Free The Monkey Link by Andrei Bitov Page B

estimated to have been two to three million   …That was the antique world   …   ” He sighed pensively.
    “Malthus   …   ” I said. Sand gritted in my teeth, and now we turned back.
    The doctor’s attitude toward Malthus was complicated. History beckoned him. The ecologist in him was tempted by the epochs that showed through in the distant past, where vain details had been effaced and the count was kept not by decades but by centuries.
    “Why do you think Alexander the Great stopped?   …No, no, his military machine was flawless. There was nothing in the world that could resist it. Simply, he had gone so far beyond his geographic range, and he had won so long ago the lands sufficient for the further consolidation and prosperity of his own country, that the biological purpose of his aggression (to expand the territory for a flourishing population) was completely exhausted. By the time he reached India and Central Asia he was a traveler, almost an amateur ethnographer: he arrayed himself in the national garb of the new lands that had nominally submitted to him. There was nothing he could do but leave, with no likelihood of reaching the subjugated country ever again   …He could not turn back, he seemed to have forgotten where he came from. His death was obscure. Thus all aggression miscarries, establishing only the necessary boundary to the expansion of its geographic range.”
    “Interesting,” I observed. “It’s been a fairly long time since we had a war. Could modern tourism be viewed as sublimated aggression?”
    “Are you saying this to me, or am I to you?” The doctor was tempted. Like Alexander, he could no longer stop. He measured history in imperial giant steps. The same had also happened, as the doctor saw it, with a later people, the Norse (thus he was creeping into epochs closer to ours, while I, like a hunter concealed in his blind, didn’t breathe or move or interrupt). The Vikings had also possessed military might, comparable to Alexander’s. They had had no equal—they could have gained a world much more livable, from our standpoint, than their cliffs and fjords. But from the biological standpoint they behaved more logically than Alexander. They were strong enough to seize Europe, yet they discovered Iceland and Greenland, which Europeans find uninhabitable, and reached the northern shores of America before Columbus. They expanded only within the limits of their natural geographic range, the northern seas.
    I had always wondered at the evident relief with which a man comes down   …You no sooner gain a height, spiraling upward like a bird, than you immediately drop like a stone, mistaking some utterly inedible piece of trash for a gopher. But I, too, could not stop: “The history of Russia begins with the Vikings.”
    “Even though north, it wasn’t their geographic range,” the doctor said. “Russia Russianized them. Their regime ground to a halt.”
    “As in the humorous saying,” I said. “   ‘Come here—I’ve caught a bear, and he won’t let go.’   ”
    “That’s it, that’s it,” the doctor agreed.
    “But why did the Tatars bog down in Russia?” I went on.
    The doctor humphed, chewed a moment, and concluded, “The steppes ended.”
    “Did you think that, or did I say it?” I exclaimed admiringly.
    But he was lured no further by my admiration. He stopped, like Alexander, having gone too far in his confidences. He fell silent and gazed into the distance.
    The sea, toward evening, had become utterly calm and still. Lacquered. As if replete and thicker than water. For a long time now, although I spent hours wandering beside it every day, I had not been seeing it   …In addition to box gales, there were also “bottle gales,” which cast up bottles and flasks from whiskeys and gins I had never seen or drunk. There were “amber gales,” which cast up a crumb of amber on their last wave. For a long time I had only been looking under my feet, in the hope