Refiner's Fire

by Mark Helprin

  She herself lay back in the sun, blinking. “And then we left the station, and for hours and hours and hours that engine carried us at speed through a tube in the prairie, falling toward a horizon of running colors. I saw dozens of raptors on the wing to left and to right, wheeling in permanent axes they had just taken up. It seemed to interconnect—the stroke and clattering recession of the engine rods, the axis of an eagle’s flight, the path of a dim disappearing road saturated by August heat and moving like the patterning of a piano. And then I looked at Henry’s teeth, and at his eyes fixed on the road. Physical laws were so apparent and omnipresent that I wondered of what we were made, and if our dissolution would really bring darkness, and it seemed to me that it would not, no more than the fall of water and its infinite dazzling changes the stream. I realized then that raptors are not independent fliers, but that in their aerial turning and their wide flight, they are merely indicators of lines which have always been. It drove me to a shaking conclusion. I tremble at the thought. It filled me, and I was amazed.”

  “And that’s why you pray.”

  She quickly looked at him, and held her gaze. “That’s why I pray.”

  9

  “IT TAKES six or seven hours to get up to the observation chimney,” she said. “When fully loaded, even in this near-zero humidity, you’re going to sweat like an Alabama hog. The more we carry, the longer we stay; the longer we stay, the more work; the more work, the better for continuity and integrity.”

  “Scientific integrity?”

  “Scientific integrity,” she echoed.

  He did not believe her warning until he saw her loading his pack. She put in food, cameras, lenses, and five bottles of wine, explaining that they could not use lights at night because they would be in the center of a valley of eagles, and that after dark the only entertainments were music, astronomy, and drink. “I usually tie myself down and stare at the Milky Way. My pack weighs ninety pounds. Unfortunately, yours weighs a hundred and fifty.”

  “How far do we have to go?” he asked, terrified.

  “It’s not how far; it’s how high. Were at eight thousand feet, and we’re going to eleven thousand feet. We have to go three thousand feet straight up, eventually, which for you will be the same as taking a hundred and fifty pounds on your back up a sixty-story skyscraper five times. You’ll lose twenty pounds, and we’ll have to sleep for a day.”

  “What about water?”

  “Luckily, we have a cistern up there which collects rainwater, so there’s always enough if one is careful not to waste it.”

  They set off at a stumble, but once they took the path upward, gravity steadied them. It was extremely difficult. The straps of the packs dug into their shoulders. After ten minutes they were sweating, and they walked for many hours. As the air thinned and they fell into a stupor of exhaustion, the world, too, thinned and sounds were hardly heard, as if a spell had been thrown across the pines. They saw dust particles, bees, things hovering in air. They were wet; they sweated; they breathed hard for hours. “The chains and chain ladders jingle against the rock,” she said, “and the rock is brown and terra-cotta as far as the eye can see. It’s worth it.”

  Halfway through the afternoon they rested by a stream, where the air was screamingly thin, a high frequency for breathing. “This is the last stream,” she said. They drank. The water was nearly iced it was so mechanically cold. Muscles aching, they lay back on a terrace of pine needles to listen to the trees hissing in a steady western wind.

  In late afternoon they came to a curving flint ridge about five miles long. At its end were high rock chimneys toward which they traveled walking on a path near the edge, looking down a thousand-foot cliff and then much farther into a valley which seemed to run toward the rest of the continent. Though the day was clear, the horizon was blurred. Had it not been for the imperfections of air and the human eye, they would have been able to see for many hundreds of miles. A queer spectrum began below the cliff with yellow sands dotted by brush—a tan haze with strata of orange was the undulating floor of desert, and in the distance bands of blue and purple gave way to blue and green and blue once again which finally cleared to the sky above them. Birds other than eagles swooped and darted above and beyond the cliff face, singing strangely and beautifully. They could not see one sign of man. The enormity of view, the complete absence of any challenge to natural order, the effulgence of horizon colors, and the strange sweet sounds gave to Nancy May Baker and Marshall a sense of being on another planet or in times prehistorical. They could just make out the curve of the earth. When they looked up from their flinty plain of brown rocks they felt as if they were looking outward. The planetary sense derived from this made them feel (in contradictory fashion) that they were on a small moon or asteroid.

