The Invention of Nature

Then, on 29 July 1829, five days after they had left Tobolsk, everything came to a sudden halt. Locals told them that an anthrax epidemic was spreading through the Baraba Steppe – the ‘Sibirische Pest’ as the Germans called it. Anthrax is usually contracted first by herbivorous animals such as cattle and goats when they ingest the extremely hardy spores of the bacterium that causes the disease. It can then spread to humans – a deadly disease with no cure. There was no other route to the Altai Mountains than to drive straight through the affected region. Humboldt made his decision quickly. Anthrax or not, they would continue. ‘At my age,’ he said, ‘nothing should be postponed.’ All the servants were made to sit inside the carriages, rather than outside, and they packed provisions and water to reduce their contact with possibly contaminated people and food. They would still have to change their horses regularly, however, thereby taking the risk of being given an infected carriage horse.

Humboldt riding through the Baraba Steppe (Illustration Credit 16.2)

As they sat in silence, hot and cramped behind tightly shut windows in their small carriages, they passed through a landscape of death. The ‘traces of the pest’ were everywhere, Humboldt’s companion Gustav Rose noted in his diary. Fires burned at the entrances and exits of the villages as a ritual to ‘clean the air’. They saw small makeshift hospitals and dead animals lying in the fields. In one small village alone, 500 horses had died.

After a few days of uncomfortable travelling, they reached the Obi River which marked the end of the steppes. As this was also the demarcation line of the anthrax epidemic, they only had to cross the river to escape. But as they prepared, the wind picked up and quickly turned into a raging storm. The waves were too high for the ferry that shipped carriages and people across. For once, Humboldt didn’t mind the delay. The past few days had been tense but now it was almost over. They grilled some fresh fish and enjoyed the rain because the mosquitoes had disappeared. Finally, they could take off their suffocating masks. On the other side the mountains were waiting for Humboldt. When the storm calmed, they crossed the river and on 2 August they arrived at the thriving mining town of Barnaul – Humboldt had almost reached his destination. They had travelled the 1,000 miles from Tobolsk in just nine days. They were now 3,500 miles east of Berlin, as far as Caracas was to the west of Berlin, Humboldt calculated.

Three days later, on 5 August, Humboldt saw the Altai Mountains for the first time, rising in the distance. In the foothills there were more mines and foundries which they investigated as they pressed on to Ust-Kamenogorsk, a fortress near the border of Mongolia – Oskemen, in today’s Kazakhstan. From there the paths into the mountains became so steep that they left their carriages and most of the baggage behind at the fortress, continuing on small narrow flat carts that the locals used. Often they went on foot as they climbed higher, passing gigantic granite walls and caves where Humboldt examined the rock strata, scribbling notes and drawing sketches. Sometimes when his scientific travel companions Gustav Rose and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg were collecting plants and rocks, Humboldt became impatient and dashed ahead to climb even higher or to reach a cave. Ehrenberg became so distracted by the plants that the accompanying Cossacks had regularly to search for him. Once they found him soaking wet, standing in a bog with some grasses in one hand and in the other some moss-like specimen which he declared bleary-eyed was the same as the one that ‘covered the bottom of the Red Sea’.

Humboldt was back in his element. Crawling into deep shafts, chiselling off rocks, pressing plants and scrambling up mountains, he compared the ore veins he found with those in New Granada in South America, the mountains themselves with those of the Andes, and the Siberian steppes with the Llanos in Venezuela. The Urals might have been important in terms of commercial mining, Humboldt said, but the ‘real joy’ of the expedition had only begun in the Altai Mountains.