i.

A fortune-teller in Munich offers him a reading. She pulls The World and he thinks the world will be his own to possess and name. Pine and nettle sigh in symphony when they hear him declare: Let me journey across that troubled Atlantic to discover New Spain’s unknown wilderness!

ii.

There’s a wildness to discovery, promiscuity to natural history. Amongst the rolling cordilleras and soaring monuments of Mexico City, he remarks: no city of the new continent…can display such great and solid scientific establishments as the capital of México. Alexander travels across rugged terrain; he documents basalt prisms, measures arboreal girth, puzzles over the lives of bugambilias. Every evening a different god sighs from underground. Huitzilopochtli never marvels over measurements, only blood. Alexander does not know who said that.

iii.

It is no matter where he goes, though he has now reached Verde Antequera, the Emerald City. Each act of illustrating, each desire to name life is riddled by power and tenderness. Is naming not a love-act? Alexander wonders. He unmounts from his horse, Doris, to examine a cacao pod, fleshy, pale, refreshing. Doris suddenly dies, decays, and arises a perfect pile of bones. A local weaver does not blink and points Alexander and Doris toward the city of the dead.

iv.

There’s a lady with her lotería splayed out on the dirt beneath El Tule’s ancient, weeping arms. This cypress is the oldest living being they know; it is the oldest living being Alexander knows. Since having left the city of the dead, Alexander feels weary. All the talk of the living and the dead, and now the world’s most primeval tree towers above him, shades him from the shock of sun. He wants to give it a name but is warned to resist unless risk the ire of the god, Kondoy. What do you have for me? Alexander unknowingly asks both the woman and El Tule. She holds up The World. El Tule’s laugh measures the universe.