The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins Read online

  April 1863

  Paris, France

  In Which Gibear Gives Me a Birthday Surprise

  We have just arrived in Paris: I need to buy some new supplies before we begin excavating the French countryside. And today happened to be my birthday, so instead of stocking up on picks, shovels, and the like, I felt like spoiling myself: a little croissant (or two, or three), a little chocolat chaud (or two, or three), a little gâteau (i.e., a delicious, delectable, diabolical cake), and perhaps a few other victuals.

  Gibear and I have just settled into a little boardinghouse on the Left Bank. I unpacked and got ready to shave off my beard and tend to my mustache (which has fallen into shameful disarray). Then I looked into a mirror for the first time in months and got quite a shock: gray hair was beginning to tuft out around my temples! Why, my skin looked as leathery as some of the animals I have uncovered. This sight distressed me no end—but what could I expect? After all, I have done a great deal of difficult outdoor living. One cannot expect to stay fresh as a daisy forever.

  Even though I hardly felt like celebrating anymore, I got dressed and took Gibear out to visit a French street café. He grew very excited when the waiter set down a big saucer of café au lait, or coffee with milk, in front of him. After lapping it up, he curled up and napped in his chair. As he peacefully slept, I scowled and thought about my gray hair some more. The late-afternoon sun gradually shifted and shone down on Gibear. Suddenly I noticed something extremely odd. I leaped out of my chair and parted his fur.

  His rose-red undercoat was turning green.

  Not an earthy sort of green—the sort of color that a dog turns after swimming in algae—but rather a brilliant, rich bottle green. My pet was changing from a ruby into an emerald!

  I sat back down and stared at him, stunned. Animals always know when they are being watched: Gibear woke up, sat upright in his chair, and stared right back at me. We sat like this until the sun set. By then, Gibear had turned the color of a gleaming green jewel.

  I picked him up and carried him back to our house. As we waited at a street corner for a chance to cross, a scrap of paper blew up against my legs. I plucked it off the ground and examined the words printed on it:

  Youth is fleeting, but the curious shall always be evergreen and young at heart.

  —Jean-Pierre Sancerre

  Just then, I felt that I understood Gibear’s birthday message to me. What a wonderful, darling little animal he is! I squeezed him to my chest affectionately, and felt much better.

  October 1863

  Provence, France48

  In Which I Discover … Bunny Fluffs

  (Plumeus Cuniculus)

  We are enjoying one of our loveliest countryside campsites yet, right in the middle of a lavender field. Everything in Provence is sweet: the air, filled with the perfume of flowers; the milk and cream from the cows; the honey, made by fat little buzzing French bees. So it should hardly have surprised me that the first creatures we should uncover here would be almost impossibly charming.

  And just think—I found them only because I had wanted to eat a rabbit for dinner. I skulked around the field with a little bow and arrow, Gibear at my side. His new green fur shone in the sunshine. We spotted a fine field rabbit in the grass. Gibear let out a whoop—Giii-bear!—and the chase began. Once, Gibear got close enough to nip at the rabbit’s haunches, but the rabbit leaped away and scrambled into a grass-covered hole in the ground. Gibear burrowed into the hole after him.

  “You’ll frighten him away!” I cried, grabbing for one of his hind legs, but it was too late. Gibear had gone down the rabbit hole. I sat back down crabbily, ripped up some onion grass from the ground, and chewed on it while thinking dark thoughts.

  A few minutes later, scuffling noises came from the tunnel. I grabbed my bow and arrow and waited for the rabbit to bound out. But this is what rolled out of the hole instead: a minuscule skull! Gibear came out shortly afterward, nudging another skull along with his nose. The tiny bones were very, very old and light as air—almost as fragile as the skin-thin bones of the ancient tribe of Brittle Bones in England.

  I simply had to know more about the creatures to whom these skulls belonged; my rumbling stomach was forgotten as I ran back to our camp and grabbed my excavation kit. What I have learned from the ensuing dig: the lavender field is the home to an ancient rabbit warren once inhabited by a species of bunny ancestors so light and filmy that they were almost weightless. Completely round, these creatures had no legs; instead, they floated like dandelion fluff through their warren. Consequently, I have called them Bunny Fluffs. Needless to say, they rarely emerged from their underground maze, for the slightest breeze could send them flying for miles.