  They leaned their packs against the wall of the highest rock chimney and attached them to a nylon rope which hung down several hundred feet from a gantry at the top. Then they took a circular path winding dangerously along the outside to a plateau halfway up. On several occasions they had to press against the wall, so thin was the path and so formidable the drop. A chain ladder led to another plateau forty feet farther up. After a terrifying walk along a ledge, gripping a companion cable, they came to the last chain ladder—190 feet to the top. “This is very difficult,” said Nancy, “and you must observe several rules. First, never look down. As you can see, halfway up the rock pushes out. If you look down at that point, you wont profit. Second, before and after the bulge, rest for a count of a hundred, putting your arms through the rungs and flexing your hands. Third, remember that Denis used to climb this when he was seventy-five.”

  They felt like flies. Rounding the bulge, they hung outward over a drop of more than 2,000 feet. Marshall was almost faint, but Nancy’s pace was exemplary. Because she too was breathing hard, he knew that for her it was an act of courage. At the top, they lay panting until they recovered. “Who put these ladders on?” asked Marshall.

  “Two Swiss rock climbers made the ascent, tossed down ropes, and pulled up enough to make a crane. Then they hoisted up a team of ironworkers, and more materials, including an engine. They rigged scaffoldings, and drove the best steel alloy five feet into the rock for anchor pins. A geologist laid out the pattern. It’s not humid up here, so nothing rusts deeper than a protective coat on the outside. Every few years a metallurgist and an engineer come from Chicago to inspect. The ladder is rated to hold ten thousand pounds and Denis says it can take five times that.”

  “Is it true that Denis climbed this, at seventy-five?”

  “Yes. He says he comes from a long line of tree Frogs. He’s so sweet. Every girl in the department is in love with him. If only he were forty-eight instead of eighty-four.”

  “How many girls are there in the department?”

  “Three graduate students. Me, Bonnie (who’s married), and Angela, who looks like a manta ray. Her body is shaped like a hammock. She’s in the Philippines, studying Thorax thorax.”

  They used a winch to hoist up the knapsacks and the bottom of the ladder (which hung free). Alone in an impenetrable fortress in empty territory, they mounted fifteen iron steps to the upper deck from which the world appeared before them in Himalayan style. This place was nearly perfect, because it was both exciting and completely safe. A waist-high fence and lightning rods had been installed, and these made the upper deck look like the flying bridge of a warship. “In lightning storms you go into the utility room on the second level.”

  At the second level were a higher fence, some optical mounts, the cistern (full of cool water), a heavy wood picnic table, and a canvas sunshield projecting outward like an awning. All around, rings were attached to the rock. “Because of the wind,” she said. She drew a brass key from her pocket and opened an iron door which led inward to the utility room, hewn into the rock underneath the top deck. They took out canvas chairs, kitchen equipment, telescopes, the radio, large mats on which to lie, safety harnesses, cameras, and a pelorus. All of these
were clipped to the rings or mounted on provided supports.

  “You can’t work or sleep in there,” she said about the one room they had, “because somehow, even when the wind is high, it’s just a pocket of dead air. When it gets really rough though, I have to write my notes at that table.” After filling the stove, arranging the supplies, opening the log, and loading the cameras, they took out and grilled their only two steaks. The sun was beginning to set.

  When they had had their meal they looked from under the canopy to a world where eagles returned to cliffside aeries in graceful lines of flight, the sun diminished in a perfect sphere beyond the curve of the horizon, the stars appeared at first mildly and then blindingly bright, and violet bands stretched from heaven to the face of a darkened peaceful earth—a planet of cool high desert and ruffling insistent winds. After they cleaned up, brushed their teeth, and splashed cool water over themselves, they went to the top deck, clipped on their safety harnesses, and reclined on the mats. The view was so black and bright that it was as if they were traveling in space. Gravityless, they looked outward, and they slept entwined in one another. Marshall awakened deep in the night. He saw the stars from 40 degrees below the platform to the top of the sky for a full 360 degrees around, as if he were lying on a pedestal thrust into space. The wind was mild. Nancy May Baker looked quite wonderful when asleep. He listened to her breathing—an even, steady, and miraculous sound.

