Other floods had scoured the houses of Basel from time to time. Nearly three hundred years ago the Black Death came to the Rhine and passed the city walls. There’d been no count or memory of how many died or how many lived. Instead, the wall of the cemetery of the Preacher’s Church was painted with the city’s Death Dance. Many cities had these Dances of Death; the Black Death swept many, many cities. Basel’s was famous, though, for its size and artistry. It was a mural a hundred feet long on the cemetery wall, made in the plague years, just opposite the house where Master Huldrych now lived. Perhaps he lived in it then, as well.
I’d seen engravings of other Dances from other cities and they all had the same form of a line of many panels, and in each panel a man or woman danced, with a partner. Every dancer’s station in life was easily recognized from their dress despite centuries’ difference. There were kings and priests and farmers, bakers, knights; children and aged; monks and nuns; paupers, and scholars and students and knaves. But the partner was always the same. It was a sprightly cadaver, Death, grinning, spouting worms and decay, and enjoying the gavotte much more than the reluctant living. In every scene he mocked his mate, twirling the farmer’s plow or brandishing the knight’s sword or wearing lopsided the king’s crown.
These dances were drawn and carved in observation of the Black Death’s sweep and carelessness. Even now there were churches in Germany standing empty and alone in old wide fields. Their villages dead and worn away, the stones of God’s house were the only remainder.
Though drawn in that time centuries ago, the Dances’ meaning was just as painful now. Everyone would die. The dance showed that no one, no one, would escape, whatever their station, rank, or achievement. Life was only a dance with death.
That Monday afternoon I took my place in Master Huldrych’s lecture room along with the dozen other students who paid the Master for his lectures. We were all in black and white for lectures, and we jested and teased and ignored the moral lesson available to us so close by.
In my first years I was often the object of the jeering, being younger than the others. Now I was the same age as them and I still received a generous share of their torment, but I didn’t mind. I also received a share of their purses for tutoring them in their Latin and Greek. I wasn’t asked to tutor other subjects: I had gained a reputation of becoming too enthusiastic and lengthy in my sessions.
Finally, as the church bells began their noon lecture, Master Huldrych appeared to begin his. We sat on a bench built around the walls of the room and the Master stood at a podium. He was expert in the Physics current in his youth but not the Physics current in his old age. He still referred to the subject as Natural Philosophy. He was one of the few masters at the University who still lectured in Latin. I wasn’t sure that he knew that he did. His great energy had dwindled though his curiosity was unflagging. He questioned any visiting scholar on the newest discoveries and ideas, but nothing new would ever seep into his lectures.
He was aware that the atmosphere was a gas, and that it exerted pressure on surfaces. He had himself collected gases in containers and observed that the volume and pressure in the container were somehow related. But the basic principle eluded him that this relation was a simple Mathematic inverse proportion, though Mr. Boyle stated that sixty years ago. He had described to us the experiments and proposals he’d entered into the Paris Competition, though he had not competed for many years. He had never won the competition. He may not even have entered, but only remembered that he had.
His lecture that morning was on the theory of waves, and I was in misery! I was fascinated by waves. From the square behind the Munster I would watch them on the Rhine. And this was my theory, as ridiculous as Master Huldrych found it: that sound was a wave.
I believed this because I was convinced that waves could move through volumes, not just across surfaces. How could a bird in flight be heard? What was the sound? Huldrych said it couldn’t be a wave, because no surface connected the bird and the ear, and plain observation showed that waves occurred on surfaces. I believed instead that sound showed that an invisible wave might occur in a gas. There were so many invisible things!
The air itself was invisible. It had been a century since Monsieur Pascal stated he believed that we were not surrounded by a vacuum, but by a type of matter like water, that filled our world like an ocean. At the time, Monsier Descartes derided him by saying the true vacuum was between Monsieur Pascal’s ears; but later, Mr. Boyle in England was able to evacuate the air from a bell pressed firmly against a tabletop. This true vacuum had many strange properties, including the phenomenon that no sound could penetrate it: a small, jangling bell inside the vacuum couldn’t be heard outside. So, air was necessary for sound.