Vaughan Cornish died almost unknown, his work on the wave form dismissed as cranky. One person, though, would encounter Cornish’s work, and would build on it to become a pioneer in the analysis of the behaviour of particulate matter.
Ralph Bagnold fought as a young man on the Western Front, and then returned to England to train as an engineer. In the 1930s, stationed in Egypt, he led expeditions into the sand seas of Libya, and became fascinated by the abstract beauty of that arid world. Above all, he was interested in the migrations of the Libyan dunes - their slow martial processes of advance and retreat. To Bagnold, the dunes seemed to possess the wilful unpredictability of living beings. He loved, too, the eerie song of the dunes, made when wind played in a certain way on the sand slopes. This song had haunted his Libyan evenings; at times the dunes would emit a low-pitched sound so penetrating that normal speech could be heard only with difficulty. As he travelled more between deserts, he began to catalogue the different songs of the sand: the high keening of the slipfaces of the Libyan sword dunes, and the ‘white roaring’ of the Kalahari sands.
Bagnold was compelled by the contradictory properties of sand grains. He wanted to know how it was that loose, dry, uncemented grains of sand could settle so firmly against one another that a loaded lorry driven across the surface of the sand would make tracks less than an inch in depth; but that sand grains of the same consistency could form pools of dry quicksand, fluid and deep enough to swallow that same loaded lorry.
His engineer’s mind engaged by the behaviour of the sand, Bagnold began to delve into the scientific literature surrounding its properties. What he found was that almost no work had been done, apart from that of Vaughan Cornish, on the physics of dune formation or sand structures. It was true that the dunes had been named and described, making an austere litany of names -
erg
,
seif
,
barchan
- and that their forms and habits were known; the star dunes that built and spread out from a still centre, the
seif
dunes that drifted in linked chains miles long, the
barchan
dunes, crescent-shaped and showing their outer curves to the wind. But beyond this, nothing. Empty territory.
So Bagnold began to investigate the topic. The physics involved in the analysis of the dunes was formidably complex. One had to map and anticipate the turbulence patterns of the wind, even before one tried to understand how the sand grains themselves - each of a different weight and shape - behaved within the flows of the wind. Only a brilliant obsessive could have taken on the subject.
Bagnold was such a man. Working by night, he held candles in the slipfaces of the dunes - their ‘undercliffs’ - in order to determine the ‘wind regimes’ that controlled the behaviour of sand there. In the heat of the day, he walked for miles through what he called ‘the streets’ - the corridors of low ground that the dunes preserved between themselves, even as they moved - and he walked along the fine lines of the trailing wing-tips of
barchan
dunes, which reached up to ninety feet high. In an effort to determine the different possible liquidities of quicksand, he took to jumping up and down on the surface of the firmer pools, and recorded that such leaps could make ‘a real circular wave radiate outwards for several metres in the undulate sand’. In prose of beautiful precision, Bagnold catalogued the dunes and the physics of their behaviour: their serpentine crests, their rounded windward shoulders, and their steep leeward slipfaces, ‘where the slope of the dune surface reaches the limit of steepness imposed by the angle of shear of the deposited material’.
When Bagnold returned to England from North Africa in 1935, he retired from the army, built a wind tunnel for himself, and began a decade’s worth of intricate experiments into the physics of blown sand. He found himself occupying a physical universe of exquisite formality, in which dunes travelled before the wind, preserving their individuality by an equality of loss and gain of their component sand-grains.
The massive accumulation of minute particulars: this was Bagnold’s method of study, and it could not have been more appropriate to his subject. This was science as devotion. Information, for Bagnold, was not a way to summarise and therefore reduce or close down the desert landscape, but instead a way to make it more astonishing. Science, for him, refined the real into a greater marvellousness.
In 1941, Bagnold published his findings as
The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes
. William Langewiesche rightly describes the book as ‘a small masterpiece of scientific exploration’, the consequence of Bagnold’s love-affair with sand. ‘Instead of finding chaos and disorder, ’ Bagnold wrote of the desert:
the observer never fails to be amazed at a simplicity of form, an exactitude of repetition and a geometric order unknown in nature on a scale larger than that of crystalline structure. In places vast accumulations of sand weighing millions of tons move inexorably, in regular formation, over the surface of the country, growing, retaining their shape, even breeding, in a manner which, by its grotesque imitation of life, is vaguely disturbing to an imaginative mind.
