the lengths of the channels and the gradient or fall of the water to the sea.
For us earthly geographers, the job is compounded part of science and part of imagination, for in this place the line between land and water is not as clear as the map must make it. It is a line that wanders and shifts with the seasons and the years. One summer an island comes up clear from a channel, only to shrink away when the rains arrive. Another year a river decides on a new turn, gambols about and abandons its old course.
This is the nature of the Great Level, and it has never before been fixed on paper. The reason is simple. None of the natives of these parts has need of a map, neither the people of the islands such as Ely, who fear to venture into the fen, nor the fensmen, who know all the watercourses as they twist and change and all the islands as they rise and fall. This land, since the creation, has slept sound under its watery covers each winter and thrown them off in the heat of summer.
Now everything will begin to change. The land will wake and emerge, as improvement demands. With the maps of all the sections, and Van Hooghten’s survey of the extent and perimeter, we will make one whole map of the Great Level drowned, and so proceed to a plan of its draining.
In the heat of the summer I begin my task. We start each new day where we left off the day before. At precise intervals of distance we tie up the boat to measure the depths of the waters as we map them. This, in a river, is a simple matter, easily accomplished, the depth varying only with the time of year and the fall of rain. But north beyond Ely Isle is a place of meeting that alters the case. Twice a day at high tide there is a mingling of salt and fresh waters, the heavier seawater sliding below, the lighter river water turning lazily above it, trying to go on its way, yet pushed back towards its source.
In the summer, when the fresh water is low and idling, this conjunction is a benign one, two old friends tipping their hats and nodding as they pass. But in the autumn and spring, at the highest tides, Van Hooghten tells me, they may come up fast against one another, and neither has the space to yield. The water then overflows the banks of the channels and rises through the reed beds and above the tree roots. Sometimes all in a rush, or sometimes with a slow and steady elevation, the waters grow until the meres are enlarged and joined and sheets of water like the great flood of old spread out under the sky all the way to the gray horizon.
These great shifting meres I have not yet seen, only the meres that are permanently established. Yet even a small mere seems large to the eye close up. The water takes in the azure of the sky and gives up its shining light so that at the horizon solid and liquid cannot be prised apart.
I lean over the stern of the boat as it sways by a reed bed, and drop a plumb line. When the lead touches the bottom, I can read the depth from the marks on the line and record the place in my book. In this way we will chart the course and fall of each channel. Once all are plumbed and mapped, Van Hooghten and I will decide where best to make a cut, a new watercourse to gather and drain the water from the land and carry it to the sea.
This is not the simple matter of a map only. The land here is not all of one substance. At points the clay comes to the surface and there are islands of more solid ground upon which grow a multitude of bushes and small trees. There are other islands, too, such as that to which Van Hooghten took me on my first day. These float upon the water, platforms of spongy vegetation. Still a third form of land, upon which grass grows plentifully, appears only when the spring waters have subsided. This summer land, peat black and flat as the mere bottom, will be most fit for farming.
A serenity comes upon me as we begin the work. I am sure in my knowledge and my skill, and the exercise of it calms me and takes away the feeling of being naked and observed that I have in Ely. Each day we push out a little further from the town, and work our way towards the sea. We part company and work alone on the smallest of the channels, with walls of reed about us. I take pride in the task, and recount it to Van Hooghten when we meet in the evening.
It is three weeks after we begin measuring that the first thing happens. I have left my men and taken a coracle such as fensmen use up a winding channel away from the main current of the River Ouse. This coracle, of the sort that I first saw by the wharfs in Ely, is a curious round craft, made of skin stretched over a frame of willow, and tarred black inside and out. It is small and shallow-bottomed; so light that I can hoist it onto my shoulders if land appears where I do not expect it. Paddling first one side and then the other with a single oar, I can nose my way up the narrowest of channels. In the height of summer when the water is low, the coracle floats easily over the shallows. When I work alone I use it almost every day.
Now we are in the dog days. Summer heat holds sway over the whole of the Great Level. Land and water, warm with sunshine, lie lazy and still. Reeds sway as I edge between their russet walls. High above, a lark sings its warning to the blue. Plumb line, measuring rods and ropes are stowed in the bottom of the coracle, my papers and chronometer in the large pocket I have sewn into my jacket for the purpose.
