The second week of my expedition began with a sky of ambiguous temper, grey with the promise of rain yet coy in its delivery. I departed Launceston in fair enough spirits, but scarcely had the church tower disappeared behind me than the heavens opened with the suddenness of an End of Act One stage curtain.
Rain! Not the genial drizzle that can be refreshing for the athlete like myself, but a veritable cascade, as though some celestial sluice had been loosed upon me. Within minutes I was drenched, my notes dissolving in their case, my spectacles a misted blur. The Steam Unicycle, though valiant, is ill-suited to aquatic deluge: the boiler, designed for orderly vapour emission, grew querulous. Steam and rain engaged in open quarrel, each hissing louder than the other, until I feared I had invented not a vehicle but a travelling thundercloud.
Worse still, the road became a ribbon of mud. My wheel slipped and lurched, threatening mutiny at every yard. Twice I dismounted to push, and once I was obliged to enlist the aid of a passing carter, who, after hauling me uphill, remarked with rustic candour: “You’d be drier in a coffin.” I could not dispute the logic; I gave him a sketch of his horse in gratitude.
How I wished I had access to my studio/workshop, for I immediately invented a hat cum water collector, which would both prevent the rain landing on my person, whilst also directing it, through various tubes and some sort of funnel, to the boiler itself. I imagined the device, made of tempered brass, replenishing the boiler automatically. How wonderful would it be? To turn affliction into advantage,what greater aim could invention pursue?
But I only had a motley selection of tools on my person, and none of the raw materials needed to build what I had christened the Bromley Precipitation Boiler Refiller, so I had to face the weather sans such a device. By afternoon the storm abated, leaving me sodden but unbroken. I paused at a wayside inn near Lifton, where the landlady insisted I remove my boots before entering, lest I transport half of Devonshire mud onto her floor. I sat by the fire, garments steaming, the unicycle itself propped in the corner, exhaling vapours like some great drenched walrus. Other patrons regarded it with a mixture of awe and suspicion; one ventured that it resembled “a bishop’s mitre turned inside out.” I sketched the comparison hastily, for it pleased me.
By nightfall I had pressed on to Okehampton, the road made tolerable by the drying wind. The moor rose about me in sombre majesty, and for a brief interval the sunset poured itself across the wet earth, gilding puddles into molten mirrors. Even soaked, scratched, and weary, I felt a painter’s gratitude for such a vision.
Thus concludes the eighth day: rain-battered yet resolute. The unicycle and I learn, it seems, not merely to endure the elements but to quarrel with them, and perhaps in time, to collaborate.
