The Infinite Library (22 page)

One such jaunt, the one that I cannot seem to efface from a memory so over-full and now a fading and aged tapestry, took me to a place that exists on no maps, if it really exists at all. Deserts had, from childhood, always captivated me as it did T.E. Lawrence. My intended journey would be to go up through Saudi Arabia and deep into the furrowed tracks once left by the mighty Persian Empire. My guide, Ibn al-Hamadi, had a preternatural skill for navigating his way through a sandy biome without much in the way of geographical markers. I thought it impolite to inquire after his one missing hand, but it was the result of justice served for a crime he would come to commit once more upon this unsuspecting and starry-eyed tourist. Far be it from me to judge him harshly, even now, for what sort of honest employment is there for someone already mutilated and marked, condemned to repeat his offence? Of course, my knowledge of their laws was then as absent as Ibn al-Hamadi's right hand. I will say that, for his part, he was a reliable guide regardless of how, one night while I assumed we were both asleep, he made off with both our camels and all my money. But, as many young men do, I treated the event as just another circumstantial detail, fancying it just another chapter in the ongoing novel of my life. Panic does not touch those who feel, justly or not, blessed, guided by the unjustified belief that no lasting harm can ever befall the protagonist.

We had travelled too far for me to consider backtracking on foot, so I placed faith in my youthful fortitude to push on towards my next goal. With no water, and that merciless sun overhead battering me, I trod on. That sun was both tormentor and saviour, depleting me of strength yet acting as my bright compass through that infinite desert landscape with no identifiable markers. The sandstorms that would whip up from time to time were severely harsh, and each step brought me closer into that terrain of trance one experiences under conditions of extreme heat and lack of food and water. One must remember that back then I wasn't the hardened man with such unbearably strict thinking, and so perhaps I secretly enjoyed this test of my will.

I cannot say exactly how long I travelled across that unforgiving terrain before consciousness fled me, nor how long I lay in what was to be my open sandy tomb. Fated to be spared, I was prodded awake by a man holding a stick. The sandstorm had vanished and it was midday – the cruelest time to be lost in the middle of the desert. The figure who had prodded me, perhaps poking to see if I were already dead, was far more appropriately attired for desert travel, in light layers of silk. His mouth, behind a wiry beard, was defiant, and his eyes burned. Wordlessly, almost reluctantly, he bade me to follow.

The desert upon which I had found myself was like no desert I had ever seen. The sand was a powdered obsidian black, and the heat it collected and returned made walking even in boots as though upon lighted coals. My rescuer's skin was smudged with this black sand, the look of a miner well inured to his stifling surroundings. He frugally shared a goatskin bladder of water as we made our way, and we briefly camped in the evening when he shared some ghastly fare only extreme hunger allowed me to partake in.

We moved steadily across that black blanket, him of surer foot than I. Neither of us essayed a word to one another, and I had assumed it would have been pointless to strike up conversation seeing as he probably only spoke his tribal tongue. However, by nightfall, he surprised me with a clearly spoken English:

“We are not in the habit of admitting trespassers.”

“I-I had no intention. I was robbed and abandoned by my guide, left to wander without provisions. If you had not come along, I would have surely died.”

“This is true, but we do not believe in accidents – you are still trespassing.”

I could tell that my woeful predicament did not faze him, for he brushed it aside with a gruff lack of sympathy. After another prolonged silence, I asked, “Where am I that I am trespassing?”

“You are in the domain of the desert engineers. We are nearing the boundary where our workshops are stationed.”

“Do you all speak English so well?”

“We less speak than manufacture this language called English,” was his cryptic reply.

“Are you all under the employ of a British or American company? This seems a desolate and remote area to conduct work.”

“No. I will answer no more questions. The only reason I am taking you with me is because it is a shameful thing for someone so young to die. You will be brought before our Guildmaster, lodged for one night, outfitted with provisions, and one of our own will guide you on your way.”

I had not thought to ask him his name, and I was sure given his rather taciturn manner and determined gaze trained on impossible distances that it was of no importance to him. It seemed to me that, for a man of his comportment, names were beneath him, or perhaps so sacred that they could not be uttered so carelessly and irreverently. The only other precedent I have since found on the sacredness of names has been among some gypsy cultures where a mother assigns a secret name to her child that only they know, for to reveal it to anyone else is to risk the devil stealing the child's soul. My own name, in a land so vast and mysterious, soaked with the blood of endless feuding, the birthplace of the concept of zero, seemed a ridiculous thing to me, so paltry and meaningless. My namesake obtained the fleece through less than heroic means in a celebrated tale that would have barely been a minor footnote in the narrative legacy of these people. Even in my misguided romanticizing, I suspected that desert people would always outpace us in their profundity, leaving even the best of us passive and confused ethnographers desperately grasping for understanding.

My new guide led me to a fortification. I could see enormous piles of the powdery black sand being poured from the ramparts. As I would learn, this lost tribe did not follow Allah, but the Aleph, but this element of my story is premature.

Despite the misfortune of my circumstances, I had already been judged a trespasser, and was treated thusly. Gruff faces with grisly beards spied me with unconcealed mistrust and contempt as we approached the main gates. My guide explained to the guards that I had been orphaned, a foundling of the unforgiving desert, and that my passage away would be speedily arranged. He also did not bother to make any excuses on my behalf, dubbing me harshly with that title of trespasser.

“It is written that none but our tribe see the Work,” one guard admonished, reciting as if from some invisible scripture.

“His eyes shall remain hooded from the Work. Praise be Aleph,” replied my guide.

“Praise be Aleph,” the two guards answered simultaneously, opening the two heavy stone doors by means of a crank mechanism.

