The Day the World Discovered the Sun Read Online Free

broad daylight, the roads and paths revealed themselves to be slender traffic lanes that were becoming too narrow for the travelers’ tastes. Two-way traffic often couldn’t fit on the road side by side. Ideally, this fact shouldn’t have mattered. With its lead horse sounding the royal post bell, Chappe’s sleigh commanded right-of-way, with oncoming traffic moving to one side. But they weren’t anywhere near St. Petersburg, and in the wilderness the royal post law was just another irrelevant nicety of court.
    As the roads to Siberia narrowed, Chappe began to tense up whenever he’d see a sledge approach. Some drivers would give the eastward bound party as much room as the road allowed. Others not as much. One incident crossed the line. The oncoming driver barely bothered to move his sledge out of the way, and Chappe’s driver was evidently growing tired of Russian scofflaws. For a teeth-clenching moment, the two vehicles looked as if they might collide. But the horses on each side clearly had no interest in ramming each other head-on. A physics experiment was avoided, however narrowly. But before the offending driver could get close enough to meet with Chappe’s scowling expression, a protruding arm of the other sledge’s shaft rammed into Chappe’s cab. Chappe’s cab lost the joust. The sleigh’s covering, Chappe wrote, “was carried away with so much force that I should certainly have been killed if the stroke had lighted upon me. This last shock completed the destruction of my [sleigh]. I now remained without any covering, exposed to the severity of the cold air.” 14
    The three other sleds in the team also needed repairs, although none as direly as Chappe’s. Consulting a regional map with his interpreter and sergeant, Chappe learned that a day’s journey would bring them to the country seat of Pavel Grigoryevich Demidov, a scion of one of the richest families in Russia—and a friend of the transit expedition. A scientific amateur with a passion for botany, Demidov had given Chappe a letter in St. Petersburg commending the Frenchman to his family estates, should he need assistance during the journey into Siberia.
    Demidov’s Solikamsk riverside estate in the northern Ural Mountains provided comfortable refuge for a stranded traveler. Hosting a dozen greenhouses containing more than four hundred different species, Solikamsk turned out to be more than just a shack where a man could fix his sleds. “These were full of orange and lemon trees—and contained likewise all the other fruits of France and Italy, with a variety of plants and shrubs of different countries,” Chappe wrote. 15 The chief mistress of the household said that the letter Chappe carried put her under orders to treat the distinguished visitor’s every request as if it came from Demidov himself.
    The estate’s mechanic told Chappe that he’d need at least three days to fix the broken sleds, freeing the travelers to enjoy comforts unknown since Vienna. Chappe went to the greenhouse. With 10 degrees Fahrenheit outdoor breezes buffeting the window panes, the humid, temperate climate—tinged with the welcoming scent of citrus—was all the oasis Chappe could have asked for. Moreover, the greenhouse gardener was something of a philosophe himself. Demidov had, Chappe learned, encouraged the gardener’s omnibus talent by creating a small science, mathematics, and philosophy library for him. The French visitor explained his Venus transit voyage to the eager audience—as comforting as any warm breeze of greenhouse air. Excited at finding a kindred spirit, Chappe gave the gardener one of the two barometers he’d made to replace the device that the weeks of travel over craggy roads had destroyed.
    On the morning of March 31, Chappe wrapped himself in a fur nightgown and, with his servant in tow, took a carriage to the estate’s sweat lodge. Upon opening