A Wormhole Time Machine in Three Not So Easy Steps

1. Find or build a wormhole -- a tunnel connecting two different locations in space. Large wormholes might exist naturally in deep space, a relic of the big, bang. Otherwise we would have to make do with subatomic wormholes, either natural ones (which are thought to be winking in and out of existence all around us) or artificial ones (produced by particle accelerators, as imagined here). These smaller wormholes would have to be enlarged to a useful size, perhaps using energy fields like those that caused space to inflate shortly after the big bang.

2. Stabilize the wormhole. An infusion of negative energy, produced by quantum means such as the so-called Casimir effect, would allow a signal or object to pass safely through the wormhole. Negative energy counteracts the tendency of the wormhole to pinch off into a point of infinite or near-infinite density. In other words, it prevents the wormhole from becoming a black hole.

3. Tow the wormhole. A spaceship, presumably of highly advanced technology, would separate the mouths of the wormhole. One mouth might be positioned near the surface of a neutron star, an extremely dense star with a strong gravitational field. The intense gravity causes time to pass more slowly. Because time passes more quickly at the other wormhole mouth, the two mouths become separated not only in space but also in time.

How To Build A Time Machine

Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it really be done? Is it possible to build a machine that would transport a human being into the past or future?

For decades, time travel lay beyond the fringe of respectable science. In recent years, however, the topic has become something of a cottage industry among theoretical physicists. The motivation has been partly recreational--time travel is fun to think about. But this research has a serious side, too. Understanding the relation between cause and effect is a key part of attempts to construct a unified theory of physics. If unrestricted time travel were possible, even in principle, the nature of such a unified theory could be drastically affected.

Our best understanding of time comes from Einstein's theories of relativity. Prior to these theories, time was widely regarded as absolute and universal, the same for everyone no matter what their physical circumstances were. In his special theory of relativity, Einstein proposed that the measured interval between two events depends on how the observer is moving. Crucially, two observers who move differently will experience different durations between the same two events.

The effect is often described using the "twin paradox." Suppose that Sally and Sam are twins. Sally boards a rocket ship and travels at high speed to a nearby star, turns around and flies back to Earth, while Sam stays at home. For Sally the duration of the journey might be, say, one year, but when she returns and steps out of the spaceship, she finds that 10 years have elapsed on Earth. Her brother is now nine years older than she is. Sally and Sam are no longer the same age, despite the fact that they were born on the same day. This example illustrates a limited type of time travel. In effect, Sally has leaped nine years into Earth's future.

Jet Lag

THE EFFECT, KNOWN AS time dilation, occurs whenever two observers move relative to each other. In daily life we don't notice weird time warps, because the effect becomes dramatic only when the motion occurs at close to the speed of light. Even at aircraft speeds, the time dilation in a typical journey amounts to just a few nanoseconds--hardly an adventure of Wellsian proportions. Nevertheless, atomic clocks are accurate enough to record the shift and confirm that time really is stretched by motion. So travel into the future is a proved fact, even if it has so far been in rather unexciting amounts.

To observe really dramatic time warps, one has to look beyond the realm of ordinary experience. Subatomic particles can be propelled at nearly the speed of light in large accelerator machines. Some of these particles, such as muons, have a built-in clock because they decay with a definite half-life; in accordance with Einstein's theory, fast-moving muons inside accelerators are observed to decay in slow motion. Some cosmic rays also experience spectacular time warps. These particles move so close to the speed of light that, from their point of view, they cross the galaxy in minutes, even though in Earth's frame of reference they seem to take tens of thousands of years. If time dilation did not occur, those particles would never make it here.

Speed is one way to jump ahead in time. Gravity is another. In his general theory of relativity, Einstein predicted that gravity slows time. Clocks run a bit faster in the attic than in the basement, which is closer to the center of Earth and therefore deeper down in a gravitational field. Similarly, clocks run faster in space than on the ground. Once again the effect is minuscule, but it has been directly measured using accurate clocks. Indeed, these time-warping effects have to be taken into account in the Global Positioning System. If they weren't, sailors, taxi drivers and cruise missiles could find themselves many kilometers off course.

At the surface of a neutron star, gravity is so strong that time is slowed by about 30 percent relative to Earth time. Viewed from such a star, events here would resemble a fast-forwarded video. A black hole represents the ultimate time warp; at the surface of the hole, time stands still relative to Earth. This means that if you fell into a black hole from nearby, in the brief interval it took you to reach the surface, all of eternity would pass by in the wider universe. The region within the black hole is therefore beyond the end of time, as far as the outside universe is concerned. If an astronaut could zoom very close to a black hole and return unscathed--admittedly a fanciful, not to mention foolhardy, prospect--he could leap far into the future.

My Head Is Spinning

SO FAR I HAVE DISCUSSED travel forward in time. What about going backward? This is much more problematic. In 1948 Kurt Gödel of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., produced a solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations that described a rotating universe. In this universe, an astronaut could travel through space so as to reach his own past. This comes about because of the way gravity affects light. The rotation of the universe would drag light (and thus the causal relations between objects) around with it, enabling a material object to travel in a closed loop in space that is also a closed loop in time, without at any stage exceeding the speed of light in the immediate neighborhood of the particle. Gödel's solution was shrugged aside as a mathematical curiosity--after all, observations show no sign that the universe as a whole is spinning. His result served nonetheless to demonstrate that going back in time was not forbidden by the theory of relativity. Indeed, Einstein confessed that he was troubled by the thought that his theory might permit travel into the past under some circumstances.

Other scenarios have been found to permit travel into the past. For example, in 1974 Frank J. Tipler of Tulane University calculated that a massive, infinitely long cylinder spinning on its axis at near the speed of light could let astronauts visit their own past, again by dragging light around the cylinder into a loop. In 1991 J. Richard Gott of Princeton University predicted that cosmic strings--structures that cosmologists think were created in the early stages of the big bang--could produce similar results. But in the mid-1980s the most realistic scenario for a time machine emerged, based on the concept of a wormhole.

In science fiction, wormholes are sometimes called star-gates; they offer a shortcut between two widely separated points in space. Jump through a hypothetical wormhole, and you might come out moments later on the other side of the galaxy. Wormholes naturally fit into the general theory of relativity, whereby gravity warps not only time but also space. The theory allows the analogue of alternative road and tunnel routes connecting two points in space. Mathematicians refer to such a space as multiply connected. Just as a tunnel passing under a hill can be shorter than the surface street, a wormhole may be shorter than the usual route through ordinary space.

The wormhole was used as a fictional device by Carl Sagan in his 1985 novel Contact. Prompted by Sagan, Kip S. Thorne and his co-workers at the California Institute of Technology set out to find whether wormholes were consistent with known physics. Their starting point was that a wormhole would resemble a black hole in being an object with fearsome gravity. But unlike a black hole, which offers a one-way journey to nowhere, a wormhole would have an exit as well as an entrance.