  The Bunny Fluffs shared certain attributes with today’s rabbits. For example, they tended to multiply rather quickly. Within a very short time, two Bunny Fluffs turned into four, which led to sixteen fluffy bunnies, and then thirty-two, and then five hundred and twenty-four, and then many thousand. The warren grew terribly cramped—and more Bunny Fluffs were being born every day.

  Why, one might ask, did they not just dig more tunnels? Indeed, a sensible question. Unfortunately, a hard layer of rock lay beneath the Bunny Fluffs’ warren, and rock-filled hills surrounded the field on all sides. The Bunny Fluffs had run out of space. Something needed to be done. It appears that a brave band of Bunny Fluffs volunteered to leave the warren and scout out another field to accommodate the ever-larger Bunny Fluff population. Before leaving the tunnels, they likely would have taken some precautions to weigh themselves down a bit, such as gobbling heaps of grass roots before trundling up to the edge of the tunnel.

  This is how I imagine the scene playing out: the sun shone; the grass stood still and silent in the breezeless day. The first of the Bunny Fluffs tentatively floated out into the field. Suddenly the grasses began to wave: a breeze came across the field. With sad little squeaks, the pioneer Bunny Fluffs were lifted off the ground and blown away, their weighty meal to no avail, never to return (Gibear and I found carcasses of random Bunny Fluffs in the far corners of the valley). Too afraid to leave the warren and take their chances in the vast, windy world, the rest of the Bunny Fluffs seem to have hunkered down and continued to multiply until they eventually suffocated in their own fluff. Their very old remains are terribly sad to behold.

  (“That rather reminds me of your room when you were a boy,” said Mother Wiggins, who had somehow managed to appear in the middle of this lovely lavender field. “What a pigpen!”

  “It was neat as a pin,” I defended myself. “Do go away, Mother. I am trying to write about the Bunny Fluffs.”)

  Anyway, when Gibear and I first opened the massive grave of these poor animals, it appeared that we had uncovered millions of pearls. But of course these “pearls” simply turned out to be more of the Bunny Fluffs’ tiny skulls, carpeting the entire bedrock of the lavender field.

  As their tale shows, sometimes taking no risk is the worst risk of all.

  48. A pretty part of southeastern France.

  May 1864

  The Swiss Alps

  In Which I Discover … the Timekeepers

  (Custodis ab Tempus)

  After leaving France, Gibear and I spent the winter in the mountains of Switzerland, enjoying a warm chalet in the Alps with a huge stone fireplace. I decided to take up skiing to amuse myself until the spring, when I could begin excavations in the area. On the first day, I trudged through the snow to a mountain peak, lugging my wooden skis. Gibear (still green!) hitched a ride on my shoulder, and watched with great curiosity and amusement as I strapped the planks onto my feet.

  “And away we go,” I shouted, tucking Gibear into my pocket and pushing off the top of the mountain.

  What a ghastly experience! As I whizzed down the mountain, one of the skis flew off my foot and embarked on its own voyage; I careened down the slope on one foot, lurching to the left and then to the right, and finished by plunging off the top of a cliff. (Luckily, the
re was not far to fall—just about fifteen feet to the next cliff top—but it still hurt.)

  I found myself at the mouth of a cave49 and ambled inside. I sat down and rubbed my hands together to warm them up. Outside, the icy wind howled and moaned. When it died down for a moment, I heard the distinct sound of a ticking clock. I froze and listened carefully. It was coming from deep inside the cave’s floor. Clearly, this called for an investigation, so I climbed back up the cliff and staggered home to my chalet to retrieve my tools.

  What a miserable dig: the ground was icy and hard, but the ticking noise prompted me to chip away. After digging three feet into the ground, Gibear and I discovered that humans had been living in the cave as recently as several hundred years ago.50 I pushed aside these boring modern remains and went on digging.

