No planes dared fly over it. Its unpredictable climate, dizzying abnormalities of compass and impossibilities of landing made it a pilot’s and navigator’s nightmare. All its pathways turned into overgrowth, jungle and ambush. The tribes that were rumoured to live there were barely human – some said the anthropophagi still roamed. Creatures beyond hope. Heads growing below their shoulders. Horrors.
The logging roads skirted its perimeter, allowing commerce to gingerly nibble at its unprotected edges. There were no commercial means of ingress or egress from its solid shadow, except for the train. The mindlessly straight track that ran towards its heart was laid, line by line, with the hunger for wood. As it grew forwards, it forgot its immediate past. The iron rail carried sleep in its miles of repetition.
Most of the train that ran on it was composed of open platform and iron chain, built to receive the freshly cut trunks. But there were two passenger carriages, made for short and necessary visits, or for those whose curiosity outstripped their wisdom. There were also the slave carriers, basic boxes on wheels designed to carry the workforce into the forest’s interior. The slaves had changed before the eyes of their owners. They had transformed into other beings, beings devoid of purpose, identity or meaning. In the beginning, it was thought their malaise was the product of their imprisonment, but it soon became clear there was no personality left to feel or suffer such subtleties of emotion. The forest itself had devoured their memory and resurrected them as addicts to trees.
The zoopraxiscope was defunct. It had been superseded, overtaken by other machines that defined movement and projected the gait of reality. But he had already given up that task in America. He and his brass hydra of lenses, cogs and light had already achieved that which was now being trivialised. No one had ever seen the new machine – it remained locked away in its haunted East London room.
Returning to Kingston-upon-Thames after so many years and so many travels had been the natural thing to do. He had contacted what remained of his family and told them he needed help to grow old. ‘Uncle Eddie’ was a celebratory figure and a man of considerable affluence: they had, of course, said yes.
He knew he would not develop the last machine. Its effect had been catastrophic – everything else that had brought him fame seemed like child’s play by comparison, and he had determined to take its secret to the grave.
He had recognised, many years ago, what had been screaming at him from his archives of movement: his misdirection, up to that point, had been complete. The measured delineation that filled his life was a lie. Observation was not the primary function of photography, but a side effect of its true purpose. The constant gathering of pictures of life was only a harvesting of basic material. Deeper meaning lay within the next part of the process, a kernel waiting to give up its flavour after being savagely reworked: the camera was not a collector of light, but time, and the time it cherished most was in the anticipation of death.
It could look between the seams of existence and sniff out an essence that was missed in the daily continuum. It fed on a spillage between worlds which was denied to common sight and ordinary men. He had first noticed it when making portraits of the defeated Modruc chieftains, all those years ago, though he saw it also in Guatemala, and in some of the invalids who graced his movement porfolios. They had stared into life, and his camera, differently to other men. Their portraits sang against the world, their eyes threading through the viewer’s gaze.
There was an aura of non-visible vibration in his glass slides, an effect that shimmered in the emotional eye but not in reality. It somehow transferred to his prints, so that while they depicted the noble or twisted sitter, framed in space, they also hummed a lucid resonance which slivered alongside the viewer’s subjective intelligence. Astoundingly, the effect was increased when the image was projected, rather than stained, onto paper.
The twelfth generation zoopraxiscope was not like the rest. It was certainly not like the first four. He needed another name for it, the one that still scared him, yet he had never found it. No one would ever believe what it did, looking at its complex entanglement of lenses and shutters. They would expect more pretty pictures to dance on the wall, yet would meet instead a rippled light which sliced the optic nerve into a whip of driving visions…
Muybridge was keen in his arrogance, sharp enough to know that such a statement, made publicly, would unbind his esteem and threaten his well-forged place in history. Those little minds that scratched at his achievements would make light work of his undoing, were they privy to such a discovery – but they would never be allowed to snatch away his triumph or his secret. He would let it seep out, after they were all rotted bones. Let others announce his genius, as Huxley had for Darwin, or as Ruskin had for Turner, men not yet born, men of the growing age who would recognise his enlightenment. He would save his strength and maybe live long enough to witness it. He had made the device, found the conclusion. But he had seen others of his age brought to the pillory in the last years of their lives, shredded and broken by their generosity, choked on the crumbs of wisdom they gave, too freely, to the mob. He had better things to roll into the future than explanation. He was too old to debate and be questioned. He was justified and right.
So he had returned to England, to conceal his knowledge of the brass creature that engineered the invisible and to avoid the native curiosity and gawping interest of the Americans, which he had previously exploited so brilliantly. He wanted the surly indifference of England to hide in, to be unseen, even while apparent.
A long time ago, what now seemed like hundreds of years, he had visited the Isle of Man, a derelict rock in the Irish sea between England and Ireland, ignored by both antagonistic islands. His parents had taken him there to see the peasants working the thick, dense earth and the violent, ragged sea, and to avoid the questions of a smouldering family horror at home. On a rare, blistering afternoon, without shadows or any other form of shade, he had been trusted to explore alone as they wandered the beach, and not to move from the place in which he winched and roamed without finding interest.
In a shelter of cupped rock, nailed with white painted cottages to the cliff, he had met a fisherman. His boredom had been like bait to the old seaman, who was hiding his own endless tedium in the morbid actions of work. They had talked intermittently, dribbling sentences into the sand for each to watch without comment. The tide had receded and given a bellowing space to their breath, letting speech occur in salty bubbles. The highlight of the interaction had been in the contents of a battered pail of slopping brine, fetched by the fisherman and dramatically screwed into the sand for the boy’s attention. A clunking, pissing sound had come scratching from the bucket. The boy’s attention was instantly hooked. Walking over to look inside, he saw five crabs of various sizes, struggling against the limited water and the steep tin sides of their containment.
‘Are they trying to escape?’ stuttered the boy. ‘Trying to get out?’
‘Aye,’ nodded the fisherman, after a tobacco pause.
‘But why can’t they do it?’ asked the boy. ‘There are more of them than the water.’
‘They be Manx crabs,’ said the man. ‘See – every time one crawls up an’ nearly escapes, the others drag it back down.’
The boy had recognised this, known it to be as true as the ocean, and he had been instantly grateful for an adult fact. He had known, even then, that he would use it all his life.
The only time he had let it go was in his marriage, where overpowering love had happened twice and shaken his terse tree of knowledge to its roots.