In the Loop

FOR THE WORMHOLE to be traversable, it must contain what Thorne termed exotic matter. In effect, this is something that will generate antigravity to combat the natural tendency of a massive system to implode into a black hole under its intense weight. Antigravity, or gravitational repulsion, can be generated by negative energy or pressure. Negative-energy states are known to exist in certain quantum systems, which suggests that Thorne's exotic matter is not ruled out by the laws of physics, although it is unclear whether enough antigravitating stuff can be assembled to stabilize a wormhole.

Soon Thorne and his colleagues realized that if a stable wormhole could be created, then it could readily be turned into a time machine. An astronaut who passed through one might come out not only somewhere else in the universe but somewhen else, too--in either the future or the past.

To adapt the wormhole for time travel, one of its mouths could be towed to a neutron star and placed close to its surface. The gravity of the star would slow time near that wormhole mouth, so that a time difference between the ends of the wormhole would gradually accumulate. If both mouths were then parked at a convenient place in space, this time difference would remain frozen in.

Suppose the difference were 10 years. An astronaut passing through the wormhole in one direction would jump 10 years into the future, whereas an astronaut passing in the other direction would jump 10 years into the past. By returning to his starting point at high speed across ordinary space, the second astronaut might get back home before he left. In other words, a closed loop in space could become a loop in time as well. The one restriction is that the astronaut could not return to a time before the wormhole was first built.

A formidable problem that stands in the way of making a wormhole time machine is the creation of the wormhole in the first place. Possibly space is threaded with such structures naturally--relics of the big bang. If so, a supercivilization might commandeer one. Alternatively, wormholes might naturally come into existence on tiny scales, the so-called Planck length, about 20 factors of 10 as small as an atomic nucleus. In principle, such a minute wormhole could be stabilized by a pulse of energy and then somehow inflated to usable dimensions.

Censored!

ASSUMING THAT the engineering problems could be overcome, the production of a time machine could open up a Pandora's box of causal paradoxes. Consider, for example, the time traveler who visits the past and murders his mother when she was a young girl. How do we make sense of this? If the girl dies, she cannot become the time traveler's mother. But if the time traveler was never born, he could not go back and murder his mother.

Paradoxes of this kind arise when the time traveler tries to change the past, which is obviously impossible. But that does not prevent someone from being a part of the past. Suppose the time traveler goes back and rescues a young girl from murder, and this girl grows up to become his mother. The causal loop is now self-consistent and no longer paradoxical. Causal consistency might impose restrictions on what a time traveler is able to do, but it does not rule out time travel per se.

Even if time travel isn't strictly paradoxical, it is certainly weird. Consider the time traveler who leaps ahead a year and reads about a new mathematical theorem in a future edition of Scientific American. He notes the details, returns to his own time and teaches the theorem to a student, who then writes it up for Scientific American. The article is, of course, the very one that the time traveler read. The question then arises: Where did the information about the theorem come from? Not from the time traveler, because he read it, but not from the student either, who learned it from the time traveler. The information seemingly came into existence from nowhere, reasonlessly.

The bizarre consequences of time travel have led some scientists to reject the notion outright. Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge has proposed a "chronology protection conjecture," which would outlaw causal loops. Because the theory of relativity is known to permit causal loops, chronology protection would require some other factor to intercede to prevent travel into the past. What might this factor be? One suggestion is that quantum processes will come to the rescue. The existence of a time machine would allow particles to loop into their own past. Calculations hint that the ensuing disturbance would become self-reinforcing, creating a runaway surge of energy that would wreck the wormhole.

Chronology protection is still just a conjecture, so time travel remains a possibility. A final resolution of the matter may have to await the successful union of quantum mechanics and gravitation, perhaps through a theory such as string theory or its extension, so-called M-theory. It is even conceivable that the next generation of particle accelerators will be able to create subatomic wormholes that survive long enough for nearby particles to execute fleeting causal loops. This would be a far cry from Wells's vision of a time machine, but it would forever change our picture of physical reality.

Overview Time Travel

* Traveling forward in time is easy enough. If you move close to the speed of light or sit in a strong gravitational field, you experience time more slowly than other people do--another way of saying that you travel into their future.

* Traveling into the past is rather trickier. Relativity theory allows it in certain spacetime configurations: a rotating universe, a rotating cylinder and, most famously, a wormhole--a tunnel through space and time.

MORE TO EXPLORE

Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction. Paul J. Nahin. American Institute of Physics, 1993.

The Quantum Physics of Time Travel. David Deutsch and Michael Lockwood in Scientific American, Vol. 270, No. 3, pages 68-74; March 1994.

Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein's Outrageous Legacy. Kip S. Thorne. W. W. Norton, 1994.

Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel through Time. J. Richard Gott III. Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

How to Build a Time Machine. Paul Davies. Viking, 2002.
Existing Forms of Forward Travel

By Paul Davies

50, 100, 150 Years Ago

JANUARY 1957

BOREDOM --"In this age of semi-automation, when not only military personnel but also many industrial workers have little to do but keep a constant watch on instruments, the problem of human behavior in monotonous situations is becoming acute. In 1951 McGill University psychologist Donald O. Hebb obtained a grant from the Defense Research Board of Canada to make a systematic study. Prolonged exposure to a monotonous environment has definitely deleterious effects. The individual's thinking is impaired; he shows childish emotional responses; his visual perception becomes disturbed; he suffers from hallucinations; his brain-wave pattern changes."

ANXIETY --"In the past year and a half prescription sales of the tranquilizing drug meprobamate, better known as Miltown and Equanil, have jumped to the rate of $32.5 million a year. More than a billion tablets have been sold, and the monthly production of 50 tons falls far short of the demand. Some California druggists herald each new shipment with colored window streamers reading, 'Yes, we have Miltown today!'"

JANUARY 1907

AUTO CHIC --"The improved appearance of this year's cars is largely aided by the considerable increase in the wheel base which, in the case of some of the heavier machines, is now as great as 123 inches. Furthermore, the use of six-cylinder motors has brought with it a considerable increase in the length of the bonnet, and this also adds to the generally rakish and smart appearance of the up-to-date machine. By a judicious attention to these principles, the builders of even the low-powered and low-priced machines have succeeded in giving to their output a style which was altogether lacking in the earlier models."

FLYING FOR SPORT AND WAR --"With mechanical aeroplane flight an accomplished fact, we may now look for a diversion of interest from the dirigible balloon to the aeroplane proper. Its field of usefulness will be found chiefly in military service, where it will be invaluable for reconnoitering purposes and for the conveyance of swift dispatches. In all probability its chief development ultimately will be in the field of sport, where it should enjoy a popularity equal to that of the automobile."

