Mercury settled in Basilio's poncho

The barometer on the Chimborazo transect read 22 inches of mercury at the 14,000-foot station, and I wrote the number in the notebook beside the moss I had scraped from the rock. What the notebook did not record was Basilio’s hands. He had carried the instrument for six hours, wrapped in his poncho against the sleet, and when we stopped he held it level while I read the scale. The mercury settled. I wrote 22. The number entered the table, the table entered the paper, the paper entered the world as a fact about pressure at altitude. His hands entered nothing.

I have been thinking about the diagram I published in the Personal Narrative, the one that shows the plants arranged by elevation, zone by zone, from the palms at the base to the lichens at the snowline. It is a beautiful thing. It is also a lie of omission. Between the palm zone and the oak zone there is a band I did not draw: the band where Basilio’s brother died of a fever in 1802, where the mules were changed, where the porters ate their cold maize. That band has no plants in my diagram because I was not looking at plants when I passed through it. I was looking at the peak.

The correction I make now is small. When I began this work I believed the transect measured the mountain. It does not. The transect measures the line I walked, and the line I walked was cleared by hands I did not count. The instrument is accurate. The reading is accurate. The accuracy belongs to the instrument and to the reading, not to the mountain, which was there before the mercury and will be there after the table is forgotten.

I now believe the diagram should carry a second axis, one I cannot draw, marking the labour that made the first axis visible.