I did not chance to glimpse at what lay behind those gates, for a guard tied a blindfold around my eyes. I was led by the hand through what my artificial blindness would have assumed were winding corridors. When next sight was restored to me, I was face to face with a stern old man with a long grey beard and a beige ceremonial robe. He had the look of a frightening biblical patriarch, and a scowl etched his face.

“Announce yourself before me and this council, trespasser,” he boomed.

“My name is Jason Johns, an American. I lost my way when my guide deceived me and abandoned me to certain death until one of your people encountered me unconscious in the desert.”

“What is your guild, Jason Johns American?”

“Guild? I have no guild. I am just a traveller.”

“Trespasser,” I was corrected.

“He is b'rethtu,” said what I assumed was the patriarch's vizier.

“B'rethtu?” I echoed.

“He means 'nomad', a man with no guild, no place, and no purpose,” explained the patriarch.

I was on the verge of protesting, that I had a place, an apartment in Seattle, a family, and so forth, but immediately redressed myself. Was I not a nomad? Without purpose or direction, a long series of temporary jobs and aimless globetrotting in some half-hearted attempt to discover myself. The pronouncement of nomad was perhaps exceptionally apt.

“He cannot remain here,” said the vizier.

“That is written,” said the patriarch.

Amid a plethora of inconsequential protests I made, insisting on accidental circumstances to efface this nomination of being a trespasser, they would hear no more. Nothing further would be revealed that night, and I was led away to be bedded down in an antechamber with a floor fashioned of rough jute.

I could flatter myself to believe these mysterious people were impressed by my precociousness, but it was more likely their boredom and isolation that allowed me to tarry longer in their domain as they had made no motions to do as my guide had announced in speeding me off. I was slowly introduced to the mysteries they so carefully guarded. Perhaps by the curious twist of their metaphysical outlook and its complete exclusion of any possibility of, or place for, accidents, my simply being there was an act of a higher will, linked perhaps to predestination or fate. In time, they relaxed the derogatory predicate of trespasser from my name and began treating me – not with excessive hospitality – with a measured laconic tolerance. Seeing that I was harmless and more or less grateful to having been saved from the harsh desert, there was less reason for them to be secretive. As a nomad, I could present them with little to no jeopardy.

In time, I would learn their names, although names served a different function, closely reminiscent of medieval naming where a surname like Cook, Butler, Smith, would announce one's profession. Each member of the Guild was assigned a letter at birth they would be accountable for. The man who had rescued me was named – and responsible for – the letter P. Each of the 26 members were given to profound reflections on their respective letters, experimenting with phonic variations, drawing elaborate tables of connections where the letter was prominently in use, the geometric permutations of the letter, and so on – a whole of one's life devoted to one assigned letter each. They were also, I learned, each responsible for the manufacturing of their assigned letter using a large typesetting apparatus (I would later discover that the black sands that dominated this stretch of desert were actually a mix of stone dust and black ink from these machines). By contrast, my name, composed as it was of ten letters, must have seemed to them a jumbled incoherence.

Each letter had a guardian and an elder advisory council. The guardian would be entrusted to train the novice at thirteen years of age when the child was taken from the parental home. At the age of 26, if the novice passed the educational requirements in the study of the letter, he would take the position of the new guardian while the old guardian would be given a seat on the advisory council. The training was of a demanding rigour not found even in some of our most renowned schools. Concurrently with the training specific to the letter, the novice was expected to read the Book of Aleph (Liber Alephi) so as to lend the requisite spiritual gravity and instruction as to why guardianship of the letter was necessary. I was given no indication if their studies included mathematics, geography, history, or the natural sciences, but their knowledge seemed to embrace all fields of study as it pertained to the study of the letter.

Despite the rigour of instruction, their studies were pragmatic and the subjects gracefully economical. A history of American presidents, for example, would most likely be considered highly peripheral except where letters were somehow involved – the repetition of W in the initials of Woodrow Wilson would have some relevance to one studying the letter W. Neither was their education so exclusively specific as to disregard the importance of other letters in the alphabet. I've already mentioned their quasi-theological text, Liber Alephi, but every six months they were expected to pass a test on a letter outside their guardianship. This survey knowledge of other letters gave the student insight on how letters connect as a whole. By the time they reached the age of 26, on top of mastering their own letter, they would have gained approximate knowledge on the remaining 25. This was consistent practice in their pedagogical view of gradual development and the cohering of orthography.

For obvious reasons of guild privacy, I was not permitted to read the Liber Alephi, but the guardian of Q was kind enough to tell me select notions from their devotional text, doubtless taking care to omit a great deal so as not to subject the book to the eyes of the profane.

The Guildmaster's suspicion of me as a foreigner was waning, almost as though I had ceased to be of any alarming significance. His nonchalance trickled down to the remainder of the tribe who took very little interest in me, my travels, or the land from whence I came. In fact, they seemed to lack that bone of curiousity most others are born with, and so my incessant questions must have seemed odd, if not mildly offensive and exasperating. I more than made up for their signal lack of any astonishment while they regarded me like one would the presence of a chirping migratory bird.

I cannot reliably say just how many weeks I spent pacing those winding stone corridors and black sands, alighting in one workshop or another (they were all of homogenous size and contents save for the difference in letter). To say that I was permitted to observe their work is too formal an acknowledgement when, in fact, they took increasingly less interest in my presence. In each of the 26 workshops, all hewn in stone, there was a monumental letter (also of stone) in the centre announcing the workshop's charge. By the evidence of small stone chips strewn around these sculptures, the letter was always being refined and reshaped. A baffling array of instruments and measurement tables bespoke of perpetual modification and analysis. To say these people took letters seriously would be a crude understatement: for them, the letter was a religion, a way of life, and the reason for existence for which no higher purpose could exist. The fact that I had no trade in the letter placed me in the maligned position of being inferior.