Late that afternoon, Roger and I reached the furthest seaward point of the Ness, the point at which the coast crooked and the peninsula began its slow sharpening away southwards. The sea had thrown up a ten-foot-high rampart of wet shingle. We scrambled down it, the stones hissing and slithering under our feet, and walked along the tideline for half a mile, picking up pieces of wood, comparing flints, finds. We discussed the driftwood, tried to imagine the story of each stick or shard; where it had floated from, which river had washed it down to which sea. Roger could tell the wood-type of each curled or flattened piece: a waterlogged oak plank; an ash shard that had the brittle texture of cuttlefish bone; even a rare spiralling cherry bough, weathered to a silky silver-grey, like the handle of a well-used implement.
We made a little woodhenge out of the driftwood: a rough circle of poles and spires, pushed down into the gravel - a homage to Derek Jarman’s driftwood garden on Dungeness. Our henge would last as long as the next high tide.
Then we sat, watched the sea and talked. I told Roger the story I had been reading of a ‘ghost forest’ that had been discovered on the eastern coast of Greenland in the 1950s. A young glacier had sheared away volcanic crust to reveal a stratum of 100-million-year-old sandstone, embedded in which were the fossils of long-dead forest: seeds, leaves and bark imprints - the spectres of persimmons, walnuts, sycamores, tulip trees, even eucalypts and breadfruits. A six-man expedition had been mounted to investigate the fossils: the scientists sailed a ‘small fine schooner’ into the remote bay, across ‘a cold grey mirror of water that was sprinkled with icebergs in surrealist shapes’, passing through ‘eerie arctic twilight’. It was the kind of mission I wanted to be called up for, I said: ghost trees, the tropics haunting the poles, adventure, ice . . . A month or two earlier I had given Roger a book called
The Great American Forest
, by Rutherford Platt, and he had brought it with him to Orford. He got it out from his knapsack, and read a section he liked about chlorophyll and the colours of autumn forests: how the great flaring, which looked like death, was in fact just a sign of the trees hunkering back for winter, ready to go through the sap cycle again.
The shingle rampart behind us locked off the rest of the world. There was only the steep wet gravel to our west, and the sea to our east, brown and frightening. Fast, fat, stone-heavy waves plunged aggressively, and the big wind filled the air with cold spray. I could hear only the detonations of the waves, gravel spattering like bullets, and the wind’s steady roar. A single sailing-boat, visible through the haze, marked the edge of the known world.
Perhaps we should not have been surprised by what we found out there, sitting on a concrete housing near the lighthouse. It was a tiny shelter, a little cabin a foot or so high, made of broken bricks and hunks of concrete, with a loop of coat-hanger wire sticking from its ceiling, and a gap for the front door. There was no clue as to who had made it, or why, but the impulse to have done so was no mystery. It was a shelter, however rudimentary and scaled down, for this unprotected front-line space.
At evening, as the sun was low and red in the sky, we crossed back over the River Ore, and into the woods and fields of Suffolk. A single mushroom-cloud of cumulonimbus dominated the eastern sky, and it was soaked in the red fission light of the late sun.
Some time after our day on Orford Ness, Roger became unusually withdrawn. He stopped writing as regularly, and he spent increasing amounts of time alone at the farm. We - his friends and family - thought it was the effect of his book, which he was close to finishing, after so many years’ work on it: that he had gone into hibernation for the final stages. I went over with my friend Leo to see him, to find out how he was, and to see if I could help at all with the book. He cooked lunch for us, but did not eat himself: he had lost his appetite, he said - probably the pressure of the work. When Leo and I went for a quick swim in the moat, he stayed on the bank.
Two weeks later, Roger began to slur his speech, and to hallucinate that visitors had come to stay at Walnut Tree Farm, when he was in fact alone. He was taken that night to hospital. A scan revealed an aggressive tumour on the front left lobe of his brain.
