March 25, 1891.
The air in the basement of the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden was much colder and damper than in the greenhouse above.
Here, there was no sunlight, no golden beams filtering down through the glass dome, only fine droplets of water seeping from the damp stone walls and a few explosion-proof gas lamps hanging from the vaulted ceiling.
The air was filled with a pungent smell of mothballs, mercuric chloride preservative, and dried paper pulp, so stuffy it was somewhat suffocating.
Professor Fernandez held up a tin lantern, walking ahead down the creaking wooden stairs.
“Watch your step, Adams,” the old man's raspy voice echoed through the stone archway. “The archives here have been piling up since the Spanish colonial era. Aside from rats and a few damn silverfish, barely anyone is willing to come down here all year round.”
Holding the hem of his trench coat, Ryan followed behind with a calm expression.
The two stopped in front of rows of massive black walnut filing cabinets.
Professor Fernandez hung the lantern on an iron hook on the wooden frame, the light illuminating paper boxes with brass labels. The old man ran his dust-covered finger across the labels, finally stopping at a box marked “1880-1890: Unclassified Field Expeditions.”
“That German botanist you mentioned... Hermann.” The old man pulled out a stack of yellowed documents and flicked the dust off them, coughing twice from the cloud he raised. “He did exist. Hermann von Schmidt, graduated from the University of Berlin, hired by the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture in 1882.”
Ryan took the stack of documents and began flipping through them by the dim yellow light.
The photo in the file showed a rugged man in his thirties with a full beard, his eyes reflecting a rigor and obsession unique to Old World scholars. The documents detailed his salary payments, expedition applications, and several papers on South American ferns he had published in Berlin academic journals.
However, when Ryan flipped to the records of 1887, the file abruptly cut off.
In November 1887, there was only a blunt line in red ink on the form: “Lost contact at the southwestern edge of the Pampas. Search yielded no results. Allowance canceled.”
Not only that, but Ryan noticed that in the logs for the most crucial two years of expeditions, from 1885 to 1887, dozens of pages had been neatly sliced from the binding with an extremely sharp blade.
“A few pages are missing,” Ryan muttered, his voice low as his fingertips traced the clean cut.
“Hmph, more than just missing,” Professor Fernandez leaned against the filing cabinet, pulling out his gourd mate and taking a noisy sip. “In his final years, that fellow was already a madman in the eyes of his peers.”
The old man pointed to his temple. “After 1885, he barely submitted any proper plant classification reports. Instead, he began frantically collecting meteorological data, recording the wind directions of the Pampas, and even spent a fortune hiring carriage drivers to measure changes in underground well water levels. Rather than studying the pistils and stamens of flowers, he spent all day staring blankly at the hot, dry winds blowing from the Andes Mountains.”
Ryan looked at a remaining meteorological sketch in the folder and remained silent.
“What happened to him later?” Ryan asked.
“Then he vanished,” the old man shook his head. “Some say he was killed by bandits, others say he fell into a salt marsh. But if you're truly interested in those crazy ideas of his...”
Professor Fernandez paused, pulling a newspaper clipping the size of a business card from his pocket and handing it to Ryan. “You can go take a look at the Columbus Bookstore in the Lower End. Back then, Hermann didn't have the money to buy the latest geological maps, so he spent every day borrowing books there. The bookstore's old owner is an obstinate old man; maybe he still remembers him.”
At six in the evening, the Lower End of Buenos Aires was enveloped in a hazy twilight.
Rain had washed the cobblestone streets clean, making them gleam, and carriage wheels made heavy, dull thuds as they rolled through the mud. In the arcades on both sides of the street corners, the earliest steam bakeries puffed out sweet, wheaty aromas, mixing with the heavy oil smell from the distant harbor.
Following the address given by Professor Fernandez, Ryan found the Columbus Bookstore deep in an old street far from the main road.
The bookstore's sign was a piece of red pine that had weathered countless storms, its gold-painted lettering almost completely peeled off. Through the dusty street-facing glass window, the dim, warm glow of a gas lamp could be seen inside.
Pushing open the heavy rubberwood door, the brass bell hanging at the top let out a crisp ring.
The bookstore's interior was even narrower than it appeared from the outside.
Thousands of old books were piled from the floor to the vaulted ceiling like city walls, making the already cramped space feel incredibly congested. The air was thick with the sour smell of fading old paper, damp wood, and the rich aroma of cheap roasted coffee beans.
Behind the counter sat a white-haired old man wearing a patched vest. Wearing reading glasses, he was using a small brush to clean a leather-bound French dictionary.
