60°10”N, 24°57”E #4
It has been a hot day. The warmth lingers under the trees, and though it has been a long journey, von Nordmann and Miss Olson are in no hurry to retire for the evening.
If one goes to bed too early here, the heat will make anyone longing for sleep toss and turn in their sheets, so they wait until the evening has cooled, sit beneath the trees and enjoy some chilled drinks.
Von Steven shares some of the latest botanical advances with von Nordmann, and as he is talking, a spider lowers itself from a branch and lands on his jacket shoulder.
He asks Miss Olson to identify the species, and to her satisfaction she correctly identifies it as the European garden spider; she remembers copying its white marbling onto paper.
Von Steven congratulates von Nordmann on his assistant, then turns to Miss Olson.
The young lady knows her spiders, but does she know how the arthropods first came into being?
Miss Olson shakes her head, and von Steven assumes a comfortable position and begins his story.
Arachne was the finest weaver in the land.
Her tapestries were so exquisite that word of her skills reached the gods themselves.
However, Minerva, the goddess of crafts, was envious that a mortal should receive such praise and challenged the young woman to a weaving competition.
The two weave, but even the gods cannot find a single flaw in Arachne’s tapestry.
However, this skill does not bring her happiness, as the goddess will not settle for a draw and attacks the young weaver.
Arachne is shocked at the goddess’s wrath, and when she sees the girl’s sadness, Minerva relents.
She saves Arachne from death and gives her eight limbs with which to weave her fabrics.
Now she can weave perfect creations in peace until the end of time, remaining invisible and innominate, hidden in dark corners and the notches of trees, for such is the price of boastfulness, the fate of all those who seek a position that is not theirs to take.
As the expedition nears its end, von Nordmann is content.
He will return with von Steven’s plants and his impressive collection of spiders, a collection including several species hitherto unknown to science.
The collaboration with Miss Olson has exceeded all his expectations.
His assistant has shown herself to be a most excellent microscopic illustrator, and perhaps more surprisingly, a skilled collector too.
Miss Olson can survive in the field – better than the professor, in fact, as von Nordmann is plagued by an injury he sustained in childhood.
She clambers across the rocks alongside him, swatting away mosquitoes, and shows exceptional aptitude for learning.
Watching the way she stretches out the many-jointed limbs of the wasp spider and pins them to the chart, he makes up his mind: the expedition is coming to an end, but their collaboration will continue.
Next they will document the spiders of the forests, bogs and shores of Finland, many of which are still waiting to be named.
Upon returning from the Crimea, the professor grants Miss Olson a short holiday.
Von Nordmann must go through the specimens he took from von Steven and write up the notes from their trip, so Miss Olson travels back to Ostrobothnia to visit her sister, but even on holiday she cannot forget about the spiders.
She is used to training her eyes on arthropods, and suddenly she sees them everywhere.
In the past, she was able to work at her desk without paying any attention to the creatures buzzing about, but now there is no place where she cannot find a spider.
She learns to sense the domestic house spider under her washstand and to spot the zebra spider wandering across the ceiling.
This is her favourite spider, a lively, nimble creature that upon seeing her raises its upper body and shakes its limbs, as though waving at her, and as her sister looks on in amazement, she carries jars of soapy water out into the garden.
In the morning, she collects her rewards, the spiders and insects that have crawled into her slippery jar overnight.
Upon coming across a species that she does not recognise, she submerses it in ethanol, wraps the test tubes in cotton wool and sends her discoveries to the professor: here for your consideration are some of the species I encountered, which I was unable to identify and which I thought you may appreciate.
In total, Hilda Olson paints more than four hundred spiders for the professor, four hundred reproductions of arthropods drawn with microscopic precision, and von Nordmann is so happy with his assistant that he makes the bold gesture of naming one of these species not only after himself but after Miss Olson too.
The creature is christened Olsonia pilifera Nordmann, a long-limbed testament to their collaboration.
It later transpires that the same spider has in fact already been named elsewhere, and the name that von Nordmann gave it does not live on, but Miss Olson does not know this and immortalises the creature on paper with jubilant strokes of the brush.
Miss Olson and von Nordmann usually meet in the grounds of the botanical gardens, but today the professor has asked her to come to the university.
He has been waiting for the arrival of this animal for a long time – a magnificent, long-awaited beast of the sea – so Miss Olson climbs the stone steps up to the university’s main building and walks in between the white columns framing the entrance.
The janitor is taken aback at the sight of a young lady stepping through the doors and asks quite what she is doing there.
The University of Zürich has recently taken a revolutionary step in opening some of their programmes to women, but as yet there are no womenfolk gracing the corridors of the Imperial Alexander University.
Here the only feminine presence is the alabaster Artemis standing in the foyer.
Miss Olson was prepared for this befuddlement, and she tries to remain calm and composed, though the stares of the passing students make her distinctly uncomfortable.
She is unaccustomed to drawing attention to herself, but now she stands out from the crowd like a bright-red velvet mite in a collection of spiders.
She takes a breath and explains that she is here at the express request of the professor of botany and zoology, and with that the janitor swallows his objections and shows her to Bonsdorff’s collections.
Miss Olson steps inside, and the befuddlement follows with her.
Of course, everyone has already heard about von Nordmann’s assistant – after they set off for the Crimea, the university gossips spoke of little else – but seeing her here in the flesh is another matter entirely, and upon seeing how satisfied von Nordmann looks watching Bonsdorff wonder how best to greet the woman who has just entered his study, the professor of anatomy cannot escape the thought that his old friend might be playing some kind of prank on him.
“Now, look at this, Miss Olson! Here we have a creature whose anatomical survey is sure to arouse international interest!” Von Nordmann dashes from one bone to the next, and Miss Olson looks at the pieces of the animal laid out on the floor: ribs, vertebrae and, on the table, a skull in two parts: the crown and the jawbone lying next to each other.
She looks at the bones, but they mean nothing to her.
She is not acquainted with skeletons, nor does she understand anything about this animal other than that it is enormous, but she does not let this trouble her.
She is an illustrator. She does not need to know; all she has to do is see, her skills are in the art of looking closely and reproducing, so she remains unperturbed at the creature’s strangeness and begins instead to scrutinise its bones, assessing their texture and examining the joins along the skull.
The sea cow is a magnificent specimen, though few researchers will ever find themselves up here in the coldest, remotest corner of Europe.
But the postal service works, and von Nordmann has already agreed to give a lecture on the animal and for this lecture to be published in a large print edition.
Scientists may not be able to view his specimen in person, so the specimen must travel to them in printed form, and for this, precise drawings of the bones are essential.
For a moment, von Nordmann considers drawing them himself.
Even his eyes are good enough to reproduce the sea cow, but he is short of time.
He only received the bones yesterday, but he has already agreed to hold his lecture at the beginning of the semester, in only three weeks’ time, when the animal will become the focus of everyone’s unwavering attention.
His time will be spent writing, so let Miss Olson do the drawings.
Von Nordmann wants the lecture hall to be so full that the slowest will be left without a seat, but for that he needs more than learned words.
He needs drawings too, the whole animal, so that those enthusiastic souls who have gathered to hear his lecture can leave the lecture hall and walk to the collections to witness his story for themselves.
He and Miss Olson must reconstruct the sea cow for people to see, put the bones together, and when the master in charge of the bone collection complains about the short notice, the professor dismisses him with a wave of the hand.
Surely von Wright understands that what they have before them is a quite unique creature, and if two professors of zoology and their assistants cannot put one vertebrate together in three weeks, something is surely amiss.