TEA MONEY --"The queerest use to which brick-tea (tea leaves compressed into a block) has ever been put in the Orient is in the capacity of money. It is still in circulation as a medium of exchange in the far-inland Chinese towns and central Asian marts and bazaars. Between the Mongolian town of Urga and the Siberian town of Kiakta, there is as much as half a million taels (say $600,000) of this money in circulation. At the latter place it ceases to be used as currency, and enters into the regular brick-tea trade of Siberia and Russia, where it is largely used in the Russian army, by surveying engineers, touring theatrical companies, and tourists in general."

JANUARY 1857

REALITY THEATER --"A severe test of the strength of the suspension bridge at Niagara Falls was afforded by the gale on the evening of the 13th of last month, when the toll gatherers deserted their posts at either end, and crowds assembled to see it fall, but it stood like a rock."

DR. LIVINGSTONE'S TALES --"The celebrated traveler Dr. Livingstone has been lecturing since his return to England. During his unprecedented march, alone among savages, to whom a white face was a miracle, Dr. Livingstone was compelled to struggle through indescribable hardships--he conquered the hostility of the natives by his intimate knowledge of their character and the Bechuana tongue. He waded rivers and slept in the sponge and ooze of marshes, being often so drenched as to be compelled to turn his arm-pit into a watch-pocket. Lions were numerous, being worshiped by many of the tribes as the receptacles of the departed souls of their chiefs; however, he thinks the fear of African wild beasts greater in England than in Africa."

Scientific American, Jan2007

Happier holidays -- in 5 easy steps

Ditch those obligatory get-togethers for new traditions with folks who really matter.

Last year, my girlfriend Betsy and I decided to set the holiday craziness aside and spend an impromptu few hours celebrating Christmas Eve together. No big dinner, no fancy gifts, no huge crowd--just us, our kids, and our husbands, enjoying store-bought hors d'oeuvres, desserts, and eggnog, swapping traditions, and rediscovering why we adore one another. It was a celebration full of sweet memories we won't soon forget.

If only all holiday connections were as low-key and hassle-free. Unfortunately, with all the party-hopping and the pressure to cook, decorate, and find the perfect gift, celebrations can end up feeling more like The Nightmare Before Christmas than It's a Wonderful Life. In fact, the National Mental Health Institute says that worrying, partying, stressing, and clinging to unrealistic expectations--all in an overcommercialized atmosphere--can lead to a case of the holiday blues, a condition that can cause insomnia, headaches, fatigue, and even depression.

"People focus on the holidays by saying, 'Can I just get through it?' instead of recognizing this as a time to connect with family, reflect on the previous year, and look forward to the New Year," says life coach Valorie Burton, author of Listen to Your Life.

It doesn't have to be that way, though. Get more out of this holiday season by saying no to irrelevant obligations and finding more meaningful ways to connect with those most important to you. Here are a few tips to get you started.

1 Instead of assembling and wrapping gifts into the wee hours to keep the kids from hearing your tools and the distinct sound of tape ripping …

Take an afternoon off from work and invite a few buddies over for a gift-wrapping party, while the kids are at school. "Put on your holiday music, have cake and tea, talk and laugh--and connect," Burton suggests.

2 Instead of packing the whole family into the minivan and driving 6 hours across four states to see your parents (or worse, spending thousands of dollars in airfare) …

Send Mom and Dad tickets so they can visit you during the holidays. "It'll cost you a few hundred bucks. But it's an awfully wonderful trade, compared with what it would take for you to get there and the disruption it would cause," says Jeff Davidson, author of Breathing Space: Living and Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society. "The gesture alone speaks volumes."

3 Instead of attending multiple Hanukkah or Kwanzaa parties to celebrate these weeklong holidays …

Host a small gathering of friends on one of the days, and enjoy the others with just your immediate family. You can even make your party more special by inviting people whose religions and traditions differ from your own. Cecelia Cancellaro and Eric Zinner, of Maplewood, New Jersey, let their 7- and 4-year-old daughters invite friends over to play dreidels, eat latkes, and participate in lighting the menorah as part of their annual Hanukkah party. It gives her daughters a sense of pride when they share their tradition with friends, Cancellaro says. "It helps all the children feel more connected to one anther."

4 Instead of schlepping the kids to the mall to wait (and wait) in an excruciatingly long line to get pricey-but-not-so-great holiday portraits …

Whip out your home video camera and have your children sing, dance, and share their New Year's resolutions. Then when the holidays arrive, pop some popcorn, pour the eggnog, dim the lights, and sit everyone down to enjoy your own musical. The kids will love seeing themselves, you'll capture priceless memories, and the entire family will enjoy your new holiday tradition. Plan to make it an annual event. And next year, this year's video will be even more fun.

5 Instead of going to the annual neighborhood-association holiday potluck …

Help your kids bake a batch of cookies, and then take the treats to your favorite neighbors' homes with handwritten holiday greetings. "These days, people don't connect much with their neighbors," Burton says. "This is a great way to get the kids involved and do something that you wouldn't normally do. It's an inexpensive and extremely thoughtful gesture."

Already dreading the holidays? Ease your stress with our Holiday Survival Guide at Health.com.

By Denene Millner

Outbound

Bone weary in the wee hours, rolling west out of Colorado. I make it only as far as Green River before pulling off for a nap at the back of an abandoned gas station, easing past a sad toss of weeds and cracked concrete and rusted barrels. The rest of the night plays out to the whine of big trucks on Interstate 70: some running for Denver, others west to 1-15 and then on to California. Every so often one slows and exits, rumbles past me here on the outskirts — pausing barely long enough for a tank of fuel, maybe a microwaved burn to at the Gas-N-Go on West Main. Nearly everyone, it seems, is just passing through.

Listening to the engines in the darkness, I'm reminded of the story of an anthropologist from Boston sent west to California in the 1920s, assigned the job of chronicling the language of the Pit River Indians, even then on the verge of extinction. At one point the young researcher asks the elders their word for newcomersrecent arrivals, European descendents like himself. The men get nervous, refuse to answer. Finally, after much cajoling, they give in. The word is inalladui, one old man explains. Tramp. We can't understand how your people travel through without ever stopping long enough to learn something of the land; without ever binding a place to your heart. We think a part of you must be dead inside.

I'm up again at dawn, glad to trade the four-lane for Highway 95 — a sweet, lonely path along the San Rafael Swell. Beyond the road, the land is dappled with locoweed and purple vetch, dropseed and cheatgrass and fescue, here and there the occasional huddle of juniper or cottonwood. This was Jane's country. A wind-shorn mix of rock and wind and sky that changed her utterly, turning her at 18 from a Midwest farmer's daughter into an outdoor educator. An Outward Bound instructor. A national park ranger. "You know if something ever happens to me," she said shortly before she died, relighting a conversation we'd had years before, "I want my ashes scattered in my favorite places." Five days later she was gone, lost in a canoeing accident on the Kopka River, in the dark woods of northern Ontario.