  The ticking continued, louder now. What came up next in the dirt: fossils of Ice Age cave bears, probably tens of thousands of years old.51 Ho-hum. This might have interested another man, but not me. I dug deeper; the pit was so deep now that I had to stick torches into the walls to see. The sound grew even louder; the ground trembled with every tick. Then my shovel hit something hard; I got on my hands and knees and swiped the dirt aside.

  There gleamed a great, ancient gold clock—and a very odd one at that. Ten feet wide, five feet deep, sporting two hundred rings of numbers, each one shifting to a new spot every time the clock clicked. Every second, the clock seemed to be solving a different, terribly complex mathematical equation.

  Gibear pawed at the ground around the edges of the clock, and I knew that there must be more to find (that animal simply has a sixth sense when it comes to discovery!). To my great disbelief, in due time we unearthed yet another graveyard, this time containing an extremely ancient tribe of humans with absolutely huge heads. Enormous! I simply do not know how their shrimp-like little bodies supported those massive craniums.

  The story told by their remains and surroundings sends chills down my spine. Although they lived over 350 million years ago, these cave dwellers remain the most mathematically intelligent creatures to have ever inhabited our planet. Those huge skulls had once contained gargantuan brains, which had mastered astronomy and physics half a billion years before Galileo was even born.52 I know this because I also found powerful telescopes and countless other mathematical machines and trinkets so complex that I cannot make heads or tails of them.

  The clock in the floor, however, had been the magnum opus of this species. Its extraordinary purpose: to control time.

  It appears that for a while, the Timekeepers, as I have duly named them, found success with their machine. A first batch of skeletons shows signs of rapidly accelerated aging, which means that at least one generation of Timekeepers used their gold clock to speed up time. Too bad for them: in doing so, they accelerated themselves to a quick, untimely death.

  But then, another group of skeletons shows signs of an extremely drawn-out aging process, which means that this generation managed, with their gold clock, to slow down time. They met as grueling a fate as the first Timekeepers: imagine having to live your life out in excruciating slow motion over thousands of years.

  A third group of Timekeeper skeletons shows signs of reverse aging, meaning that the next generation had managed to turn back time—something that we all wish we could do upon occasion. Yet this, too, yielded extremely painful results: their bones retracted and crunched and ground themselves up as the Timekeepers shrank back into babies—and died from lack of care. These skeletons were the most heartbreaking to behold.

  When I readied to leave the cave, a terrible thought occurred to me: What if the wrong people happened to discover this clock after us? Just imagine what a terrifying weapon this clock could be!

  (“So pull it apart, Wendell,” crowed Mother Wiggins. Her apparition suddenly stared down at me from the top of the pit. “Only, turn it back just enough to give me a youthful look again.”

  “Mother!” I wailed. “That is exactly what I am worried about: people using this clock for selfish reasons, without considering all of the consequences.”

  “Talk about selfish!” she said. “Just look at these wrinkles. And you won’t lift a finger to help your old mother—as usual.”)

  Well, that did it. The very idea of this machine being used for such petty purposes! I pulled out many of the clock’s gears, lugged them out of the pit, and threw them over the side of the cliff. Then I went back in and chopped at it with my ax. When I was done, Gibear and I filled the pit back up with mounds of dirt and rocks, and stamped all over it.

  As I write this in my comfortable chalet, I keep thinking about the fact that present-day Switzerland is famous for its fine clocks. It is as though the Timekeepers still whisper the secrets of their clock-making art to their heirs, across millions of years. And the heirs listen to these whispers and paint clock faces and affix clock hands and concern themselves with the business of seconds and minutes and hours. They cannot boss time around like their ancestors, but, by God, they can try to regulate it.

  Of course, it is not the same thing—but we must all acknowledge our limitations.

  49. Dr. Wiggins had found what is now known as the Wildkirchli caves. A man named Emil Bächler has been officially credited with finding and excavating them in 1940—seventy-six years after this journal entry was written.

  50. The caves had indeed been used by hermit monks in the 1600s. “Wildkirchli” means “little church in the wilderness.”

  51. Dr. Wiggins was correct: bears had inhabited the cave fifty thousand years ago.

  52. An Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, Galileo lived from 1564 to 1642. Some say that he was responsible for the birth of modern science.