“Find books yourself. Dictionaries and sea charts are on the left, newspapers on the right. If you're not buying, don't touch,” the old man grunted without looking up, clearly in a bad mood.
Ryan walked to the counter and lightly tapped the wooden table. “Good evening, sir. I'd like to ask about someone.”
The old man took off his reading glasses and scrutinized Ryan's trench coat and top hat with slightly cloudy eyes. “If you're looking for someone, go to the police station or the bars by the Matanza River. I only have books of dead people here.”
“Hermann von Schmidt,” Ryan uttered the name. “A German botanist. I heard he used to come here often a few years ago.”
Hearing the name, the old man's hand wiping the dictionary paused slightly.
He pushed his reading glasses up, the wariness in his eyes fading slightly, replaced by a recollection of the past. “Hermann... It's been a long time since anyone mentioned that German fool. He still owes me three pesos in book rental fees and hasn't paid them back.”
The old man shook his head and set down his small brush. “He did spend every day here during his last six months. But he wasn't here to read poetry or novels. He rented every single book in the shop on Argentine hydrology, railway construction, and early nineteenth-century geographical surveys. Sometimes he would sit in the corner alone, drawing on maps with a pencil until midnight.”
“What was he looking for back then?” Ryan asked.
“Who knows,” the old man shrugged. “He was always babbling crazy nonsense I couldn't understand. He said, ‘Botanists today are all blind. They think plants are just stones rooted in the dirt. Plants can't walk on their own... yet the land itself is migrating.’ Did he think the earth could run?”
Ryan's eyes flickered imperceptibly.
“The land itself is migrating.”
“Thank you.” Ryan pulled two coins from his pocket and handed them over as payment for the information.
Just as the old man took the coins and prepared to resume cleaning the dictionary, the wooden door connecting the bookstore to the backyard was gently pushed open.
A slender figure carrying a thick stack of old newspapers tied with hemp rope walked in, stepping with some effort on the creaking wooden floorboards.
It was a young girl of thirteen or fourteen.
She wore an ill-fitting, faded grey dress with her sleeves rolled up high, revealing slender arms. Her brown hair was loosely tied behind her head with a thick hemp rope, a few stray strands hanging over her forehead, and her face was smudged with a small patch of black printing ink.
“Lucia,” the old man instructed without looking up, “where did that 1872 edition of the 《Flora of the Paraná River Basin》 on the third shelf go? A customer asked for it earlier, and I couldn't find it.”
The girl named Lucia placed the newspapers by the counter and, without even glancing at the third shelf, answered in a soft yet extremely certain voice:
“Second shelf, twelfth book from the left. The one with the green leather cover. A gentleman in a top hat misplaced it this afternoon.”
The old man froze for a moment, then stood up and walked to the second row of shelves, reaching out to pull a book.
Sure enough, a musty, old green book was accurately pulled out by him.
The old man muttered, “Good memory,” and took the book to mark it for the customer who reserved it.
The entire process was natural, and no one found it strange.
For a young girl working in a bookstore to know the placement of books on the shelves inside out seemed like nothing more than memory accumulated over long-term work.
However, standing before the counter, Ryan's brow furrowed slightly.
His gaze fell upon the girl named Lucia.
In his eyes, this girl exuded an indescribable sense of nature.
She was like a plant growing in a corner of the bookstore. Though quiet and unnoticed, she perceived the minute movements and changes of all objects in this small space in an extremely faint, almost instinctive way.
The girl seemed to sense Ryan's gaze and turned to look at him.
They were extremely clean grey eyes, as clear as morning dew on the Pampas. She did not shrink back, only bowing slightly and politely to Ryan before turning back to organize the stack of old newspapers.
Ryan did not ask any questions.
He pulled down the brim of his hat to shade his eyes, turned around, and pushed open the door of the Columbus Bookstore.
The brass bell chimed once more.
The night wind outside, carrying the moisture of the La Plata River, dispersed the smell of paper pulp from the bookstore. Ryan walked toward his residence along the wet, slippery cobblestone street.
Over the next few days, Ryan became the most frequent visitor to the Columbus Bookstore.
He no longer went to the suburban salt flats to collect samples, but instead sat in the most secluded corner of the bookstore's loft every afternoon. There stood several old wooden tables piled with mid-nineteenth-century Argentine newspapers and hydrogeological maps.
He needed to reconstruct Hermann's trajectory before his disappearance from this vast clutter of paper.
