by Matt Stanley
I wondered as we prayed, if we prayed, whether those prayers congregated as they rose up through the lighthouse and out through the ventilator’s Faraday funnels. Did they mingle and combine, or was each a separate wish divided into beams by the prisms in the lens? Did the cowl cough at the sudden influx of emitting prayer so much purer than the usual exhalations and emanations? Or was it simply more effluvia?
Mr Adamson was staring fixedly at me when I opened my eyes. Evidently, he had not been praying.
* * *
I stayed in the library after the other two had left, Principle Bartholomew to continue with his measurements of weather, Mr Adamson to do whatever occupied his time – perhaps reading the three newspapers he had taken from the library. I was keen to read about the ancient stylites in the volume that somebody had put into the catalogue as some manner of joke.
The first of them was Simeon, it seems: a Syrian shepherd who fled his flock for austere monasticism. That he lived beyond even this vocation was remarkable, he having attempted pious suicide numerous times. The other monks were obliged to restrain or resuscitate him.
Finally, his asceticism was not enough for him, or too much for the others. His fasting and self-castigation was extreme. He ventured to a remote hut, there to dedicate himself to starvation unto the point of revelation. He attempted to sleep standing, but often fell. This, too, was comfort beyond tolerance.
Instead, he sought a rocky mountain wilderness to make his home. But word spread of his miraculous deprivations and pilgrims came to call, requesting insight, requesting prayer, requesting benediction. He could withstand the cruellest hardships of weather and hunger, but he could not support interruption.
On the periphery of a town, he found the remnants of some Roman temple and ascended a column of nine feet in height. There he would remain in aerial penance, braving rain and sun and cold upon a tiny platform barely wide enough to support his limbs. It was not enough. His wished-for isolation was too close to the ground.
And thus he moved to higher and higher columns. Twelve feet. Twenty-two. Thirty-six. Finally, he made his home fifty feet from the ground in a space barely a yard square and surrounded by a baluster. He dressed in animal skins and bore the elements without shelter.
For another man, this might have been the highest expression of asceticism, but Simeon was no normal man. To compensate for the coddling aid of vestment, he chose to wear a heavy chain about his neck and remain standing at all times, preferably with arms out-stretched, cruciform, in constant praise. If this proved too complacent, he would bow repeatedly his head to feet. One spectator noted 1,400 consequent obeisances before ceasing to count.
Thirty-seven years in total did he spend atop one column or another, through blistering summers and chill, starry nights. Emperors, patriarchs and bishops visited him, ascending by ladder just near enough to talk. When stricken with a weeping ulcer on his thigh, he sought healing in greater piety and spent the last year of his life standing on one leg.
They say that birds used to wheel about the apex of his tower, drawn by the animal reek of his tattered clothes and unwashed body. The pilgrim hordes washed about the pedestal in waves. And he… Was not he a kind of light atop his column? Was he not a beacon for those who sought a purer truth?
Or was he, rather, like a lighthouse warning mariners to beware of perilous shallows that appeared profound?
NINE
Apart from Sundays, the other named days do not really exist in the lighthouse. It is more a question of hours. Breakfast, lunch and supper. The cleaning hours after breakfast. The raising and lowering of the signal ball between eight and ten. The partitioned hours of the watch. It seems that one is always looking at the clock.
There are innumerable small tasks requiring our attention. Baking bread and preparing meals. Bringing up provisions from the stores. Emptying ash and other waste into the sea. Checking the horizon periodically for ships. The opening and closing of windows according to the direction of the wind or rain. The lighthouse is a large machine and we must maintain it constantly with fuel and care. Or perhaps we are its fuel.
Even with such a regimen, the hours of liberty before lunch or between lunch and supper gape. It is during such periods that one regards the impassive sea and sky and recalls the epic solitude. We may be three within this house, but there is little comfort in proximity. I would like to talk to the other two, but they are rocks unto themselves, each surrounded by his own whirlpools, eddies and hidden reefs. To approach either one is to risk a wreck.