  10

  “THERE WERE thirty thousand of them not long ago, and now there are fewer than ten thousand. Two thirds of Aquila chrysaëtos canadensis have been shot from planes or the ground, poisoned with insecticides, and who knows what else.” They had awakened with the sun, and they sat clasping their knees as they watched some eagles hunting in the dawn. “I think that wholesale extermination has had a profound and subtle effect on the remaining population. Certainly, from their point of view, they have inherited an empty though beautiful world, and if they could think the way we do, they might be confused by the riches in game afforded them after so sad a decline.”

  “But they don’t think the way we do. They just hunt and travel from one day and one season to another and another.”

  “No, they don’t think, but I feel that the vast silence influences them. I believe their movements have changed, their expressions, just the way they are—subtly of course and most likely unbeknownst to them—and if we could enter the world of eagles, we might not know the heart of even one. Anyway, that’s not scientific. Later, we’ll get so scientific that it will hurt.”

  That afternoon, a storm arose. They noticed that the horizon had grown plum dark, and was bristling with miles-long lightning bolts. The storm approached rapidly, tumbling and turning like stirred wool, gray and white in the folds, purple and black deep down, a crest of white at its round and alpine top. They saw sharp flashes, listened to their hearts strike a number of beats, and then heard the rolling thunder as it swept across the desert and echoed in the canyons.

  A mounted horde, the massed clouds charged over miles of desert. Lightning was everywhere bright and thick, and at times the sky looked like a zebra. As they stowed away the last of their equipment, a minor bolt struck one of the lightning rods, and the thundercrack made every part of their bodies tremble. Great drops of rain flew past in steadily thickening sheets. Purifying lightning and thunder attacked so viciously that in their room hewn of rock they felt as if they were in a barrel going over a falls. They sat quietly on canvas chairs, a light like silver illuminating their mountain-dark faces. Water dashed off the second terrace into the air.

  Their primary tool in observing Aquila was the 12,000-mm. lens/telescope with SLS (by which it was possible to see in starlight, although they knew that eagles spend the night at home). More than forty feet long, the lens moved easily on a titanium-magnesium mount. Two could look through it simultaneously. Nancy controlled the camera, photographing intermittently in her dictation of notes and observations. Marshall frequently checked through his eyepiece to coordinate his understanding of her narration.

  The power of the lens was astounding. On a cliff five miles distant perched an aerie of canadensis in which yearlings were about to fly. Marshall could easily make out the pineal structure of their feathers, and the individual fibers of lint clinging to their snowy chests. One night, he and Nancy climbed up to the observation level and swung the lens in the direction of Albuquerque. They didn’t see anything, but a few degrees’ turn and Santa Fe was theirs for the taking. They could read signs and movie marquees, and (with the SLS) they could watch people in the streets and in their houses. The images were mere shadows, but by skilled deduction they saw lives playing out—fights in bars, night workers scrubbing walls, police sleeping in their cruisers, children reading under the blankets with flashlights and animal crackers, and a uniformed brass band playing in an adobe kiosk. A green streetcar passed in the background. By turning on the SLS Marshall could see that inside were many women in long frothy skirts, that their hair was done up, and that they smiled. The interior of the streetcar was dark, paneled with fine cream-colored wood. The women looked at the brass band and seemed very pleased, and the green trolley disappeared into the darkness.

  They wore out their eyes following eagles ringed with the azure world. Aquila chrysaëtos canadensis—holarctic and monogamous, a lifespan of fifty years, its feathers and beak of finer and smoother flow than the once molten gold of the Abbot Suger’s golden porphyry jar. As the eagles soared above and below, Nancy gave a random dissertation.

  “I find it difficult to speak about this,” she said. “It’s the one thing in the world I know something about, and so much gets in the way. But as the eagles move I’ll tell you about them.” And then she proceeded, interrupted by her notations in the Ornithology Department’s shared codes and jargon.