Meanwhile, the girl named Lucia was like a quiet kitten, repeating her dull daily routine in the bookstore: wiping shelves, carrying heavy old books up and down, and pouring a steaming cup of coffee for the dozing owner.
Ryan had almost no verbal exchange with her.
Until the afternoon of March 30.
The wind of late summer in the Southern Hemisphere carried a touch of mugginess, and consecutive days of high temperatures made the air in the Lower End feel like a boiling pot of thick soup.
In the small courtyard behind the bookstore, the old owner was losing his temper at a row of flowerpots lined up against the wall.
These were cheap ornamental plants placed by the bookstore to attract business, mostly common petunias and wild chrysanthemums. Due to the consecutive days of high temperatures and the old man's neglect, five or six of the pots had completely withered, their stems a dry grey-brown and their leaves curled into crumbs scattered on the cracked soil.
“Damn it, they're all baked to death!” the old man grumbled as he rolled up his sleeves, grabbing one of the most severely dried petunias to throw into the trash. “This junk really can't take any beating.”
“Wait a moment, sir.”
A flurry of hurried footsteps sounded as Lucia ran out of the back door.
She grabbed the cracked clay pot in the old man's hand, shaking her head anxiously. “You can't throw this one away.”
The old man was startled by her, then burst into laughter. “Lucia, has the heat gotten to your head? Look at it yourself. The roots have dried into firewood, and the leaves turn to powder the moment you touch them. If we don't throw it away, are we keeping it to waste space?”
“It's not dead,” the girl's voice was not loud, but it carried an almost stubborn tenacity.
“Not dead? If this thing can live, I'll swallow this clay pot!” The old man waved his hand, too lazy to argue with a young girl. “Fine, fine, fine. If you want to keep it, keep it. Just don't put it in the middle of the path and get in the way.”
The old man returned to the front shop, shaking his head.
Ryan stood by the wooden window of the loft, looking down at this scene in the backyard.
As a disguised botanist, Ryan's conclusion upon first seeing the petunia was the same as the old owner's—outwardly, its vascular bundles were completely dehydrated and its cell walls had almost collapsed, which would be declared dead under almost any biological standard.
However, when Ryan pushed open the back door and walked down the stairs, he saw what Lucia was doing.
The girl did not blindly pour water into the cracked soil (directly watering a heavily dehydrated plant under the sun would only accelerate root rot). Instead, she carefully used a small iron spoon to scrape away the dry, hard surface soil layer by layer, exposing the damp soil about two centimeters deep.
Then, she used scissors to mercilessly cut away all the dried stems and leaves above, leaving only a tiny section of the main stem above the ground.
Finally, she moved the clay pot to the shadiest, most ventilated stone crevice in the courtyard, caught a few drops of cool well water in her palm, and gently sprinkled them on the cut surface of the remaining main stem.
Ryan stepped forward, squatted down, and gently touched that small section of the main stem with two fingers.
It indeed was not complete death; it was an extremely rare state of extreme dormancy triggered only under incredibly harsh conditions. The plant had actively abandoned all its upper organs, locking its last bits of moisture and nutrients tightly inside a few dormant buds at the root collar.
Without highly specialized botanical knowledge or performing tissue sectioning under a microscope, an ordinary person could never tell the difference between it and a dead weed.
“Have you studied botany?” Ryan looked up at the girl beside him.
Lucia was startled by Ryan's sudden appearance. She instinctively shrank back slightly, then shook her head in embarrassment. “No... sir. I can barely even read.”
“Then why do you think it's still alive?” Ryan stared into her eyes.
Lucia bit her lower lip in confusion. She looked down at the battered clay pot, seemingly struggling to find the words to express the vague feeling in her mind.
After a long while, she looked up and said softly in an extremely pure tone:
“Because... when I touch it, it's still warm.”
“Warm?” Ryan was slightly startled.
“Not hot like from the sun,” the girl stretched out her slender finger, gently touching the remaining main stem. “It's like a sick kitten's... very, very weak breathing. It's still sucking up the water below with all its might. It still wants to live.”
Ryan stood in place, silent for a long time.
This did not even make any logical sense. In the realm of modern science, plants have no nervous systems, let alone a subjective will to “want to live.”
“Keep it here,” Ryan stood up, pulling a small paper packet of potassium nitrate fertilizer he had collected in the suburbs from his trench coat pocket and handing it to Lucia. “In three days, water it with a small amount of lukewarm water mixed with a little of this. It will sprout.”
The girl took the small paper packet, a flash of pleasant surprise in her eyes. “Thank you, sir!”
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