And so I travel. Journeying across the West with a small brown pottery jar of her ashes, ultimately bound for six perfect pieces of wilderness: Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains, where 25 years ago I stood beside her in a field of camas lilies, me in my gray suit, she in her wedding dress; a certain little cabin in the pine-covered foothills of Wyoming's Absaroka Range; the heartbreakingly beautiful northern range of Yellowstone, where on

spring days she knelt beside 12-year-old kids, hearing them catch their breath at the sight of wolves; a couple of alpine gardens near home, deep in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana. And today, Capitol Reef National Park, in southern Utah.

These were the essential landscapes of our lives. And though for me right now the joy is nearly gone from them, choked by this jagged pill of grief, Jane's last wish means I cannot stay away. Later in the afternoon on the eastern edge of Capitol Reef, with the sun lighting clusters of rabbitbrush and Apache plume, I grab my pack and walk with tears streaming down my face toward the great maze of the Waterpocket Fold. Barren capes of slick rock. Slot canyons. A lone raven, his voice full of gravel. At one point a slight breeze from the east begins to rise, and that's when I open the lid and release her, watching puffs of ash drift into the upturned fringes of the fold. Even these scant vestiges of her are not long for this world. Soon they'll be disassembled into tiny jots of carbon; those, in turn, feeding the very web of life that so inspired her.

What the Pit River Indians understood that the young anthropologist from Boston likely did not, is that to stop moving, to rest on wild land, is to be nudged toward relationship. Or more specifically, toward an urge to weave the stories of relationship. Awaiting us on unfettered lands are exquisite metaphors — images to feed not so much our quest for meaning, as our hunger for place. Even for me, on this somber afternoon, there are notions of kinship. In the silence. In the faint scent of dust. In a frail and lovely patch of sumac withering in the hot sun, dropping leaves, desperate for rain.

By Gary Ferguson

Travel Trick

Renewing your passport is an expensive pain, in part because you have to find a place that can take the very specific type of unflattering photos the U.S. government requires. Now you can make them yourself with epassportphoto.com. Snap a headshot against a white wall with your digital camera, upload the photo, and the site will resize and crop it to passport specifications. Print six photos Oh a 4×6 sheet, or order a set from an online photo service.

Popular Science

Shoot More Ducks

Ten fun tips to improve your waterfowl season

The basics of duck hunting are the same no matter where you are: decoys, calls, shotguns and shells, blinds, bracing weather and, most important, ducks to work. But over the years you come across a few useful tricks. Here are some of mine.

1. THE EASY-MONEY SHOT
When I was a boy my father would take me with him to a railroad Sack that ran alongside a local lake. Ducks would trade back and forth between the lake and another marsh a mile or so away. When the ducks left the lake, they flew over a steep hill and then the railroad bed, which was even higher.

Many of the ducks were well within range when they crossed the railroad track, which made for some excellent pass shooting. I hunted with my first shotgun, a single-shot 16-gauge Winchester Model 37, and my father quickly taught me how to hit the high overhead shot, coming or going. "Start behind the duck and swing through. When the bird is blotted out by your barrel, pull the trigger and keep on swinging," he told me. It was solid advice, and 40-some-odd years later, the high overhead shot is the only one I'd ever bet money on making.

2. AN ICE-FREE HOLE
On late-season hunts it's often necessary to knock a hole in the ice for decoys. Always try to break the ice in large slabs and then slide them under the secure ice on the edges of the hole. If you simply break the ice into small chunks and throw the decoys out into the mix, ducks will be reluctant to decoy. I've found that if I can't break the ice into slabs, I'm better off just setting my decoys on the ice. Like some scotch drinkers, ducks don't like ice cubes.

3. JUST A COUPLE OF BLOBS
Entire books have been written about the subject of how to set out decoys. Most have pretty drawings, too. I've tried some of them and they do work, but none better than my old "twin-blob spread." Just toss a blob of decoys to the left and a blob to the fight, leaving a sweet spot in the middle. Sounds too easy, fight? Well, sometimes the simplest solution is the best one.

4. DUCKS OUT OF RANGE
Many hunters insist upon putting most of their decoys well within range and then putting one or two decoys almost out of range. Such "marker" decoys are intended to serve as a range reference for hunters when ducks come in. What the way-out decoys often do instead is entice ducks to land not only short of the main spread, but short of the markers as well. If you need a range indicator, use a stick or pole stuck in the mud instead of decoys.

5. SWITCH-HITTERS
When my father was in his 40s, he went partially blind in his fight eye and was forced to train himself to shoot lefthanded. Because of that experience, as soon as I became somewhat adept at shooting from my natural side--the fight side--my father insisted that I learn to shoot left-handed as well. At the time I thought it was totally unnecessary, but evening after evening I would stand in the middle of the living room floor, an empty shotgun in my hands, snapping the stock to my left shoulder as Pa tossed my mother's couch pillows across the room. I've got to admit, Pa was fight. Being able to shoot from either side paid off in the duck blind on those hard over-the-right-shoulder screamers that most right-handers, including this one, find nearly impossible. Practicing left-handed won't cost you anything, so give it a try.

6. DON'T OVERCHOKE
I grew up hunting ducks in an era when duck hunters, almost to a man, favored 12-gauge pumps and semi-autos with 30- or 32-inch barrels and full chokes. Many hunters continue to hunt with the same sort of guns today, and in doing so they are unwittingly handicapping themselves. After having tested steel shot from all the major ammunition manufacturers through a variety of guns and chokes, I have never found a fullchoke barrel that did not leave holes in the pattern a teal could fly through. A modified or improved-cylinder choke is best for steel.

If you want to stick with Ol' Betsy, spring for the extra bucks and shoot either Bismuth or Kent TungstenMatrix. These nontoxic loads pattern beautifully through a full choke. Federal's popular Tungsten-Iron loads pattern best from either improved or modified chokes. HEVI-Shot, another nontoxic option, patterns so tightly that unless you're in a situation where long shots are going to be the rule of the day, you're better off with less choke constriction.

7. SEEK THE SHADE
When hunting flooded timber on a sunny day, always lean against the shady side of the tree. Ducks will have a much more difficult time spotting you in the shade than they will if you're standing in bright sun.

8. WEIGHTED BUNDS
The biggest problem with a cloth boat blind is that the cloth can billow and flap unnaturally in a stiff breeze. Ducks often flare from such unnatural movement. My buddy Tommy Akin taught me how to correct the problem. Using short lengths of cord, tie a decoy anchor to the blind every few feet. Adjust the cords so that the anchors hang down a couple of feet into the water but don't touch bottom. You'll have no more duck-spooking flap.

9. PANTYHOSE PROTECTION
Stuffed into a plastic bag in one comer of my shooting box are a couple of pairs of women's pantyhose (save the wisecracks). When I shoot a duck I want to save for mounting, the pantyhose afford the protection needed to ensure that the bird will arrive at the taxidermist's shop in perfect condition, just slip the duck headfirst into one leg of the pantyhose. When you take the duck to the taxidermist, cut the pantyhose below the head and lift the duck out. Don't try to back it out the way it went in or you'll bend and break the feathers.

