Meanwhile, the work on the lens and its apparatus had been finished; but it could not be set up until he was there, and arriving at the end of March there was no time to spare. For although the opposition of Mars did not occur until December 10th the planets would then be far past their nearest point, and there was much to see months before. In fact he, with Clark, arrived at Flagstaff shortly after the middle of July, and proceeded at once to put the glass into the telescope—no small difficulty, for the tube was so tight a fit in the dome which had housed the Brashear telescope that the lens had to be hoisted up and let into it through the shutter opening,—“quite a job,” as he wrote, “for so delicate and yet heavy a thing as a 24-inch lens.” However, it was successfully done, and the next morning at half past two observing began, and thereafter the dome knew no rest.[13]
In the letter last quoted he says that he has “taken a brand new house, finished indeed after I arrived, a little gem of a thing.” Before long he had three houses on the hill there, and began that succession of charming hospitalities ending only with his life. Friends like Professor and Mrs. Barrett Wendell and Professor Charles S. Sargent visited there, while Professor Edward S. Morse and George R. Agassiz, who were interested in his investigations, paid him long visits; and since Flagstaff was on the direct road to Southern California, a paradise becoming more and more fashionable, many others stopped off on the way to see him and his observatory, whom he was always delighted to entertain, for he had an unusual capacity for doing so without interrupting the course of his work. Then there were excursions to the cave dwellings, the petrified forest, and other places of interest in the neighborhood, for he loved the country about him, and took pleasure in showing it to others. Sometimes these trips were unusual. “We all rode,” he writes to a friend, “twelve miles out into the forest on the cow-catcher of a logging train, visited there a hole in the ground containing, if you crawl down through the chinks in the rocks several hundred feet, a thing we were not accoutered to do, real ice in midsummer; came back on the cow-catcher; and immensely enjoyed the jaunt. The acmes of excitement were the meeting of cattle on the track who showed much more unconcern of us than we of them. Indeed it was usually necessary for the fireman to get down and shoo them off.... Nevertheless we saw a real bull fight in a pretty little valley far from men where Greek met Greek for the possession of the herd. The two champions toed the line with great effect.” Nor did his interest in literature abate, for a few weeks later he wrote to the same correspondent: “Send me, an’ you love me, the best Chaucer at my expense.”
Meanwhile the observations of Mars and the other planets went on with success, and he was naturally gratified when his telescope revealed something that others had failed to find, such as Professor “See’s detection of the companion to Sirius which astronomers have been looking for in vain since its immersion some years ago in the rays of its primary due to its place in its orbit. The Lick hunted for it unsuccessfully last year”; the last remark being pointed by the fact that this rival had again been casting doubt upon his discoveries on Mars.
He observed without a break all summer and autumn, but aware that the atmosphere at Flagstaff was not so good in the winter, he decided to try that of Mexico, and thither he went in December taking the 24-inch telescope. Before the dome therefor was built he saw well with the six-inch; but for the larger glass the results were on the whole disappointing. Yet the observations in Mexico were by no means unproductive. To his father he writes: “In addition to all that I have told you before, Mr. Douglass has just made some interesting studies of Jupiter’s satellites, seeing them even better than we did at Flagstaff, and detecting markings on them so well that they promise to give the rotation periods and so lead to another pregnant chapter in tidal evolution.” And in another letter to him: “Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s satellites have all revealed new things about themselves. I intend to embody all of these things some day in a series of volumes on the planets.” Meanwhile, as during the observations of two years before, he was sending papers to various scientific journals, American and foreign, about results obtained on Mars, Mercury and Venus; and about this time Sir Robert Hart asked through Professor Headland permission to translate “Mars” into Chinese. One may add that the first volume of the “Annals of the Lowell Observatory” appeared that year (1897), the next in 1900.
CHAPTER XII
ILLNESS AND ECLIPSE
But his personal hopes of contributing further to science, or diffusing the knowledge learned, were destined to be sadly postponed. In the spring he left Mexico, and the telescope was returned to Flagstaff in May; but although he could stand observing day and night without sufficient sleep while stimulated by the quest, the long strain proved too much, and he came back to Boston nervously shattered. Such a condition is not infrequent with scholars who work at high speed, and although the diagnosis is simple the treatment is uncertain. The physicians put him to bed for a month in his father’s house in Brookline, a measure that he always thought a mistake, believing that he would not have collapsed so completely under a different regimen. The progress everyone knows who has seen it, a very slow regaining of strength, with ups and downs, and after much discouragement—in his case about three years—a return to normal health.
After the doctors let him up from bed he sought rest in divers places, but the progress was slow and uneven, as it must be in such cases. Naturally letters at this period are few, short and far between. Only two, written to his father, appear to have been preserved, one from Bermuda, January 22, 1898:
“Dear Father:
I enclose what I think you will like to see, a copy made for you of a letter just received. Festina lente is nature’s motto for me, and I try to make nulla vestigia retrorsum.
Affectionately your son Percival”
The copy enclosed is evidently of the letter from Professor Headland conveying Sir Robert Hart’s request to translate “Mars” into Chinese. The other letter is on January 17, 1899, with no place—date, and it says: “Was much better; now can’t sleep well. So it wags.”
A year later, although not yet recovered, he was so much improved as to plan with Professor Todd of Amherst an expedition to Tripoli to observe a total eclipse of the sun. They took a 24-inch lens, from the observatory at Amherst, with a very light tube for transportation in four joints that would slip inside one another, and a device for photographing the solar corona; the lens of the telescope being the largest yet used in such an expedition. Sending the apparatus by freight, they themselves sailed on the German Steamship St. Paul from New York on January 17, 1900. He had regained his humor, if nothing else, for he heads his private journal of this exploit: “An Eclipse trip to Tripoli being the sequel to The Valet and the Valetudinarian”—not that he ever wrote anything under this last title, but it was a reference to what he had been through in the preceding two and a half years—and after inserting two flamboyant newspaper clippings, for which he was not responsible, he writes: “Further notices there were of which no notice need be taken; literary and professional murders all, of various degrees of atrocity.”