  “Three quarters of the time they do nothing. They need rest for the kind of life they live, and are not of the working class. So they sit on their perches and contemplate the horizon, like philosopher kings. They spend a lot of time food-getting and, related to that, in soaring and acrobatics—the connection being obvious yet difficult to describe fully. We do not know how closely hunting and soaring are dovetailed (perhaps the wrong word), nor do we fathom the subtleties of the crossover. They are relatively asocial, an ephemeral presence over the landscape. Because of this, they do not suffer destructive sweeping epidemics, and their populations are fairly stable over extended periods. They have several nests, sometimes more than a dozen, and go from one to another according to their pleasure, prey availability, weather, and changes in territoriality. Often they’ll green the nests, so that when we band the birds we work in a bed of fresh pine branches. Their vision is the keenest of all creatures’, with visual acuity perhaps eight times that of man. Rochon-Duvigneaud reports a million cones per square millimeter of eye in Buteo buteo. Eagles can spot their prey (never very large) at two miles. I’ve seen that, and I hope to show it to you. Now look up there, you see, you see that speck? He’s probably close to fourteen thousand feet. They fly so beautifully that it can take your breath away. He might be food-getting, migrating, playing, giving a territorial display. Whatever it is, its gorgeous.

  “The complexity of fixed-wing flight (and there are volumes of equations which hardly begin to explain the forces engaged) pales before the infinitely variable contortions of wings, adjustments in emarginated and primary elasticated feathers, the spreading tails, legs, beaks, muscular tension and trunk attitude, feet, and talons. Aquila has been clocked in stoops of two hundred seventy-five miles per hour, and an eagle can brake smoothly and suddenly just before it hits the ground.

  “The daily food intake of canadensis is about seven percent of its body weight, far more efficient than dogs, but less so than lions, which average two point five percent. The lions’ social organization allows them this. The eagle, though, is fairly efficient for a loner. You know, they arrive at the sound of gunfire, having learned to associate it with flushed prey. But not
up here. They’re too wild. I can fire away for an hour and the darlings don’t blink. On the edges of the Asian deserts, in places like Kirghiz and Samarkand, some people depend on Aquila for their livelihood. The eagles are sent after foxes and wolves, for the pelts. In medieval times, only a king was allowed to hunt with an eagle. They are the perfect hunter, and they have little trouble in dashing in to grip an unwitting bird or mammal, piercing to the heart. What Whitman—”

  “You mean Walt Whitman.”

  “I mean, what Walt Whitman called ‘the dalliance of eagles’ is really a sexual display in which the male and female tumble through the sky after the female has turned on her back and presented her talons to the male. Sometimes, though rarely, this is combat. In 1948, a pair of golden eagles were found in Scotland, quite dead, locked in one another’s talons.”

  An eagle flew by at their level and dropped a stick, which fell through the air until he dived after it and caught it soundly. Nancy was delighted, and quickly began to snap photographs. “This is just what I want,” she said as the eagle repeated the trick again and again until finally he was lost in the distance. Her face was pressed against the telescope. Marshall was entranced by her smooth dark skin and the convex form of a blue eye as it peered into the black tube.

  “Sometimes they’ll swoop down on some poor bird and frighten it to death, just out of habit, or in practice, or in play—we don’t know. Sometimes they kill and don’t eat. You see, the need to kill is intensified in certain stages of the breeding cycle. Males, the provisioners, develop the habit of killing far more than they themselves need, for the nest-bound females and young. I’m sure there’s a link with play. I shouldn’t put it that way. Perhaps there is a link. I’m observing young males who haven’t yet been required to provide for families, to see if they indulge in such highly aggressive diversions. As you can imagine, this question has many complex implications. My greatest fear is that if I can fashion a decent dissertation on the subject, some idiotic behaviorist will use it to arrive at a tart psychological explanation which other behaviorists will claim mirrors the soul of man. They are fools, you know, behaviorists. They don’t understand—not at all—religion, nature, art, or birds. As far as I’m concerned, they’re as convincing and attractive as bats.”