  April 1865

  Rome, Italy

  In Which I Discover … the Grand Celebrators

  (Bacchantes)

  Our European tour continues: we have arrived at last in the ancient city of Rome (ancient being, of course, a relative term—the current city has only been around for several thousand years). Romans have always loved food and feasting: in the evenings, when your stomach is empty and you just happen to be out walking the city’s streets, the delicious smell of pasta cooking and meat roasting in the nearby homes will drive you mad with hunger. Despite these temptations, I am proud to report that I have scaled back to a mere four meals a day. (So I do not know why, exactly, I have still such a fat stomach, but that is neither here nor there.)

  When we arrived, I began a small excavation near the Roman Pantheon,53 looking for truly ancient temples to truly ancient gods. Most people would likely think it foolish to dig around the streets of a modern city, but as my previous excavations have demonstrated, history tends to reveal itself in layers: beneath history there is always more history.

  I preferred to work at night, once the crowds thinned out. One night, at around eleven, Gibear leaped up and growled at a dark alley nearby. As I have said before, animals always know when they are being watched. I clutched my shovel.

  “Come out of there,” I cried. “I just happen to be armed, so take care.”

  A small figure emerged from the shadows: a young boy, perhaps seven years old. I lowered my shovel, and he came forward. All bony elbows and jutting knees, he was a bit wild around the eyes, like a hawk after winter. Suddenly he sprang toward our piles of tools, grabbed my rucksack (which, I might note, contained Gibear’s precious coffee supply), and ran around the corner. Before I could even squawk in protest, Gibear took off like a shot after him.

  They disappeared through the front doors of the Pantheon. I huffed and puffed, trying to keep up as they scrambled across the vast marble floor. The boy ran toward the great altar, pulled up a thin floor panel, and disappeared into a hole underneath. With a flash of (still) green fur, Gibear followed him. Shortly afterward, I heard an echoing sound from somewhere deep below the Pantheon:

  Giii-bear!

  Giii-bear!

  Giii-bear!

  If I ever wanted to
see my precious pet again, I would have to go after him. Lugging my oil lamp along, I squeezed myself through that hole (a process so humiliating that I would rather not describe it: I simply must eat less Italian pasta!). Once through the panel, I found myself on top of a spiraling staircase delving deep into the earth below.

  At the bottom: a huge, circular marble hall. A ring of sarcophaguses—aboveground stone graves—stood around the edge of the room. These graves were the widest I’d ever seen. What a queer tomb!

  Just then, I heard the sound of Gibear’s wheezy bark echoing from another room. Following the noise, I emerged into another vast hall, where hundreds of gold barrels and urns lined the walls. And at the back of that hall cowered the little boy, cornered by my vicious green pet. I wrestled my rucksack away from the thief and demanded to know more about these strange underground rooms. “Does anyone else know about them?” I asked in my clumsy schoolboy Italian. “Or only you?”

  “Only me,” said the boy. And when I asked him who was in those tombs in the main hall, the boy responded: “People who gave too many parties.”

  Well! I hardly knew what to make of this. While I stood there puzzling about this, the boy ran over to one of the urns and showed me what was inside: rich, blood-red wine. In the gold barrels: pure white sugar, enough to make thousands of cakes and sweets and all sorts of other delectables. The boy was right: I had indeed stumbled upon the temple of an ancient species of Grand Celebrators. I began my official inspection immediately.

  As their graves indicated, these Celebrators had been the fattest human-like species I’d ever seen—at least ten feet wide each. Their bones showed tremendous signs of strain. A very old race—some forty million years—the Celebrators clearly devoted their lives exclusively to pleasure. Why, their carcasses bear evidence of mass consumption of all of that sugar and wine! I uncovered what appeared to be a Celebrator calendar, carved in gold into one of the underground temple’s walls: one year consisted of 700 days. According to picture symbols on the calendar, 699½ of those days were spent reveling—eating, drinking, and dancing. How did they spend that last half a day?