10. DOUBLES AND TRIPLES
Have you ever noticed that some hunters routinely take a pair or even three ducks out of a decoying flock, while others struggle to scratch down a single bird? Hunters who make a habit of doubling or tripling never, never take the easy bird first when a flock decoys. Conversely, hunters who rarely double always take the "candy" bird first. If you want more doubles and triples, pick a drake towards the middle or back of the flock for your first shot. After that, go to work on the lead birds. Usually the lead birds will be stalled out over the decoys and it will take them a second or two to reverse gears. This makes number two--and sometimes number three--much easier pickings.

GREAT GRILLED DUCK
If you're successful in bringing home a few ducks this season, you might enjoy this simple recipe.

1 Split the ducks in half and marinate them with a couple of quartered onions overnight in your favorite marinade. (Hickory- or mesquite-flavored marinades complement the taste of duck very well.)
2 Place the ducks and onions on a charcoal or gas grill and cook at medium heat for about 10 minutes per side. Do not overcook. Anything past pink is too well-done.
3 Remove the ducks from the grill, slice the onions over the top and dig in.

By Gary Clancy, Outdoor Life, Sep2006

Laying Claim to a Little Paradise

David Gilmour made Wakaya a posh resort. Now Fijians want it back.

Foreigners have always found it hard to resist the siren song of the Fijian isles. And the locals have always found it just as tough to repel them. Take the island of Wakaya, a 2,200-acre emerald of lush jungle greens and chalk-white beaches that rises from the Koro Sea's shark-rife waters about an hour's flight from Suva, the Fijian capital. It is today wreathed in those same lagoony hues of aqua and turquoise that Captain Bligh, cut loose from the mutinous Bounty in 1789, skimmed when seeking refuge in Wakaya's bay. For Bligh, it was not to be. When native warriors aimed their canoes at his small open boat, the captain surmised their intentions -- as he later wrote in his diary, "not necessarily of the most friendly variety" -- and retreated. Now, David Gilmour, the Canadian financier who has owned Wakaya since 1972, has his own troubles with locals: a group of Fijians who argue the island was fraudulently sold two centuries ago, and are laying claim to it.

Times have changed since the Fijian islanders ate their interlopers. Rather than warriors, Gilmour, who has converted Wakaya into a luxurious five-star refuge for the extraordinarily rich, may soon be confronted by lawyers. And he is not alone. Mel Gibson recently bought yet another disputed island and is contending with similar claims. But Gilmour is not known to shrink from a fight, especially one with so much at stake.

Now in his mid-70s, Gilmour was the long-time partner of Peter Munk, with whom he founded such ventures as Barrick Gold, the mining powerhouse, and real estate giant TrizecHahn. Still, wealth has not always sheltered foreigners in Fiji. A coup attempt in 2000 spread from Suva into the archipelago's far-flung resorts -- including the seizure by insurgents of Laucala Island, then owned by the family of U.S. publishing magnate Malcolm Forbes. And when another group of insurgents raided Turtle Island, they held its American owner and a number of guests hostage for some two months.

Even so, Fiji has remained a mostly tranquil island paradise since it first began to boom as a tourist destination in the 1960s. And few resorts can rival the Wakaya Club's guest list of starlets and millionaires. It is where Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel honeymooned, and where Keith Richards suffered his concussive fall from a tree last spring. Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher have holidayed there -- as have Michelle Pfeiffer, Jim Carrey, Céline Dion, Rupert Murdoch and Renée Zellweger. When Nicole Kidman departed Wakaya with old friend Russell Crowe in 2001, she is reported to have just missed her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who flew in on the island's own private airline just days later.

Indeed, the island, which accepts just 24 guests at a time -- each of whom enjoys a 12-to-one staff-to-guest ratio -- is perhaps the most exclusive holiday destination in the world. As the resort's slogan says, this sprawling, thatch-roofed Xanadu is where "people who have it all go to get away from it all." Eight well-appointed, 1,650-sq.-foot cottages sit against the sea or the island's idyllic gardens, and set guests back up to $7,600 a night. A ninth cottage -- the Governor's Bure -- boasts 2,400 sq. feet and is staffed with butler, laundry service, chef and chauffeur. Alcohol is unlimited. The food is largely Wakaya-grown, cultivated from island corners teeming with wild boars and deer.

For Gilmour, the resort is just one in a string of business successes. He discovered the island in 1971 during a flight over Fiji, and purchased Wakaya the following year for $1 million. By then, he had already confronted both business zeniths and nadirs alongside his one-time University of Toronto chum Munk. Gilmour -- from Winnipeg, the son of a military man and an opera singer -- was something of an outsider on Bay Street. Clairtone, his first venture with Munk, was a hi-fi manufacturer that by the mid-'60s had turned the pair into the wunderkinds of Canadian business. When it went bust in 1971, the two managed to salvage enough money to start Southern Pacific Hotel Corp., snapping up properties around the world.

Gilmour's swashbuckling over the next three decades helped lead to the founding of Barrick Gold, TrizecHahn, and eventually to another Fiji-based triumph. Gilmour was watching Bill and Melinda Gates -- who honeymooned on Wakaya in 1994 -- playing a round on the island's nine-hole golf course, when he noticed them sipping from bottles of French-imported mineral water. Gilmour realized there was likely a purer source nearby. Within days, he'd been alerted to a recently discovered underground reservoir of 450-year-old rainwater on Viti Levu, Fiji's main island. Gilmour arranged to tap the reserve and established Fiji Water, marketing it through word-of-mouth and savvy product placements in U.S. films and television shows. He sold the company in 2004 -- reportedly for about $60 million.

He has also seen tragedy. In 1983, Munk's son Anthony found Gilmour's daughter Erin -- the two wealthy offspring were said to have been dating at the time -- in a pool of blood, the victim of a still-unsolved knife attack.

Through all the highs and lows, Gilmour's heart always rested with the coral-crested island and his boutique resort for the stars. Though he now spends much of his time in Palm Beach, Fla., and is no longer involved in many of his former businesses, Gilmour continues to operate the Wakaya Club.

Now an indigenous group is preparing a case against the Fijian government in hopes of getting the aging tycoon to cough up his paradise (or at least share its wealth). Francis Waqa Sokonibogi, a Fijian activist who is spearheading the legal case, claims the group has documents proving the group's ancestors were duped out of the island, which was sold by a local chieftain in the 1840s for a single shilling. The government of the day, he says, ignored their protesting forefathers. "We are trying to do this to prevent future coups and unrest," says Sokonibogi, who muses that the Wakayans could one day form a partnership with Gilmour. Yet Doug Carlson, the resort's chief executive, holds that at the time of its original sale Wakaya had not been inhabited since Komai-na-Ua, its ruler in the early 19th century, led its people to commit mass suicide by jumping off a 180-m cliff rather than surrender to approaching enemies.