These personal hours may be anathema to some, but such men do not seek a keeper’s life. The principle spends his liberty reading in his room or tinkering with his weather-measuring devices. Mr Adamson lives somewhat like a cat who roams absent for most of the day but returns for meals with nothing but a sphinx-like smile as to where he’s been or what he’s seen. Our paths seldom cross. He prefers the bedroom; I prefer the library.
Certainly, there is something furtive and clandestine in him. I occasionally think about the package he caught when I first landed on the rock. A bottle of whisky, perhaps, or some other contraband. I’ve seen no trace of it, nor smelled spirits on his breath, but there are many places to hide an item in the lighthouse.
By the by, I have wondered if he has discovered my bottle of morphia. It has not moved from its place inside a handkerchief in my drawer, but it occurred to me the other day I have not been using as much as I seem to have used. I would raise the subject with him, but I am no more permitted to have it here than he is to purloin it.
I decided to cease taking my morphia before sleeping. It provokes a deep and lasting sleep, but Mr Adamson has twice complained about my nocturnal babblings. He may not have understood anything I said, but it is wiser to remain silent. It is also more conducive to our peaceful cohabitation.
Sleeping at Ripsaw was initially difficult. I was not accustomed to the concept of being so high above the sea and so far from shore. The noises seemed interminable: wave impacts, screaming birds, the rattling chain each morning. The wheedling wind that gasps and whispers at the windows and never seems to rest, like the mind of a troubled man. The crashing reef. The ventilator’s hollow moan, which fills the house whenever the lamp is lighted. And, of course, the bovine grunts of Mr Adamson above me. The creaking of his bunk. His soporific emissions. Who could have imagined that a bed so far from a city’s noise could be so disturbing of a night?
Now, after a fortnight or so – is it longer? – I sleep well. Indeed, there is a deep satisfaction in lying amid darkness and listening to the circling world – more so when Mr Adamson is on his watch. I remind myself of our isolation here and see it as a privilege. I have learned to identify and appreciate the sounds to such a degree that I sometimes wake to the susurrating rain on the sea’s surface and it calms me to know I am warm and dry in this tower. I hear the beguiling wind around the windows and hear it swing from east to south, from north to west.
Sometimes, on a still night, on a warmer night, with the windows open, I fancy it is possible to hear the shore. A bell-tower’s chime. An angry dog. The sounds cross the water as trembling echoes, skipping like a pebble to greater distances than they may on land. It may be my imagination.
One knows one is settled in a place when every sound has its source and explanation. The kitchen stove’s clang. Footsteps on the metal staircase to the lens. The flat slap of a trapdoor closing between levels. I can even differentiate the footfalls of the other two upon the stairs: the principal’s measured pace and Mr Adamson’s clumsy gait.
It is the same with smells, of course. I have become a perfumer of this place, able to identify and catalogue its various aromas as a Florentine master may discern his civet, his calamus, his ambergris or cypress. There is the rank seaweed iodine, the north wind’s heady ozone, the fishy fetor of the herring gulls. The ladder’s ferric sapor. I can often tell which man is ascending to the lantern if I’m aloft. One might not think this granite eminence could harbour so m
uch scent, but our senses become more sophisticated when surrounded by the void.
* * *
I am now permitted to observe my watches alone in the light-room, Principal Bartholomew having said that he is well pleased with my diligence and attention. It is a great blessing because my watches with the other two were usually uncomfortable.
The principal would sit there like a portrait with his book and ignore my presence totally. There was no ill intention, I believe, in his silences. In his mind, he was alone. This was preferable to the nights with Mr Adamson, whose inconsistencies unnerved me greatly. Some nights, he would spend his time out on the balcony or pacing in the lantern. Other nights, he would remind me of his double watch and how it was my fault, or complain about the smallest flaws he could find in my endeavours as a keeper. My bread was under-baked. I moved too frequently while sleeping. I spent too long polishing the lens.
