by F
Lying in the cavern on my rocky exiled bed,
Restless with discomfort and thoughts of Ashur's fields
I'd so recently left; so littered with the dead,
All murdered by the Amorites;
I was awakened from my agitated slumbering
By scratching, slithering sounds from deep within the cave
Coming toward me lumbering.
Then in the sinking moon's reflected revenant light
I saw a glassine 7 jumble
Of twigs (like shatters of war-broken goblets bright).
A fragmented ghost moving
Seemingly sure, yet seemingly blind.
It made its cautious, fumbling, darting way,
Searching, with a clear intent to find.
But what it sought at first I did not know.
Nor what it was: A wrecked and wreckish thing,
Scuffing along, clacking with desire and woe.
It seemed collapsed, like battle-carrion,
Yet with a jaw serrated, large and strong.
The sight of it filled me with wonder and dread,
For it was greater than two hands long.
—Kanesh 8
As other accounts besides Kanesh's verify, what drew the klepsydra up from the depths was thirst. Most often the traveler saw nothing in the darkness and simply found himself robbed of his water supply the next morning, the creature having snatched and dragged it into the depths of the cave while the traveler slept.
But if he, like Kanesh, should see the klepsydra, the wise traveler drew back, risking thirst the next day rather than braving the translucent monstrosity. Other records stated that if hindered from its goal the klepsydra attacked without fear:
...and then did the demon, looking like evilly broken ice, launch itself upon me. It gashed my arm ere I could fling it off. I seized my flask and bag and fled outside, though the winds almost flung me from the cliffs. And even then—in spite of the mad zephyr's howl—I heard the creature scuttling after me. At last I bound my bleeding arm and leapt from one large boulder to another, so it could no longer easily follow my scent. I jumped and jumped again, then waited, exposed, hoping that the winds would blow away the clouds so that the stars and moon could show me if it followed still. When at last the sky cleared and I knew myself safe, I hid my water and made my cautious way back to the cave. I peered inside. The creature had returned to its home. It was lapping the ground where my blood had first fallen. 9
More extreme—yet apocryphal—anecdotes claimed that if an unaware traveler was not carrying a water supply, klepsydra attacked and killed them for their blood while they slept and then afterwards feasted on their flesh. Several caves found filled with skeletal remains were credited to such predation, but were more likely the results of local banditry, the myths perpetuated by the brigands themselves. While it is true that klepsydra can be aggressive and dangerous and may have caused the death of the occasional traveler, 10 its normal prey—other cave-dwelling animals—tend to be small, making serious attacks on entities as large as humans uncommon and unlikely.
In an ancient encounter with a klepsydra, if a traveler willingly relinquished his water and then followed the klepsydra, he was rewarded with a strange sight. If the water source was a goatskin bota, the animal punctured the leather with the tips of its jaws. If a metal or horn container, the klepsydra pulled and wrenched at it until the stopper or lid opened.
Then the klepsydra drank. As it drank it swelled, taking on a recognizably arachnidan form. Its abdomen grew until it resembled a perfect glass globe. The animal became so rotund that it could no longer move, its many legs 11 waving in the air in a helpless, languid manner as it succumbed into a sated torpor. A single account relates that once the klepsydra slaked its ferocious thirst it "sang," emitting ethereal chords of layered harmonics. 12
The random sightings of these creatures became the inspiration for the invention of the water clock when cave-bound travelers found themselves forced to stay in a cave over a period of several days and nights with an engorged klepsydra (they might find themselves trapped by a prolonged storm, or having to hide from searching enemies).
Whichever the case, the traveler could not help but notice the klepsydra' s swollen belly subsiding at a gradual and steady rate. At various times (there is ample evidence that the water clock was invented independently during different eras and in different places, but all near klepsydran habitats) travelers saw the relevance of the resemblance between the creature's abdomen and a blown-glass globe. When they returned to civilization they created water clocks based on the klepsydra' s survival strategy.
Ptolemaic scholars noted in Mouseion parchments that these invertebrates were native to Greece. Expeditions mounted in ancient times to furnish the Mouseion menagerie with live specimens found klepsydra deep within caves in the Meteora region of Thessaly. The collectors entered promising caverns at night and lured their quarry into traps with open jars of water.
The Mouseion records also alluded to sightings in North Africa, Syria, and certain locations in Saudi Arabia: arid, rocky locales pockmarked with deep grottoes, chasms, and caves.
The original Chief Caretaker logs that Dr. Paideuein discovered summarized the basic care of the creatures:
House individually. If placed together they will tear each other apart for food and especially for fluids.
Do not place in cages. Only enormous glass vats—covered with heavy glass lids sand-cast with small breathing holes—can withstand their mandibles.
If allowed to dry out to their normal desert state, they make for dangerous wards: They are fast, aggressive, and even in daylight hard to see, due to their transparency.
House in at least shaded environments, but preferably in near or total darkness.
Provide with large quantities of shine-water and sufficient food so they will maintain a docile and manageable globulousness. They are useful for pest control, since they can be fed any vermin up to the size of large rats.
