Gerard Helferich - Humboldt’s Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey that Changed the Way We See the World

With love to Teresa,

who first felt Humboldts spirit

Everything is interrelated.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

THE Pan-American Highway south of Quito is a highway in name only. Indifferently paved, its two unmarked lanes are potholed in some places and awash with mud in others. But it is Ecuadors principal thoroughfare, and today the road is clogged with buses and trucks. The average speed is about thirty miles per hour, far less in some places.

We are tracing the route that Prussian scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt followed in 1802, but the countryside has been transformed in the intervening centuries. Strung out along the road now are a remarkable collection of structures in various stages of construction and decay. Mostly plain, cinderblock buildings with corrugated metal roofs, they include the expected gas stations (every third sign seems to advertise a vulcanizadora , or tire repair shop; apparently flats are a growth industry on the Panamericana). There are also places to sleep and to eat, but Motel 6 and Taco Bell they are not. How are the rooms, I wonder, at El Hotel Primitivo, hidden behind its raw cinder-block wall? And what is the specialty of the house at Caf de la Vaca, a squat white building painted with exuberant black spots?

Gradually, the land becomes more rural, closer to what Humboldt would have seen. Commercial buildings give way to modest houses made of the rough local brick, with kitchen gardens sprouting behind them. Holsteins graze in the fields, and domestic pigs forage at will. Then the volcanoes appear on the horizon. It was Humboldt who named this region the Avenue of the Volcanoes, and one can see why. The peaks come in quick, snowcapped successionPichincha, Pasochoa, Atacazo, Corazn, Illiniza, Yanaurc, Rumiahui, Cotopaxi. Even Chimborazo is visible, some fifty miles to the south.

At the town of Lasso, our bus turns onto a narrow lane. A few hundred yards farther on, we make another left and enter a set of stone-and-iron gates. Built in 1850, La Cinega is one of the great historic haciendas of Ecuador, with a provenance including some of the countrys most prominent families. The original land grant from the king of Spain stretched from Quito to Ambato, a distance of some fifty miles, but the vagaries of economics and politics have reduced the holdings to thirty acres, and instead of operating a plantation, today the hacienda earns its keep as a hostera . But even in its reduced present, one can glimpse its glorious past, when the hacienda was the stopping place of presidents and kingsand Alexander von Humboldt, who, having already completed the first extensive scientific exploration of the Amazon Basin, was in the process of doing the same for the Andes.

Beyond the magnificent eucalyptus alle, we pass a faded picket fence and circle a grand fountain. The impressive stucco house has three stories, whitewashed walls, and thick stone columns flanking the door. We disembark from the bus and enter, suddenly feeling underdressed in our muddy hiking boots and dusty fleeces. Inside, a wide central hall extends through the house to a lovely patio with cobbled walkways, formal flowerbeds, and another fountain. In the hallway, on a pedestal against the wall, is a bronze bust of Humboldt. Depicting him in his later years, it captures his high forehead, wide mouth, and prominent nose. He has the tousled hair of an adventurer and the penetrating gaze of a scientist.

To the right of the door is a reception desk. Andrs, our guide on this hiking trip, scoops a stack of room keys from the counter and fans them for the group. One of us will be lucky, he announces in his charmingly accented English. Because one of these keys opens the Humboldt Suite, the set of rooms where the great explorer stayed in 1802 while exploring nearby Cotopaxi. Preserved much as it was in the barons time, the suite is the largest, finest accommodation in the hacienda. But it is a mixed blessing, Andrs warns, for the rooms are said to be haunted by the barons ghost. Though not burdened by a belief in ghosts, aristocratic German ones or otherwise, I feel an uncanny certainty as I examine the keys. The first to choose, I pluck the key marked 7 from Andrss hand. Im not surprised when he tells me that I have picked the Humboldt Suite.

Congratulating ourselves, my wife, Teresa, and I rush up the broad staircase with visions of a king-size bed, crisp sheets, and a luxurious bath. But as we open the ancient door, we see that the suite is not the den of luxury we had imagined. The first room is a cavernous parlor with faded pink-and-white-striped wallpaper, heavy colonial furniture, and dusty draperies. Beyond is the barrel-vaulted bedroom, sheathed in somber paneling. And as we step into the unheated chamber we are greeted by a mustiness that seems to predate the hacienda itself. No wonder the room is thought to be the province of ancient spirits.

After dinner, as we lie in bed reading with the covers pulled up against the Andean chill, the wide, low door separating the bedroom from the sitting room suddenly swings open with a creak worthy of Vincent Price. Teresa and I look at each other and laugh. The hacienda is over four hundred years old, after all. Who would expect the doors to be plumb? A little while later, were still reading when my hiking pole jumps from the wall where I had set itdoesnt slide down in a languorous arc, mind you, but seems to leap away from the plaster as though called to attention by some unheard voice. We laugh again, but now with a self-conscious edge. And when the time comes to go to sleep, jaded New Yorkers though we are, we feel an irrational reluctance to turn out the light. We lie in the dark for a time, straining for strange noises, then eventually drift offonly to be awakened in the wee hours by unexplained voices coming from the step tile roof outside our window.

That day we hike the barren pramo around Cotopaxi, the volcano that Humboldt pronounced unclimbable. The sky is cobalt, and the sun, magnified by the high altitude and the low latitude, seems perilously near. Jutting through a ring of clouds, impossibly huge, is the mountains snow-draped cone. Buried in ash, strewn with huge blocks of obsidian, cut by rivers of mudall evidence of its tortured geologic pastthe terrain below the volcano is forbidding but irresistible. Even today, two centuries after Humboldts journey, it is country that begs to be explored.

In the evening, as we sip the traditional lazos in the bar of the hacienda with Andrs and his brother Nelson, the talk turns to Humboldt. Im struck by how knowledgeable they are about himhis itinerary, his scientific contributions, his liberal politics, even the speculations about his sexuality. Throughout Latin America, everyone knows Alexander von Humboldt, they tell us. He is a pan-national hero, like Simn Bolivar, with streets, schools, hospitals, even babies, named in his honor. The obvious affection is impressive, considering Humboldt visited this hemisphere for only five years, two long centuries ago.

When Teresa and I confess the previous nights events in the Humboldt Suite, Andrs and Nelson betray no surprise. Neither do they share our facetiousness. Many other guests have reported strange happenings in the rooms, they tell us. Nelson himself spent one sleepless night there, troubled by a foreboding presence, and now avoids them. I feel my puckish skepticism begin to slipand we still have another night in the rooms ahead of us.

That evening, we take sleeping pills to forestall any further apparitions.

TODAY, Humboldts spirit is felt far from La Cinega, and even beyond Latin America. From 1799 to 1804, Humboldt and his traveling companion Aim Bonpland accomplished what has been called the scientific discovery of the New World, blazing a six-thousand-mile swath through what is now Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba. The expedition was even longer and more ambitious than Lewis and Clarks renowned trek across North America, which began the year that Humboldt and Bonpland ended theirs. And, whereas Lewis and Clark enjoyed the backing of the United States government and were accompanied by a thirty-man corps of discovery, Humboldt financed his expedition himself, and he and Bonpland traveled alone except for local guides and friends they met along the way.