Other times, I simply could not discern his motives. One night, after I had completed my watch with the principal and was just going off to sleep, Mr Adamson called me to the light-room with the whistle. I could not think of refusing the call. I dressed quickly and ascended.
“Meakes,” he said. “I need you to go out on the balcony and check something.”
“I can wait in the light-room if you need to go out.”
“No. I need you to go outside.”
“Why? What for?”
“Just go out and walk a few circuits. Tell me if you see or hear anything odd.”
“What do you mean by odd?”
“Darn it, lad! [He did not use these words.] Just go out and have a look.”
I did not trust him after the incident with the crank. Still, to refuse his order could be classed as insubordination and result in my immediate dismissal. He knew this, as he has always known it.
It was a zesty night. The wind was blowing from the west and the rain was intermittent but determined. I chose the lee door and emerged into a mischievous gust that whipped my cloak about me. The revolving beam picked out vaporous precipitation. The sea writhed ecstatically upon the reef. I kept close to the masonry wall lest a sudden gust unfoot me at the rail.
Something odd, he’d said. I recalled Spencer’s log entry about the figure of a boy at the periphery of his vision. But there was nothing to see. Only the dripping rail and the scudding sky. Only feathered corpses and the whirring silvered cups of Principal Bartholomew’s wind apparatus. I walked two perimeters, my shoulder close the wall. On the weather side, the wind pushed and jostled. The raindrops pinned my face. Finally, I returned to the door, which Mr Adamson had bolted open in one of the floor holes. I knocked and he appeared at the crack, perspiring – or so it seemed to me.
“What have you seen?” he said.
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“What have you heard?”
“Only the wind and the sea.”
“Nothing odd?”
“Mister Adamson – the weather is very inclement and I have done my watch.”
“Aye, and I’m doing two watches thanks to you.”
“There is nothing out here but the elements. Is this about Keeper Spencer’s log entry?”
“What log entry?”
“The watch log. He said he saw—”
“I don’t care a fig for what Spencer wrote or didn’t write.”
“Will you open the door?”
His face disappeared but the door didn’t open. I waited. It seemed quite credible that he would leave me outside until the morning and claim it as an accident.
But I saw his hand unlock the bolt and I entered with a bawdy gust. He seemed distracted.
“Is everything all right, Mister Adamson?”
“Go to bed, lad. Go to bed. It’s nothing. I am tired. So are you. Go to bed.”
I still have no explanation for his behaviour.
* * *
I have looked again at the place in the water store where I saw the message scratched on the wall. Nothing remains and I wonder now if I really saw it. I had but recently arrived and wasn’t accustomed to the place. Still, the words remain clear in my mind – Lord, deliver me from this windowless pit – and their specificity suggests I could not have imagined them.
Still, there are moments when things may pass that we feel have passed before. A gesture. A snatch of conversation. Often, all of these things in combination. Other times, we cannot differentiate what is memory and what was dream. The two seem quite interchangeable. The mind is unreliable.
Mr Fowler always used to say that every man is but a mere conglomeration of temporary states. Catch him in any one of these states – anger, contemplation, grief, drunkenness, confusion – and you see just a fragment of who he is. It’s necessary to see the whole: the white light rather than the prismatic spectrum. No man is red or blue alone. Or violet.
Perhaps I saw the writing when in a distracted state. The body on the reef, however, was unequivocal. Mr Adamson saw it, too. I have not seen it since, but things do not linger on the rocks. They pause here only on longer journeys.
* * *
This morning on the balcony after cleaning, I observed Principal Bartholomew making adjustments to his wind machine. He seemed perturbed and so I enquired about his efforts.
He explained that the machine is an anemometer to measure wind velocity. It has four hemispherical tin cups mounted at the four ends of a horizontal cross. These rotate when impelled by the wind and the number of their revolutions denotes wind speed. The principle is simple enough, but the practice is somewhat more complicated.
