Ten Tributes to Calvino by Rhys Hughes Page B

when I am no longer a bachelor, it will be an easier task to lose and find her.
     

Climbing the Tallest Tree in the World
     
    It started as a prank and ended as a plank. We drank too much ale and tumbled out of the tavern. Our university is the most renowned in the land. Somebody suggested that we accomplish a feat never before attempted. We agreed with alacrity. We disagreed with Figgis, who wanted to go home. We knocked him down with stones. We had a tradition of appalling behaviour to live up to. It was our duty.
    To be honest, I can’t remember if we were students or professors. It hardly matters. I pointed at the famous tree in the main public square and cried: “Let’s climb that!” The excited voices around me went quiet. But it was too late to back down. Slowly a chant filled those empty throats. “To the top!” We bolstered our courage with coordinated hubbub. I was happy and scared.
    We decided to mount our assault in pairs. We reached the base of the trunk but did not bother to look up. It was pointless. The canopy was lost beyond the clouds. Fresh hearts and initials had been carved into the bark. I went first with Gruber. As we ascended, the style of these carvings became cruder and older. They had all been made at ground level and the growth of the tree was carrying them toward heaven.
    Within an hour, we were confronted with the evidence of love affairs which had ended before the founding of our university. These hearts had been cut with stone tools, not steel blades. Later, when the ache in my arms was unbearable, there was nothing. The tree was older than the art of writing. Gruber and I decided to rest. Far below we watched our colleagues struggle to make equal sense of these ephemeral desires.
    “Fossils of passion,” said Gruber, as he sat on a branch and dangled his legs over the void. I guessed that he wanted to make a contribution of his own, but was frustrated in this design by the lack of a girl to love. Also he had no knife. We reclaimed our breath and resumed our climb. Roosting birds, chiefly owls, studied our progress with alarmed amusement. Then I recalled the subject I specialised in and blinked for all their eyes.
    “Trees don’t grow like this,” I muttered.
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “They don’t grow from the base but from the top. There’s no way those carvings could be rising progressively higher.”
    It was a mystery. We sweated and gasped as we pushed ourselves to the limits of our endurance. The sun went down, but when I checked my pocket watch I saw it was nearly midnight. That demonstrates how high we already were. It had been night in the town below for many hours. I wondered if we would reach the top by morning. It seemed unlikely. For a start, mornings would arrive much earlier now.
    Gruber and myself were the highest pair, as I’ve already mentioned. Immediately beneath us were Pluck and Becker. When we began this exploit, we frequently shouted at them, and they passed on our shout to the next pair, who I believe were Kane and Rowse, and so we kept in rudimentary touch right down to the final two climbers. But now our calls were not acknowledged. We were ascending too fast. Or they had fallen.
    The stars did not grow brighter in the celestial dome but the air remained breathable. This was a surprise. It should have thinned out gradually. Gruber leaned close and fixed his lips to my ear. He was trembling.
    “The trunk is getting thicker,” he whispered.
    “Yes, it is very strange. And the branches are much wider. What can this mean?”
    “That the tree is misshapen and ugly?”
    There was no other explanation at that particular time. We climbed reluctantly now, and I distracted myself by attempting some difficult mental calculations. The distance between the most recent inscriptions and the earliest could be reckoned in two ways: miles or centuries. Thus the growth of one year could be reduced to a precise length of trunk. An estimate of the height of