I am ready to lower and lift my line; to measure, check and write. Instead I let the coracle go, and drift with it, half asleep. The narrow channel empties out suddenly into a pool. In a splash of sunlight on the far side I see two or three women on the bank, indistinct in the dazzle, drying themselves after bathing, perhaps.
Nearer to me in the shade of a willow is another woman. I see her in the water, the hem of her shift loosely gathered in both hands. She does not notice me or hear anything, for at that very moment, before there is time to move or say a word, she bends forwards and pulls the garment over her head. So I see her as I have never seen a woman, her whole nakedness, half in my plain sight, half reflected in the water.
And the same instant, or so it feels, she lifts her head and sees me there. Her furious eyes strip me of everything and make me as naked as herself. The coracle floats closer to her. What can I do in that moment? Nothing. I cover my face with my hands. I cover my eyes, my nose and mouth. I want to block the operation of every sense. But it is too late; her look hits me like a spear. I cannot, even afterwards, give that look a name. It has a presence, and sinks inside me as surely as my own plumb line sinks into water. There is no pulling it up again. It is down in my stomach, ripping through my organs, settling into my flesh.
When I wake up, or take my hands from my eyes, the world has tipped sideways, and there is a confusion of shouting, and I too try to speak, to defend myself from her sight. What can I say, in that whirl of legs and arms, as her companions reach to pull her up, water slapping the coracle as she scrambles on to the bank? Nothing. I cannot speak or steady the boat, only see through a mist as the women snatch up her clothing and cover her. Besides, she is already gone, or going, through a tangle of low bushes into a parting in the reed wall.
Silence falls on the afternoon. Coots sound their sirens round the meres. Feet first, a flight of ducks skids in. Water droplets catch the sunshine. The reeds shiver and sigh. For some minutes I sit there and then with an effort lean over and check my instruments and ropes. They are still there in the bottom of the coracle, and the sight brings me back to myself and slows the beating of my heart. When I look up I see the mere, the water and the sky, all unchanged. But I know that everything is altered and translated. I spin the coracle, work abandoned, and paddle back to Ely, heavy with whatever is inside me.
From that day on I live a different life. Something has happened to me, though it feels neither a curse nor a blessing, but simply a change. Straightaway I accept it and ingest it. The woman I saw, who saw me, has taken up residence inside me. I begin to wait, though I scarcely know who I wait for. I cannot say with any certainty that I would know her again if I saw her in the street in Ely. I caught so little of her features, transfixed as I was by her piercing look.
I am the same Jan Brunt, engineer; a tall black-haired man, given to silence and sitting alone in speculation. It is only to myself that I am different. The men I work with say nothing. At my lodgings, Mrs. Suckling regards me with the usual suspicion. In the evening we continue our conversation and now work through lists of plants, then the names of animals. Gradually I begin to make out sentences in English and find myself understood. It is in part a matter of pronunciation. Lay our two languages side by side and the resemblance is clear; they must at one time have known one another. It is only the speaking that makes them such strangers.
I say nothing to Mrs. Suckling about my box, which I find one evening with the lid up, but return with a new one that has a strong lock. In this I store my papers and take the key with me when I leave, hung on a string around my neck. Still I have the feeling of being watched and followed, though I never see anyone behind me, and, our purpose becoming known, I can see no benefit in it. In Ely some of the people talk openly about the works. Opinion divides, as do the water and the land upon our maps. Some see good profits in draining the Great Level and the increases in all kinds of business that will follow. Others, who stand neither to gain nor lose, are indifferent.
I know not if it was people from Ely, or fensmen, who destroyed the earthworks and turned the last scheme into ruin, but Van Hooghten tells me it was a combination against the King whose business it was. Now that the war in England is finished the temper of the people here must be different. This being the case, I tell myself that my sense of being watched and my papers disturbed is imagination only, and comes about from feeling myself a stranger in this place.
• • •
Steadily the work advances. I start each day at the staithe as the sky lightens. Autumn comes towards us; the days shrink and the sky darkens early on the horizon. We are now bringing every creek and mere, every turn of water and curve of land, into being on our maps; giving the Great Level an outline and a form. Sometimes I work with other men, but I am often by myself. I tell Van Hooghten that I am watched, but he shrugs me off, and assures me that it is the place itself, the great wide feel of it, that oppresses me.