How, for example, does one translate the number of revolutions into a wind speed? Some have mounted the instrument upon a locomotive and calibrated it according to a known land speed. Alas, the wind is hardly ever constant on land and even less so at sea. Nor does it blow in a straight line. It gusts and pauses constantly, switching direction, and cheekily avoiding all measurement.
Then there is the question of humidity and temperature, which affect the density of air and thus its pressure on the cups. There are light winds and heavy winds. Often, the air is loaded with spray or rain, to further confuse the instrument.
As if these problems weren’t enough, there’s the matter of turbulence as air eddies and deflects from surrounding structures. Thus the machine may influence and warp its own readings. The lighthouse, too, is an enormous vane that twists and bends the air around it. One experimental answer to this problem, it seems, has been for the principal to attach a kite or a small parachute to a cord, the other end of which is connected to a spring mechanism that measures the resistance exerted by the wind. This might work if attached to the very peak of the lighthouse, at the very cowl, but every pause in wind velocity would cause the airborne device to drop, the cord to sag and the whole apparatus to either wind itself around the lantern or be dashed against the tower. The principal’s frustration seems entirely justified.
Science aside, the notion of measuring the wind here at Ripsaw appears to me to have a profounder connotation. The root of anemometry is the Greek word for wind. The Latins took it to form their word anima, meaning soul or essence of life. And are we not consequently reminded of the biblical Genesis in which God takes his terrene creation Man and breathes the breath of life into his nostrils? The Hebrew word used in that ancient record, ruah, also signifies wind.
What the principal seeks to measure on the balcony with his flawed and clumsy instruments is nothing less than an eternal force. It is nature. It mocks measurement. We may observe and annotate it, but in the end we can only marvel at its erratic will and brace ourselves in awe to face its fury, its cajoling, eccentric whims.
He teased the scalloped edge of fragile tip cup between thumb and forefinger to improve its appetite for wind. “A commissioner will soon be visiting the lighthouse. One comes every year to inspect the facilities, interview the keepers and collect the previous season’s logbooks. Our standards of cleanliness and order have to be exemplary until the boat arrives.”
> I watched him mould the dull grey metal as he had been moulding me. “Yes, sir.”
“They signalled from shore.” He did not look up. “It seems there has been some trouble with your character reference from Mister Fowler.”
“Trouble, sir?”
He stood and looked upon his work. Then upon me. “The commissioner will make everything clear, I am sure.”
* * *
I have spent much time reading in the library today. Shakespeare. Milton. Coleridge. There are different worlds among the books, and different ages. Here, beneath the stucco mouldings and with a blank horizon beyond the windows, I could be anywhere and anytime. In Florence or Venice. In Xanadu or in the very depths of Hades. Travel is limitless within the mind.
I have been thinking much about distance. We are just twenty miles from the shore but more inaccessible than a mountain peak or an oasis in a desert. With time, resources and determination, one may reach such places. Here, the sea and reef prevent access almost all year round.
Marco Polo may have voyaged to such unimagined and unmapped regions as Bukhara, Zaitun and Hormuz, but he could not have entered the door of our lighthouse, not with all his camel caravans and convoys. The sea would have tossed him back at shore.
It is a distance that taunts with apparent proximity – real through the telescope but quite beyond reach. We are living on the moon! Fewer men have set the lens in motion at Ripsaw Reef than have circumnavigated the globe.
* * *
I have been looking through Mr Adamson’s possessions when he is on his watch. Four hours allow me sufficient tranquillity to take my time in the bedroom.
In truth, there is not much to find. There is a cache of some few, small items that evidently mean something to him: a pocketknife, an ink pen, a leather bag of coins that are quite useless here in the lighthouse. Indeed, a hoard of gold and jewels would be equally useless. We are simultaneously kings and serfs.
I have found no alcohol, nor anything illicit. I have, however, discovered the missing newspapers – those printed in the weeks during which he was onshore prior to his latest duty at Ripsaw (as near as I can calculate). He keeps these three local publications hidden under the foot of his mattress. What secret lies within these pages? I have given it much thought.