A rara find, mylittlemagicshop.com
Afterwards Jonathan was shown to a bare, narrow cell in the back of the temple. It was a guest-room containing only a simple cot, a mat, a chair and a small table with two candles on it, already lit. That it had a small window cut into the stone wall, overlooking the hills behind the town and letting in the night breeze was remarkable, for most of the priests' quarters were windowless. The night was always something to be shut out of sight and mind, as a thing that could not be illuminated, and therefore evil.
In every other way the room was typical. The austerity wasn't even noticed. You might say that austerity was the keynote of this era, for the simple reason that the destruction of all ornament and science had been the anthem of earlier years.
After gazing into the darkness awhile and thinking over the events of the day, Jonathan laid down on the narrow bed with a heavy sigh. He realized that he had been a fool to overlook the matter of his staff, that he should have abandoned it and played the pauper if he’d wanted to be treated like a criminal. But he always seemed to overlook such things.
This world was too strange for him. It was beyond his power and manner of reasoning. His thoughts drifted back to the cellar he’d discovered by pure chance, the strangeness of it, an untouched relic of the past, and the odd circumstance of him, another relic, finding it. He’d left it too hastily he reflected, and would like to go back there. He thought about how he should provision himself for such a trip, and in the midst of these deliberations he fell asleep.
In the morning, after a private breakfast and then public prayers, he announced to his host his intention to set out that very day on a long pilgrimage across the desert. He said that if they would provision him, he would report their kindness in the Capitol and use his influence to aid in any business they might have there. This was bribe enough and a burro was quickly brought out and saddled with food for a month, along with a tent and cooking implements. New sandals and a heavy cloak completed the deal.
Jonathan waited in the temple courtyard while the supplies were collected, blessing the priests one by one by rank, when the old priest came up to him with the glad tidings that after an investigation the two culprits had been found and had confessed their guilt. If he could stay another hour he would witness their public execution.
Jonathan was a little shocked at this news. He begged humbly to be excused from such a sight, saying that the journey ahead was the only thing on his mind and that the events of the day gone by were best forgotten, as their religion dictated.
This fine sounding detachment duly impressed all those present. But to honor their guest they hurried all the more to build a pyre in the square and convene the town. When he set out from the front gate of the temple there was already a thick crowd of people to pass through. He was just leaving town when they kindled the fires. Everyone there thought it great holiness on his part that he didn’t look back, while they all gaped and shuddered at the blaze.
The truth was that the fat bureaucrat, after a long night of questioning, had denied ever seeing anything on the neck of the visitor, even after many brandings with hot irons. This contradicted Jonathan's assertion, and lying was a capital offence. The secretary on the other hand, being questioned in an adjoining room of the temple basement, freely admitted to having taken and swallowed the pollution. For this he was scorched many times, especially about the mouth and throat, for the contagion of the thing, and uttered nothing comprehensible thereafter, only declaring a fervent wish to be purified, by his looks and cries.
The day was still cool as Jonathan set out over the hills in a north-easterly direction. He decided not to follow the coast the way he’d come. He worried that the townspeople might follow him a little ways and he’d told them that he would be heading east. He could lose them in the hills without difficulty and would even save time by cutting this diagonal course, provided he could find the place. But he didn't doubt of that. He’d noted the landscape carefully and after a decade of wandering remote regions, had sharpened his skill in getting places.
No one followed and by midday he was peacefully alone. He hadn’t travelled with a pack animal before but found this a pleasant change. He could talk to the animal as he went along and with comfortable sandals on his feet, no load to carry and the meandering pace of the burro, he relished the comparative luxury of the journey. It put his mind in a pleasant mood. Between the one-sided banter he shared with the beast he recalled various scenes from his past, with a greater fondness than usually accompanied such thoughts.
"So now I'm growing senile, talking to animals and doting on the past. I guess I've reached old age despite all my efforts to avoid it. How strange to want to die one day and live the next. 'Vita dum superest, bene est.' 'Life, while it remains, is good' and this at the end of a poem detailing life's miseries."
It was at this moment that the thought first occurred to him to write a memorial of his strange life. "Why not" he thought, "I've already broken the ice. They can steal and chew up a note well enough. Let's see them try to swallow a whole, fat book of my writings, or deny that it's there. I'll knock the fools on their heads with it and scatter the leaves to the winds and sink the whole town in sin."
The idea engrossed him and grew in scope the more he thought on it. "Here I am by training an historian, cut off in early career by plagues, revolutions and religious fanaticism, condemned to silence, a witness to the burning of my books, all books, all history. Yet I’m a witness to it, and if I'm to be true to myself, a recorder of it. It's up to me to keep the tradition alive. They should have killed me, those fools. Now they'll have to read me. Even if they don't I'll still write it and make copies and place them so that someone in saner times will come across them, if there's enough ink."