“There is no one here concealed,” he says with a smile. “It is your own loneliness that conjures watchers, as wanderers see phantoms out of fear and hope.”
He is mistaken, or has forgotten where we come from. I am a Dutchman and an islander. Water and sky are safe to me as my mother’s skirts. I know an empty silence and a full silence. Stand still in a full silence and it’s loud with noises. A heron takes flight; he creaks like a ship in sail. Ducks scuffle in the reeds. I hear the beat of wings, the movement of creatures in the grass, water rippling, and the wind that accompanies me everywhere, sighing and roaring. Nature, that seems so quiet, pours out its songs. Even in the darkness there is a velvet purr of sound, of moles underground and field mice above.
An empty silence is quite different. If I hear a silence as quiet as the earth must have been before all things living were placed upon it, I know that something is amiss. Something has stopped up sound. Then ill-ease comes over me; a drawing in of breath.
This is what I hear one hot afternoon towards September. I have the boat tied up, and have laid upon the bank a plumb line, a measuring rod and chain, triangulation poles and the chronometer that will confirm the calculations I make concerning the speed of the water. Next to them sit a compass and my papers with the figures written in. Clouds move slowly across the bleached-out sky, everything lit from my left hand towards my right. In the distance, seawards, I see a group of men, hear their words as they float over the marsh as I have seen angels’ words writ in ribbons in the churches of the old religion. They are fensmen, come to lift wicker traps and empty the tangled eels into nets that they pull behind their boats. I hear the splashes as they throw the traps back into the mere. If they have seen me they show no sign of it, take no notice of what I do and soon drift out of my sight.
Alone with my instruments, and engaged in my work, I forget myself. Even as we map this wilderness of mere and reed, we talk and plan how to drain the whole. Van Hooghten and I are in agreement. The whole of the Great Level must be scored across from southwest to northeast. Two new cuts will take the water from the present marsh and mere, stop the overflows of the rivers that now flood whenever there is a heavy fall of rain, and discharge the excess water into the sea. The first cut, though yet marked even upon the map, we call New River.
To plot a course for this new cut, I must first measure every shift in the gradient, and map every curl and tributary of the Ouse that already runs here. Today I am some miles north from Ely at a place where the last works were destroyed. I can see the remains now, a long line of hillocks and depressions. Nature is quick to take back what she might consider stolen from her and already they are covered over with bright summer grass and encroached upon by water. If you had no notion of history you might think them natural formations, or that the mounds concealed ancient ruins such as have been left by antiquity.
This afternoon I am calculating how high the embankments of the New River will have to be. Almost lost to the world, sitting on the grass, I pick up my papers and begin to write. At this moment I hear the silence empty behind my back. Apprehension presses on my senses and the feeling of being watched steals over me with a shiver and a lurch in my stomach as if I have dropped from a great height. When I look up, there she is, though how she has arrived at this place I cannot make out.
She stands at a distance, alone and without her companions. Though I wish straightaway to speak so that she must reply, I cannot. No words come to me, either Dutch or English. I jump up and then see that my instruments lie scattered on the ground. I bend forward as if to gather them and go. In that instant she picks up the chronometer and turns to me, at the same time taking a step away.
“This—what do you use it for?”
Instead of asking how she came here or what she wants from me, I answer her, as if such a meeting as this might happen any day.
“It records the passing of time.”
Indeed, though I cannot think it then, while I turn my eyes to her, a chronometer does more. It snips up time, as much as if I were to take a pair of scissors to the air itself. And then it drives us on, towards tomorrow and the very moment of our extinction. I should look at my chronometer with distaste; it is keeping time with my dissolution. Yet I do not fear or dislike it. On the contrary, it is a source of joy to me; the newest to be found, Leiden made. Its case is silver, egg-shaped and burnished to a soft brightness. As soon as I saw it in the palm of the watchmaker I determined to have it, and saved to buy it. The movement, under the oval face, turns with the earth itself, obedient to the same force.