The first part of Roger’s treatment was at the hospital close to my home. I went to see him there each day that he was in, felt hot-eyed, talked brightly. It seemed impossible at that time, to me as to all of Roger’s friends, that the cancer would not ebb away. Roger’s unstoppable vitality would simply overpower the disease.
This did not happen. Roger became progressively more ill. There was difficult and exhausting medical treatment. There were long periods of befuddlement, and shorter periods of clarity, and in one of these periods of clarity I saw him. We spoke about some of the journeys I had been on since he had fallen ill, and about
Wildwood
, which he had finished only a few weeks before his diagnosis. He told me about oak trees; how when one of their number was under stress they would share nutrients via their root systems. It was a measure of his generosity and his devotion to nature that, even when so near to death, he could still speak unjealously of the ability of trees to heal themselves. I told him about the birch trees I had been climbing in Langdale, how whippy they were, and how, if you found a young tree slender but strong enough, you could climb to its summit, and allow your weight to bend the tree’s tip over and down, so that it deposited you lightly upon the ground from which you had begun, before springing back up to the vertical. Roger asked me to get his copy of Robert Frost down from the shelf, and to read out Frost’s poem ‘Birches’. It ended:
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
. . . I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
The cancer killed Roger appallingly fast. Five weeks before the equinox, I drove over to Walnut Tree Farm to see him for what I knew would be the last time. He was sitting in the kitchen, and was unable to raise himself from his wicker chair. I bent to give him a clumsy hug, and was shocked to feel how thin he was within his old green jumper. His partner, Alison, his son Rufus, and his friend Terence were there too; they had been taking gentle care of him for weeks. We all sat together in the kitchen, talked, drank tea. When the others moved off to do jobs around the house, I sat alone with Roger for a while, held his hand, spoke a little. I gave him a stone that I had found for him the previous month, on Embleton beach in Northumbria: it was a pyroclast, grey basalt ringed with what I thought was red serpentine, and it had been spewed out by the volcano complex whose eroded roots now formed the Cheviot massif. This was once lava, I said as I passed it to him. Roger held it in his hand, and rubbed his thumb over its rough side, to give himself the answer of a texture. A cricket clicked along the edge of the old biscuit tin that sat on the table. He fell asleep, and I left the room quietly. On the way home, I stopped the car in a lay-by and cried.
Three days afterwards, with Leo and another friend who knew Roger, I travelled by train to the North Norfolk coast: past the ironstone reef that rises near King’s Lynn and gives the walls of the older houses a rusty colour, and then out to Holkham Bay. We swam in wild waves at dawn and dusk, saw a marsh harrier hunt over the whin, and in the evening we read out the pages from Roger’s book that described his adventures on that stretch of coast. That night, we slept in a clearing in the pine forests which run down almost to the sand at Holkham. I spent half the night in a hammock that Roger had lent me, and half of it down on the thick soft needle carpet, where it smelt of sap and resin.
Roger died six days later, at the age of sixty-three, still in the house that he had built around himself thirty-eight years earlier. He had never worn anything but used clothes, so I turned up for his funeral in shabby brown cords and a jumper with a hole in the shoulder, to find everyone else in suits and black ties. After my initial horror, I realised it didn’t matter at all. His oldest and closest friends, several of whom he had known since childhood or university, spoke movingly about him. There were readings from his letters and from
Waterlog
. The coffin was cremated with a swatch of full-leaved oak branches upon it. Loudon Wainwright’s ‘The Swimmer’s Song’ was played as the coffin rolled through the velvet curtains, and the congregation wept.
In the weeks following the funeral, I could not shake off a sadness, close to depression, at Roger’s death. Grief played its tricks: I kept forgetting he had died, thinking for a second I could ring him up to ask him something, or call over to see him. I had known him for fewer than four years, but friendship with Roger did not seem to follow the normal laws of time. ‘I want all my friends to come up like weeds,’ he had once written in a notebook, ‘and I want to be a weed myself, spontaneous and unstoppable. I don’t want the kind of friends one has to cultivate.’ That caught it exactly. Spontaneous and unstoppable. Roger had not just loved the wild, he had been wild. Not in the austere and chastening sense I had once understood the wild to be, but natural, vigorous, like a tree or a river.