That version of events is in keeping with what is known of Fiji prior to its becoming a British colony in 1874, when chieftains engaged in internecine battles to evict the inhabitants of neighbouring islands before selling their land to foreigners engaged in the lucrative coconut and sandalwood trades. "There's historical instances of islands being sold for a couple of hundred muskets," says Cheyenne Morrison, an Australian private island broker. Mago Island, purchased by Mel Gibson in late 2004 for a reported US$15 million, is said to have been originally sold for 2,000 coconut plants. On Mago, according to locals now raising money for another court case, is a cave filled with the bones of those slaughtered for the island. Other accounts say Mago's inhabitants were evicted at gunpoint.

Whatever their historical basis, such claims are easily exploited by agitators seeking to fan the rancour of Fijians, many of whom live in Third World conditions even as their neighbours dine on venison. One luxury real estate site now lists Fijian private islands ranging from US$1.25 million to US$38 million. "There's of a lot of resentment in Fiji over the fact that the islands and the resorts are changing hands for astronomical amounts of money -- and the Fijians aren't getting any of it," says Morrison. Yet the legal cases being launched against the Fijian government aren't likely to lead to redress -- particularly when the lands in question belong to two wealthy and connected men. "The court case would be incredibly expensive," says Morrison, "and Gibson and Gilmour have huge amounts of money -- they would just throw money at it."

By: Köhler, Nicholas, Maclean's, 10/2/2006

Lassie, Come To Houston

The pet-friendly city makes it easy for road warriors to take along their pooch

ARE YOU FEELING guilty about leaving Fido or Fluffy at the kennel while you're away on business? If you're headed to Houston, maybe you should take them along. The American Automobile Assn. rates it the most pet-friendly city in America, at least if you go by the number of AAA-approved hotels that accept four-legged guests.

At the 314-room Hotel Derek in the city's tony Galleria area shopping district, dogs and cats get their own beds, water and food bowls, and a gift bag of toys. Pet sitting is available, and room service will deliver cooked-to-order bow-wow and meow chow. "We realize your dog or cat is part of your family," said assistant front office manager George Trevino, who was recently dispatched to get a carpeted kitty condo for Cher's cat, Mr. Big.

The Four Seasons, Westin, and St. Regis hotels confer posh pet privileges in keeping with their nationwide policies. Smaller lodging facilities, such as the 14-room Lovett Inn in the museum district, also allow pets but don't serve them treats on silver platters.

During your free time you can take your buddy for a romp in one of several canine parks, including the 15-acre Millie Bush Bark Park, named for former President George Bush's late spaniel. It has walking trails, swimming ponds, and paw-operated drinking fountains. Hungry? Stop at one of three Barnaby's Cafes, known for their multi-ethnic menu, decadent layer cakes, and dogs lying under patio tables at their owners' feet.

DOGGIE SHOW
YOU CAN'T TAKE a dog to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, but you can see its new exhibit, Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance to Today, which opens Oct. 1 and runs through Jan. 1, 2007 (mfah.org). It features 75 pooch paintings, photographs, and sculptures starting in the 16th century. Among the pieces is Two Dogs in a Landscape by Jacopo Bassano. Cat lovers shouldn't feel left out. The Cat's Meow, a show of 25 feline-related works, is on display until Jan. 21, 2007.

By: Murphy, Kate, Business Week, 10/9/2006

TREASURES OF THE BVI

The British Virgin Islands are the most popular charter destination in the world. Here's why.

LEGEND says there were pirates in these waters of the British Virgin Islands and here was one, just inches away from me. His breath was foul, his hair tangled from wind and salt water, his beard scruffy and his eyes bleary.

"Argggh," he said, staring me in the eyes.

Not frightened, I turned away from the mirror and then promised myself I'd stay away from the cold, rum-drenched Painkiller cocktails of the previous evening.

We had come to the Caribbean not to find pirates, but to find the treasures they had left behind. The British Virgin Islands have become the most popular charter destination in the world, with dozens of charter companies launching thousands of visitors each month onto these aquamarine waters. Surprisingly, many of these boaters have sailed the waters of the BVI time and time again, returning like migrating birds to the warm temperatures and soft trade winds. What is the enduring allure of this cruising paradise? We were here to search for the real treasures of the BVI.

With this mission in mind, we chartered a Lagoon 43 power catamaran from The Catamaran Company, and it served our purposes admirably. It was fast enough to reach each island easily, it had roomy accommodations and, since the weather didn't cooperate all the time, it proved to be seaworthy and comfortable, even for those passengers in our crew with landlubber tummies. (To learn more about this boat, read our test of the Lagoon 44, an updated version of the 43, in the September issue).

Our starting point was The Catamaran Company's headquarters at Nanny Cay on Tortola, where many charter businesses are based. We were delayed the first afternoon waiting for our provisions but, once loaded, Anden zipped easily at 20 knots across to Norman Island, the first stop in our treasure hunt.

Norman is an island with a legend, since it's supposedly the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island"; with coves named Money Bay and Privateer Bay, that's no surprise. Pirates once anchored in The Bight, a protected cove now popular with boaters. Today, charter crews consume their rum on a faux pirate ship, the William Thornton, a sometimes raucous night spot in The Bight, though there is also partying ashore until the wee hours. The real draw for Norman are the caves of Treasure Point, where you can snorkel deep into a tall cavern.

From Norman, we cruised past Dead Man's Chest, where the dreaded Blackbeard once marooned 15 men. We were headed for another treasure of the BVI: The Baths on Virgin Gorda.

Until you've seen and explored them, The Baths are hard to explain. Boulders are piled haphazardly as if by a giant, and the result is a series of eerie, half-submerged caverns lit by shafts of sunlight. You wade through the warm pools and end up at a pristine beach for snorkeling. A word of warning: Get here early to beat the crowds.

Although there are mooring buoys, The Baths aren't secure for overnighting, so we chose to cruise farther into Gorda Sound and eventually docked the boat at Biras Creek Resort. This luxe property is superb, from the tropical beachfront rooms to the hilltop four-star alfresco restaurant that has views in all directions. When you're ready to spend a night ashore, this is one of the best places to be.

Later in our cruise, we overnighted at the Bitter End Yacht Club, which isn't as much a yacht club as a celebration of everything boating. Guests in the hillside lodgings (and those staying aboard dockside) have access to fleets of small power and sailboats for exploring, a pair of waterfront restaurants give an onboard chef the night off, and a waterfront pub is always filled with boaters from around the world.

Another day, we picked up a mooring at Marina Cay, just across from the anchorage where Black Sam Bellamy based his pirate operation. Bellamy wasn't all bad, since he didn't murder everyone aboard the ships he plundered. In fact, he once returned a ship to its crew when he found it didn't sail up to his expectations. From a hill, Bellamy's lookouts could spot Spanish galleons sailing up Sir Francis Drake Channel, laden with gold and jewels for the royalty of Spain. We, however, chose to pillage the Pusser's Rum store on Marina Cay. The anchorage is pleasant and a good place to get an early start for exploring The Baths.