Once she had translated the original Caretaker scroll (which pointed the way to other pertinent documents), Dr. Paideuein took her findings to the taxonomists.
They were astonished. Early in the excavation of the menagerie quarters, they had stumbled upon a sealed-off chamber filled with enormous, lidded glass beakers. The biologists had assumed the space simply an abandoned storage facility. Lights shined into the beakers had revealed them to be empty, except for what looked like splinters of glass at the bottoms of the jars.
Forewarned is forearmed. Keeping in mind their experiences with other species capable of surviving centuries in suspended animation (such as the vermiculaphibian and the pestilent pasquinade fly), the scientists carefully raised the lids of the glass jars mere millimeters, sprayed thin streams of water into the containers, and dropped the lids again instantly. And waited.
But the klepsydra had decomposed past all resuscitation.
Both disappointed and relieved, the biologists ran tests on the remains and on elements found to have precipitated on the insides of the jars.
Before the DNA results on the klepsydra came back, the lab tests on the jars furnished an explanation for the puzzling term found in the Chief Caretaker's records: "shine-water." The Chief Caretaker had conceived an ingenious method to monitor the creatures in spite of their transparency and in spite of the darkness of the habitat he had to provide for them. He infused their water with phosphors of one sort or another: pestled Luciferite, or pulverized diatoms, or sulphide of lime. This resulted in the klepsydra glowing in even the darkest chambers. Scrolls later discovered tell us that in ancient times the klepsydra display was one of the most often visited, by the romantically inclined as much as by scholars: lovers wishing for a thaumaturgically passionate (though eerie) rendezvous under the orbic luminescences.
This information—found, again, initially within a word—has also perhaps provided an answer to one of the great ancient mysteries: What was the source of illumination for one of the Seve
n Wonders of the World, that great lighthouse, the Pharos?
Even a relatively modest light source can be effective in a lighthouse, provided that a system of mirrors has been strategically placed to magnify its luminescence. Some of the contemporary scientists now delving into ancient Alexandria's secrets believe that several klepsydra were kept at the top of the Pharos, their glass enclosures covered during the day. When dusk fell, the lighthouse keepers pulled away the heavy wraps, exposing the klepsydras and their glow. The Pharos's mirrors amplified the wraithlike light a thousandfold and more, providing ample brightness for Alexandria's harbor, especially since it was cast outward from the Pharos's forty-story height.
As for the klepsydra remains, once the DNA panels had been run, they proved that the klepsydra do indeed belong to the class Arachnid. But they are members of the solifugids, 13 not spiders, and are therefore close relatives to the arthropods sometimes called wind scorpions and sometimes called sun spiders (though these active and common nocturnal desert predators are neither spiders nor scorpions).
All spiders are poisonous. The klepsydra are not. However, like their cousins the wind scorpions, they secrete a caustic digestive enzyme and liquefy their prey after killing it.
After Dr. Paideuein's revelations and their own subsequent researches, the biologists believe the klepsydra evolved away from the main branch of solifugids in the distant past when they chose lightless caves as their sole habitats.
Armed with this information, the I.A.S. (International Arachnida Society) has sponsored university and other invertebrate biology research organizations to investigate all the locations mentioned in the ancient texts, as well as any known wind scorpion habitats that overlap with cavernous environments.
Due to these efforts, klepsydra have been detected in Greece not only in the Meteoras, but also the Rhodope Mountains bordering Bulgaria and the northern end of the Pindus Mountains. Zoologists have gathered specimens from Morocco and other North African countries, as well as Afghanistan, Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. Subspecies were discovered near well-known New World solifugid sites: Arizona, New Mexico, the Mojave Desert in California (in the mine shafts of Boron), and the rocky deserts of northern Mexico.
Current inquiry focuses on how all these isolated populations arose. It is not known whether as multiple cases of parallel evolution from local wind scorpions, or as a single branching-away: successive generations spreading by subterranean means. If the latter is the case, klepsydra origins may predate the geological separation of South America from Africa.
The concept invites conjecture as to what sorts of tunnels may have once subterraneously connected the landmasses—perhaps for a while even after the two continents had divided, until the dropping chasms of the Atlantic wholly sundered them. And whether vestiges of these deep passageways still remain in either set of continents. According to the translations that we find in Dr. Paideuein's later journals, these speculations may have occurred to the ancients as well:
The concept of a vast underground connectedness did not merely intrigue the Mouseion ancients, it obsessed them. Associated with the word siraga (tunnel), we find: Ta sinora. Evgnomon. To taxiTHi. I tiHi. O progono. Pote. Pada. The bordering tunnel. The grateful tunnel. The journeying tunnel. The tunnel of luck. The ancestor tunnel. The tunnel of Never. The tunnel of Always.
Yet perhaps these allusions are not in regards to the tunnels of klepsydran origins. Perhaps they refer to an endeavor that took place within the Mouseion itself.
Subsequent excavations have broken through to unexpected layers of substrata. While historical events turned the ancient world away from the acquisition of knowledge as militant Luddites embarked on a campaign of destruction, the Mouseion constructed a separate underground complex in which to ride out the storms of that era's Zeitgeist. When the Christians began their rampage, the people of the Mouseion fled below, sealing away all clues to their whereabouts.