It is not in my hands now, but in hers, and with a sudden gesture she hides it behind her back. I wonder if a woman such as she seems to be, from the unimproved part of this land, has seen a chronometer before. Does she know its beauty and its value? I am filled with a fear that she will throw it in the water and so I put out my hands towards her.
“I beg you, give it back.”
At this, she smiles, though her eyes remain steady upon me.
“You believe, sir, that no man or woman has a timepiece here?”
Lost for the English words, I stay silent.
In that moment I begin to see her clearly, and that she is not a girl, but a grown woman, tall and solid on her feet. Her face is brown from the sun as if she scorns to wear a bonnet, her hair cut short and stiff above her neck. Everything about her is golden and brown. She is without a scratch or a mark. She is dressed in a bodice and skirt that meet at her waist in a manner rough but serviceable. Except for her shoes, which resemble a man’s boots, and the lack of stockings on her legs, she might step unremarked into my mother’s kitchen.
Now, as if my chronometer is not enough, she picks up my measuring rod and holds it out to me.
“And this—how do you use this in your profession?”
I am considering how I might answer with the English words I know, and in a way that will not reveal my purpose, when she walks towards me across the spongy grass. For a second I fear that she will throw both rod and timepiece into the water, but she does not; she goes on holding them as if they are now her possessions. We are close by one another, eye to eye. I am the taller, but not by so much that I can see over her head, as is usual in my case with women.
A shadow seems to pass over me at that moment, not of darkness but of some material that I cannot see. After an instant of time that my chronometer might not register, I come into myself again and wish to speak. Or rather, it is a stranger within who bids me to talk; as if another man entirely has been resting inside me, waiting. This stranger is not a man such as I have known myself to be. He is a man without calculation, with a forwardness that I have never had; and yet he is a part of myself.
When I speak it is with his voice, not mine own that I know to be so halting and behindhand.
“I have seen you already.”
“And I you.”
“I have wished to see you again.”
There is no reply, but the stranger within me is bold.
“What is your name?”
“Eliza.”
I am a prudent man, embarked upon this task to advance in my profession; sure in purpose and firm in outline. Yet at this moment I feel none of that. I wonder if the heat has invaded me, caught me off guard. I know that I am disordered. Believing myself alone and unobserved, I have rolled up my sleeves and tied them above my elbows. My stockings and my shoes lie in the boat.
In the drowsy heat, and in the glare of her presence, my bare feet begin to sink into the fen. The space seems endless, though if I stood in the boat and turned to the southeast I might just make out the gray bulk of the cathedral at Ely even from this great distance. But now my eyes follow the low contours of the numberless floating islands, and trace the winding river courses by their borders of dense alders. Everywhere towards the northern horizon lie the meres, one after another, flattened to silver discs in the sun. Only to the west is my eye stopped, for here the reed bed is so high that I can see nothing beyond it, just the sky above and the sun blazing in it like an emperor.
You are Eliza; not a girl, but a woman. Not out there beyond me, but here, at my side. I feel you present, already, from your gaze, inside me, alongside the stranger who spoke.
I stand back for a second, and see you again, as if for the first time. You look straight into my eyes, and I know again that things have changed, and that a part of my life will be addressed to you.
You have come here from somewhere in this expanse, and somewhere must lie the island on which you live, for you are a native of the fens, of that I am at once quite sure. It does not seem strange that you have appeared or that straightaway I begin to tell you how I use the measuring rod and the chain that lies coiled on the grass of the riverbank. As well as I can, I explain the principles that my countrymen Snell and Van Royden laid down when they invented the system of triangulation that we now use to map every feature of a landscape with perfect exactitude. I even show you how it is done and explain the way I measure and calculate, and how, knowing distance, I can with the chronometer find the speed of the water at any time.
I tell you all this, full of my own knowledge and pride in my work. You listen with stillness, though my speech is rushed and my English imperfect. In truth my answers are just talk, language that bubbles up through my confusion. Though the stranger within me is bold, the man that I am finds that this is all he can say. A greater thing hangs between us that has nothing to do with the words I use.
Then, as suddenly as you have come, you lay down the measuring rod and put my chronometer back in my hand. For a second your palm closes over mine. The touch of your skin is warm and rough. In the moment that I bend to stow the instruments in my bag, you turn and walk away. The opening you make in the reed wall sways and closes; you are gone through into another world.