Next on our list was an entire island named for a pirate, Jost Van Dyke. En route, we were waylaid by tiny Sandy Cay. Picture in your mind the perfect tropical island: ringed with white sand; picturesque palm trees swaying; gin-clear water lapping at the edges. You've just seen Sandy Cay. Laurance Rockefeller donated the island to the British government as a national park, with the proviso that it stay in its native state.

Anchoring off Sandy Cay is easy. Once off the boat, take the winding nature trails where you might see a coconut crab, a strange creature with huge claws capable of cracking open a coconut.

We didn't linger at Sandy Cay, however, because we wanted to settle in at Great Harbour to meet Philicianno Callwood at Jost Van Dyke. He's known worldwide as Foxy, the owner and entertainer of the Tamarind Restaurant and Bar, one of the most famous watering holes in the Caribbean. The dock in front of this open-air beach bar is always jammed with tenders from the charter fleet, as visitors swill rum while listening to Foxy make up Calypso songs about their home cities far away. Foxy brews his own rum (try the Sly Fox) as well as beer, but it's the convivial atmosphere that draws the crowds every night.

By this point in our cruise, it was apparent that there were several reasons (besides the treasures we'd found) why boaters come back to the BVI. For one thing, the weather is not just pleasantly mild, it's predictable. We hit a front coming through so we had more wind than usual, but we adjusted our routes to fit and pressed on. Sunny skies and mild trade winds are the norm. Easy navigation is another plus in the BVI, with good charts, detailed guidebooks and islands that are within view of each other. Underwater dangers are clearly marked and the buoyage system is good, plus fog is an unknown here.

There aren't many marinas, but there's a system of reasonably priced mooring buoys ($25 a night) at popular destinations, so you don't have to anchor out every night. And, with more than 60 islands and cays in an area roughly 32 miles by 15 miles, there's good reason to come back time after time. You can't possibly see it all in one charter.

From Jost Van Dyke, it's a short hop across to Soper's Hole, a natural harbor at the west end of Tortola that might have been designed by Walt Disney if he weren't busy creating "Pirates of the Caribbean." Lining the full-service marina are brightly colored shops and buildings that are almost a caricature of island style, but fun nevertheless. Soper's is a good first stop for charterers arriving from the U.S. Virgin Islands since Customs and Immigration can clear you into the BVI. Soper's Hole is well-protected in almost any conditions.

Returning our Lagoon power catamaran to Nanny Cay was difficult, but we had proven that the real treasures of the British Virgin Islands aren't gold doubloons or buried jewels, but the sights and delights that draw charterers back year after year.

The Ultimate Sea Trial
By chartering, you can closely evaluate the boat you want to buy.

CHARTERING HAS A LOT OF BENEFITS, including one for those who are thinking about buying a new boat for use in their home waters. Charter operations in the U.S., Bahamas and Caribbean have popular production boat models in their fleet. If you charter one, you'll have the opportunity to really evaluate that model.

Had we not chartered the Lagoon 43 (above) in the BVI, we wouldn't have realized the value of the lounge on the bow; it was the most comfortable seat on the boat, especially in the evening at anchor. It also might not have been apparent in a short sea trial without guests present that more seating area on the bridge would be desirable (new Lagoons have an enlarged flybridge for just this reason). We a so found that the cockpit icemaker was a lot less useful than a cockpit fridge, which wouldn't be obvious on a day outing.

Since they've been in production for so many years, Grand Banks are probably the most popular boats in charter fleets. Grand Banks Yachts has a list of companies that charter its boats on its, but the largest fleet is in the British Virgins at Trawlers in Paradise, which also has Nordic Tugs and Lagoon powercats.

Mainship also has a Web site listing of charter companies.

Blue Pacific Yacht Charters in the Pacific Northwest has a mixed fleet of models from builders like Grand Banks, Bayliner, Meridian, Chris-Craft, Maxum, Silverton, Nordhavn and Carver. Other Northwest charter companies include Island Cruising, with Carver and Meridian, and Cooper Boating, with Meridian, Bayliner, Grand Banks and Ocean Alexander.

In warmer climates, Southwest Florida Yachts has Grand Banks, Mainship and Jefferson, while VIP Yacht Charters in the Virgin Islands has a fleet filled with Jefferson and Tarquin models.

This is just the tip of the iceberg; many other charter companies have production powerboats in their fleets. With a little Internet surfing you could find just the boat you want to try out.

By: Caswell, Chris, MotorBoating, Oct2006

The Geographical Good Guide Guide

Helping you choose that vitally important, but often rather confusing, item of kit: the guidebook Berlitz Hide This… Phrase Book

What are they like?

These concise, pocket-sized phrase books offer less formal terms and phrases for a range of typical circumstances that younger travellers might encounter on holiday. They are currently available for French, Italian and Spanish.

Who are they for?

Judging from the design, the use of 'modernised' English ("Wanna speak some Spanish?" and "Partyin' with the locals") and sections that cover extreme sports, hangover cures, breaking up after a holiday fling and the best tobacco, these "ultra-hip illustrated phrase books" are definitely aimed at younger travellers.

Strong points

They're small, cheap (£4.99) and contain a variety of useful phrases.

Not so strong points

The informal, modernised English can get pretty irritating, as can the book's general tone. And if you're at all curious about a language's basic grammar and structure, you'll have to look elsewhere.

www.berlitzpublishing.com

The Ghosts of Calcutta

Hugh Purcell finds stirring memories of the British Rig in this thriving city, a far cry from its dreadful reputation of a generation ago

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT CALCUTTA ATTRACTS two kinds of visitors, those seeking sainthood by extreme acts of philanthropy and those seeking their past. I belong to the second category. The first time I visited India I felt I had been there before and nowhere do the ghosts of our collective past return more evocatively than in the first capital of the British Raj.

Today Kolkata, as it is now renamed, does not deserve its bad reputation. Kipling called it the 'city of dreadful night' and at times in its history it has indeed seemed that 'above the packed and pestilential town, Death looked down'. In the early 1970s for instance, when it was inundated with refugees from East Pakistan, the travel writer Simon Winchester wrote of 'the hot stench of the slow-decaying poor, the mobs flowing ceaselessly over the Howrah bridge, the treacle of the Hooghly swamps below, the bent and broken limbs and the rotting rubbish piles and the screeching horns and the rickshaw bells and the infuriating calm of the cud-chewing cows.' I remember it too from the Louis Malle documentary film Calrutta (1970), which the Indian Government objected to because its reality denigrated the country. Today's Bengalis do not like the legacy of Mother Theresa either. Whatever you think about her extreme philanthropy, it has been estimated that she cost the city over four billion dollars in lost revenue. Tourists are still frightened off by the images propagated by the Missionaries of Charity, images of begging bowls, of flies on a dying face. Please do not be pui off. In my last two visits to Calcutta I have not encountered this public nightmare and, even if it exists, follow the Paul Scott advice on India and 'seek the scent behind the smell'.

