"The Leap"

On Monday, May 4th, we shall celebrate the one hundred and seventh anniversary of the most famous leap in the history of criminal man. Some may call it a "fall." Others might even refer to it as a murder, or the delusion of a drug-addled mind. But they are wrong.

My friends, I will tell you here and now, the event that occurred at Reichenbach Falls in 1891 was not a fall or a murder in self-defense. It was a leap into the abyss, a final embrace of total freedom by a man who had spent his life defying the laws of man and pondering physics so he could defy the laws of nature as well.

I speak, of course, of Professor Moriarty, the arch-enemy of Sherlock Holmes and the first man to attempt the scientific pursuit of flight without artificial contrivance.

Just look at how Sherlock Holmes describes Professor Moriarty’s actions after Holmes slips through his good-bye embrace: "he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds, and clawed the air with both hands."

Think about what Professor Moriarty has accomplished in those few words. If he were simply losing his balance upon the edge of a precipice, the professor would be keeping his feet planted firmly and waving his arms madly in an attempt to keep his balance. But that is not what we see him doing at all.

He "kicked madly for a few seconds." Obviously Professor Moriarty’s feet are not on the ground any more. And with his feet in mid-air, he’s actually staying in place for a few seconds, much like Wiley Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. But Professor Moriarty was no cartoon. He was a scientific genius, who wouldn’t think of ordering from Acme when he could use his own mind to solve any problem that came his way.

And while his feet kicked madly, like a swimmer treading water, Professor Moriarty’s hands "clawed the air." The imagery there is plain — he had become like some huge bird of prey, whose claws were now reaching out, trying to pick up Sherlock Holmes to accompany him on his flight.

Holmes stays clear of Moriarty’s claws, however, and the professor, secure in his mastery of gravity itself, sends himself into a power dive. Holmes can only watch, his mind unable to comprehend that which he is witnessing. It is at this point when Holmes’s descriptions become untrustworthy and must be interpreted for what they truly are.

"Then he struck a rock," Holmes says, "bounded off, and splashed into the water."

What other explanation could a rational mind concoct for the vision of a man suddenly changing course in total violation of all physical laws? He had to have struck that rock, not merely skimmed by it as he splashed into the water in the sheer exhilaration of exerting his total command over gravity itself.

As Watson said of Reichenbach Falls in "The Final Problem" . . . "The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house."

We can only imagine the next part, the part that Sherlock Holmes did not see, that he could not allow himself to see. Moriarty, rising up through the clouds of water vapor, like a phoenix rising from the smoldering embers. But even as he disappears into the sky, the Professor cannot help but share his joy with the detective.

"I am not a fanciful person," Holmes says, "but I give you my word that I seemed to hear Moriarty's voice screaming at me out of the abyss."

Yes, screaming with joy . . . but not from the abyss. From the sky itself.

Sherlock Holmes had indeed helped free England from the greatest criminal mind that land had ever known. For once, free of the constraints of known physics, Professor Moriarty would never concern himself with the petty doings of thieves and murderers ever again. He was now free as no man had ever been free before. Why risk that for a bit of plunder?

And Holmes is not unaffected. Why else travel all the way to Tibet, seeking the wisdom of that far-off place where levitation is not thought of as being so impossible as it is in the West? But even that brought him no solace.

For what is it Sherlock Holmes says in "Sussex Vampire," so late in his career?

"This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain."

His attempts to fathom, if not replicate, that which he has seen have all failed. And somewhere out there, he knows there flies the one man who succeeded at doing the impossible.

This year, commemorate Moriarty’s leap as Sherlock surely must. Go outside on the evening of May 4th and see if you can spot the Professor in the night sky. He’s out there somewhere, you know, under the cover of darkness, glorying in his final lesson:

Crime doesn’t pay. But theoretical mathematics describing astronomical phenomenon sure does.

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, May 1998)