We do not know how long they remained there. The initial levels are so filled with archived wonders—including many of the Library of Alexandria's lost masterworks—that the excavators, scientists and scholars of The Great Endeavor are forced to proceed in glacial increments.
What is known is that there are untapped levels and levels. We do not know how far they descend. What happened to the residents? Did they build passageways extending far beyond Ancient Alexandria's boundaries, allowing them to leave, to escape? No such passageways have been detected...so far. Did they simply keep tunneling downward? We do not know. But although evidence of underground gardens, living quarters, and even modest husbandry have been discovered, no signs of human remains have yet been found.
Ironically, one of the few things we do know of is their source of illumination—how they were able to see, to live and work, to continue their research and studies in the darkness of their underworld fortress. The underground environment delves so far that it reaches into the aquifer locked deep within the bedrock beneath the sands of Alexandria. Pure fresh water abounds in underground streams and wells. In the high-ceilinged great rooms and gardens, hosts of water-sated, globular klepsydra hang, providing light as strong and beautiful as the day's.
Last heard from, Dr. Paideuein had abandoned all work on her Greek/English compendium. She is wholly absorbed in her new task: translating the texts found deeper and deeper within the Mouseion. The imprisoned ancient residents, isolated over what may prove to be hundreds of years, came to develop their own dialect. Dr. Paideuein—one of the few intellects capable of tracing and deciphering such dialects' linguistic evolution, has allowed herself to be enfolded by this mission. As she sits and deciphers the ancient texts under the klepsydras' glow, seeking the secret meanings found in the hearts of words, she has become an integral part of the Mouseion's origami.
I thalasa I skia. To stravroThromi. I vroHi episkevi. Meta, xana meta. I avgi skotinos. O anemos axona. Mia proskisi kliTharia. Mia thea katoichomai. I foni oratotita.
The shadow of the sea. The intersection dust. Repaired rain. Again, after again. Dark dawn. The axle of the wind. A locked invitation. Vanished view. Visible voice.
1 This volume's intended title, in Greek, translates verbatim into English as Indeed It Is All Greek To You. Of course Dr. Paideuein never intended such levity.
2 So as not to miss any expunged archaic words, Dr. Paideuein's main dictionary text reference was the unabridged 1951 edition of the Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, The World Publishing Co.
3 Two factors triggered this unearthing.
The first was an undersea exploration in the early 1990s by French archeologist Jean-Yves Empereur and Egyptian cinematographer Asma el-Bakri in the waters near the fifteenth-century fort of Qait Bey, itself long rumored to stand on or near the site of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world: the Pharos, a forty-story-tall lighthouse, said to have been illuminated by a mysterious and unknown source. During their dive, Empereur and el-Bakri found a treasure trove of columns and statues. Ancient Alexandria, at least in part, still existed beneath the waves.
The second factor was a building boom that overtook contemporary Alexandria a few years later. Construction unearthed the rest of ancient Alexandria—not lost at all, but sunken through earthquakes and subsidence, waiting in silence beneath the underpinnings of the modern city.
4 Dr. Nepenthe Threnody, a Greek Professor of Antiquities at Cairo.
5 She was fortunate in this regard. She could just as easily have been appointed to a section of the Mouseion dedicated to other pursuits, such as the compendiums of maritime engineering; or the vaulted athenaeum containing the musical scores of a dozen vanished nations; or the archives of transcribed far-eastern folklore, tales already venerable before the Ptolemys' reign.
6 It must be noted that the words Dr. Paideuein references in her journals have been translated into English not only from the Greek Cyrillic alphabet, but updated to contemporary Greek as well and honed down to a single word from a translator's
choice of many. The word for rabbit, as just one example, can be translated as kuneli, cuniklos, kuniklos, koniklos, kouniklos . And those are only the words for rabbit starting with kappa, reproducing as closely as possible Dr. Paideuein's researches. There are other terms for rabbit that do not begin with kappa, of course, such as dasupous .
7 The glass-like appearance of a living animal must have terrified and seemed miraculous to ancient peoples. We know now that isolated, cave-dwelling species often evolve into sans-pigment states and even near-transparency.
8 A testimony in verse by the Akkadian poet Kanesh (not his real name, but rather the name of the village in upper Akkadia from whence he came), who at the time was returning home from the overthrow of the city of Ashur by the Amorites, c. 2150 B.C. The translation from the original and long-lost cuneiform tablets provided courtesy of the Mouseion Archives, Division of Akkadian and Sumerian Records.
Here again we find layers of tucked and folded words, for the original had been translated into Yazilikaya Hittite; then to Anatolian Phrygian, c. 700 B.C.; and finally into Greek, c. 600 B.C. Nonetheless it is considered an accurate translation, since the texts all remained physically and culturally within the Anatolian region until a copy of the final translation made its way to the Mouseion.
9 text attributed to Mikros of Thessaly, c. 350 B.C.
10 Most likely only if a klepsydra' s initial attack happened to cut through an artery, or if a traveler—in the process of fleeing—injured himself to the point of immobility.