The Day the World Discovered the Sun Read Online Free Page A

the lodge’s creaky door, Chappe walked into a cloud that he thought was smoke from a bathhouse on fire. He fumbled for the exit and made his way back into the frigid winter air. Chappe heaved a cloudy breath, doubled over, as another of the estate’s staff excused himself and opened the door through which Chappe had hastily departed. Chappe conversed with his servant, who explained that the “smoke” he’d taken such hasty exception to was mostly steam. Chappe ran to his carriage, grabbing a thermometer he’d brought along for just this purpose. Always a man of science, he now reentered the lodge to investigate the environment. His servant also walked in, disrobed, and sat down. His boss’s giddiness, he said, would abate if he just gave himself a few moments to relax and acclimate himself to the new surroundings.
    Chappe tried. But, for starters, the stone floor and seats were uncomfortably hot. Chappe looked at his thermometer, which read 60 degrees Celsius (140° F). He got up from the hot seat too quickly, and the next thing he remembered was coming to on the sweat lodge floor surrounded by the shards of his broken thermometer. At first he didn’t move. Then, from his prone position in the coolest part of the room, Chappe ordered one of the servants to throw water on him. But the dousing didn’t calm the visitor’s nerves. It just made him wet.
    He knew he had to leave. But how to get up and go without getting up? “Attempting therefore to put on my clothes with my body bent, while I was wet, and in too great a hurry, I found them too little for me,” Chappe later wrote. “And the more eager I was, the less able I was to get into them.”
    So he grabbed his fur nightgown, trailing bits of clothing behind him, and ran to his waiting carriage. At Chappe’s command, the driver hurried back to the estate as quickly as possible. The now embarrassedguest ran to his bed. The house’s headmistress was, of course, startled to see her esteemed guest in such a frenzied state. She ran up to Chappe’s room and offered him some tea. He demurred.
    â€œShe gave me to understand by the Russian sergeant who began to know a little of French that I had not stayed long enough at the baths to have been sufficiently sweated,” Chappe recalled. “And that it was necessary I should drink the tea to promote perspiration.” 16
T OBOLSK , S IBERIA
April 1761
    The journey’s final leg bogged down as March snows melted into April slush. On April 10, the sleds crossed a final river on ice that was already underwater. The trip from Paris had consumed nineteen weeks and almost twice as many carts, carriages, sledges, and sleighs.
    Approached from the west, Tobolsk looked like two cities. One sat perched on a prominent hilltop near the confluence of two rivers—the Irtysh and Tobol—that wind through the town. The other was everywhere else, in the fields and floodplains below. The entourage, driving through the western outskirts with the lead sled’s post bell clanging out its imperial mission, drew locals out of their cottages. Tobolsk residents may have been accustomed to traders and trappers from the east, but actual westerners—bearing the empress’s imprimatur, no less—were a rarity.
    It is scarce possible to walk along the streets in this city on account of the quality of dirt there is even in the upper town. There have been foot-ways made by planks in some streets, which is the general custom in Russia. But they are kept in such bad repair at Tobolsk that you can hardly venture out except in carriages. 17
    Chappe’s caravan climbed the hill to the Siberian mansions of Tobolsk’s leaders. Ascending the town’s central prominence provided an overview of the harsh spring thaw. The Irtysh River, which surrounds the eastern part of Tobolsk in a U shape, breached its banks in places and threatened to engulf the poorer, lower-lying