The most evocative view of Calcutta is from the Hooghly river. Take a boat from Fairlie ghat near BBD Bagh, formerly Dalhousie Square where the British built their first fort in 1696. Chug under the Howrah bridge, that singlespan, grey steel lattice edifice that expands four feet in hot weather and carries a million people daily between Howrah on the west bank and Calcutta proper on the east (for India, add a nought to all statistics). On both sides you pass semi-ruins of the old 'go-downs' (an Anglo-Indian word for warehouse where the goods were 'laid down*) factories and counting houses. Then from Garden Reach to Howrah are the long lines of wharves where once the massed masts and then funnels of Victorian merchant steamers crowded the view. For the groundwork of the old imperial impetus is still there, crumbling but visible. Walk along Strand Road South and search on the walls for the faded announcements of trade — First Class Tailors, Hamilton the Jewellers, Spences Hotel.

Calcutta was built by British merchants, by the Mr Five-percents. The first of these was the East India Company's agent Job Charnock who settled on the Hooghly in 1690, little more than 800 years ago. Calcutta is a young city, nearly a century junior to New York, but it grew with a restless energy, some would say with greed. Very soon it became a gigantic emporium. Jute, tea, rice and cotton were transported from all points east and stored along the Hooghly before being shipped on to Europe. And it was the boxwallahs of empire who were the last to leave. It was not the dissolution of the Raj in 1947 but India's economic policy in the 1960s that slowly forced the British out.

Their departure is chronicled on the honours boards of the Tollygungc Club where the Caruthers CBE become Bannerjees between 1955-65. The Tolly' is indeed an 'island of imperial memories' (in the words of Winchester) though the neighbouring 'neat and self-satisfied Calcutta suburbs that John Betjeman might easily recognise' have gone, as have the Joan Hunter-Dunns from the Club tennis courts. Now the members are the new nabobs of Calcutta, Marwari and Bengali businessmen with their families. The last British to leave were Bob and Anne Wright, who ran the Club into the 1990s and considered it their dvity to preserve the relics of empire including the dying and the dead. They even found an undertaker who could preserve in the hot season — heat described by Mark Twain as 'enough to make a brass doorknob mushy' — the bodies of deceasetl Britons long enough for their families to fly out for the funeral. Their most conspicuous achievement, as members of BACSA (British Association of Cemeteries in South Asia), is the restoration of South Park Cemetery. Here the British ghosts live in a city of the dead that was founded in 'the golden age' of Calcutta 200 years ago.

The ostentatious tombs of Georgian classical design are a monument to the richest, most elegant colonial city of all, to the City of Palaces or the St Petersburg of the East as it was called. According to the famous diarist William Hickey, who worked at this time as an attorney, it was also inward looking and self-regarding, greedy and sinful. Poor Rose Aylmer whose tomb in South Park relates that death was caused 'by an addiction to pineapples' must be absolved. The poet Walter Savage Landor certainly thought so: 'Ah, what avails the sceptered race!/Ah, what the form divine!/What every virtue, every grace!/Rose Aylmer, all were thine'. Beyond redemption were the many Writers, as the clerks were called, who died of venereal diseases caught in the brothels that lined the back streets, a result of the scarcity of Rose Aylmers, for in 1800 there were only 250 young British women in a town of 4,000 young men.

India has hundreds of British cemeteries wherein He buried up to two million fatalities of the Raj. Identified by their Victorian Gothic porches they are mostly melancholy places that tell of premature and forlorn death: 'Her only fault was that she left me'. The polished brass plaques in the metropolitan cathedral of St Paul's, Calcutta, tell altogether different stories: of the grandiosity of empire, of the superiority of 'the Heaven born', as the Indian Civil Service was called. Here is a monument to a judge who was also a champion pigsticker, with the smug encomium 'Well done, thy good and faithful servant'. It is tempting to imagine the congregation of sixty years ago, surrounded by marble statuary and cooled by ranks of electric fans, singing the hymn of imperial retreat: 'So be it Lord, thy throne shall never like earth's proud empires pass away'.

Separated on the south side of the Maidan (literally 'great park') by Cathedral Road is the vast Victoria Memorial. The visitor approaches through high ornamental gates bearing the royal coat of arms and is greeted by a statue of the Queen Empress herself, seated on a throne supported by Art, Literature, Justice and St George. Lord Curzon proposed the building as 'a great imperial duty' to commemorate his beloved queen who had just died. Little did he know that it would also become a memorial to imperial Calcutta for the capital of the Raj passed to Delhi in 1911 while it was being built. Cur/on saw it as his Taj Mahal, though built in the Italian Renaissance style, and like its prototype it is made of dazzling Rajasthan marble that is reflected in ornamental pools. Whether he succeeded is a matter of opinion. Some see a civic pile, an oversized town hall under a marble dome, a 'confection of white marble and hubris' (Winchester). Curzon wanted 'a monumental and grand building where all classes will learn the lessons of history and see revived before their eyes the marvels of the past'. So the inside is stuffed with imperial trophies from a lock of Lady Canning's hair to the swords of defeated princes. What can today's Indian schoolchildren think as they wander open-mouthed through the Durbar Room to Queen Mary's Room and across to the Royal Gallery? Whose Raj is it commemorating? (The word raj simply means 'sovereignty'). The truth is that modern Calcutta admires the Victoria Memorial. The Marxist local government that delights in shocking the West — Harrington Street where the US Embassy used to be is now Ho Chi Minh Sarani — have not renamed it, nor has it ever been a focus for rioters.

Visit the Victoria Memorial early in the morning and then sit on the grass of the Maidan, looking north. Let the heat haze mask over the modern city and your imagination replace it with the paintings of the City of Palaces by Thomas and William Daniell that you have just seen. There, shimmering under the blue sky are stately rows of white plastered, neo-classical buildings in the Grecian style; elegant vistas of terraces as Nash might have built them, arched gateways through which further colonnaded palaces appear. Behind are the spires of St Andrew's and St John's. Only the storks perched on ornamental urns or imperial lions give any hint that this is a world away from London or St Petersburg in 1800. Edmund Lear called it 'a humbug of palaces'. Insulated from reality it was, spectacularly. Yet the miracle of Calcutta is that although the past is another country the descendent of the Raj may still visit it today, before retreating to the Tolly' for a gin and tonic.

Hugh Purcell journeys to the St Petersburg of the East, and considers it a good place to witness the remnants of the British Raj, now absorbed in this dynamic city.

USEFUL TO KNOW
Kolkata (Calcutta) in the state of West Bengal has a population of around 15 million.

In September 2007 Hugh Purcell is leading a tour, which ends in Kolkata. to mark the 150th anniversary of the Indian Mutiny. See www.palanquin.co.uk

See www.calcuttaweb.com

By: Purcell, Hugh, History Today, Oct2006