This was the only hitch to the plan that he could see. He would have to settle for whatever writing implements the cellar afforded. Maybe there were more pens or pencils there that he hadn't seen. He regretted his haste in leaving the cellar so soon and not making a thorough search of such a rare find. "But no matter," he thought, "I'll be back there a day from now."
The paper, he thought, would not be a problem. He remembered that he’d torn his sheet out of a whole notebook, and besides, if that ran out there was plenty more in the world. Blank sheets were everywhere, framed and hung up as the perfect symbol of the new faith, the most immaculate message, the single yet sufficient icon of the Church, holy miniatures of the one great canvass that started it all.
Not a single sheet had been manufactured in the last twenty years, but this was one of the few items that escaped the destruction of the revolution. Reams and reams of white paper were treasured up in every town and city. It was sacrilege to harm them. When any old sheet became soiled through handling or brown with age it had to be ceremoniously destroyed and replaced. And so great stores of paper were still extant.
Dusk descended upon Jonathan and his burro as they slowly trudged over desolate hills and deserted valleys. He’d been following a meager stream the last hour in hopes of finding a spot of white grass for his companion to graze upon while he rested. There were no predators in these parts, only a few wild dogs that dared not approach humans.
When Jonathan finally did come to some grass he made camp and built a small fire, more for company than any practical use. After dinner he sat by the embers, reclining and feasting his eyes on the unholy spectacle of the black night. It was one of those rare moments of thin cloud cover. A few stars sparkled dimly through the haze.
It struck him that such glimpses of the real sky were becoming more frequent lately, that the thick, white overcast that had enshrouded the earth the last three decades was now thinning. He took this as a good omen and hoped that the strange shroud that had blighted people’s minds all these years might also be wearing thin, that nature and sanity might again burst forth like the sun’s bright rays and resume their former glory.
With morning came a thick overcast, but Jonathan found his bearings as usual from the dimly perceptible sun. He set out straight to the north this day, hoping to recognize a group of three hills in a row, for halfway down the western slope of the furthest one, beside a huge oak tree that raised its old head above a dense expanse of briers, lay the ruins of the cottage.
He’d discovered these ruins by pure chance. For months he had slowly trekked along the southern coast, skirting the great inland desert. When he learned from some fishermen that he was approaching the western edge of the continent, tired of beaches, he decided to head inland and vary the scenery, travelling in a north-western direction across the low hills until he again hit the coast. He provisioned himself at a coastal town, gathered all he could of the geography of the region and set out into the wilderness not with any enthusiasm but with the dry determination of a hardened wanderer. He was a friend to solitude but it was a friendship of convenience and habit, born of the disgust he felt for human commerce.
On the afternoon of the seventh day of this trek he reached the last of the three hills and noticed a flock of birds pass overhead and settle on a tree a quarter mile up the hillside. He needed water and thought there might be a spring nearby, so he pushed his way up through the thicket of thorns until he reached the canopy of the tree. He found his spring right there. Its waters gushed out of a rock wall behind the tree, filled a large basin of stone and then overflowed and trickled away down the hill. The rock wall was smooth, defeating the encroachments of undergrowth, and the basin, at table height, was fed from a fissure right above it, so curious a sight that he wondered if man had a hand in it.
He decided to camp here overnight, taken by the beauty of this spring in an arid wilderness. He followed the little brook down the hillside and found in its valley a whole grove of trees and cool, fresh grass underfoot. Then, winding back up the hill on what appeared to be a trail, he discovered the ruins of a house, with some flooring and remnants of walls on a small plot of level ground cut into the hillside. Most of this was covered with brush except for the central floor. As he examined it more closely in the failing light he noticed that none of the structure had been burnt, as was usual with ruins. It was decayed with age. He laid out his bedroll on the old floor and took a few bites of dried fish before he fell asleep.
It was in the morning as he was gathering up his bedroll that he noticed the hinges beneath him. In a moment he uncovered a latch and a cloud of dust flew up in his face as he disturbed the air of the cellar. It settled in a minute. He peered down where the daylight penetrated. It appeared to be a small room, perhaps twelve by twelve feet. The dim forms of boxes overflowing with objects littered the floor. More visible, directly past the narrow staircase was a chair and an old desk against the far wall. Upon the desk there seemed to be scattered papers and a lamp, all thickly covered with dust.
He realized right away that the cellar was unclean, full of contraband and criminal to enter. From its isolation it must have been overlooked by the rovers who made it their mission to rid the world of the evil relics that polluted and plagued the past. He’d never come across such a treasure before. Sure he’d found stray articles, scraps and debris of the former age that still washed up on beaches, but never an untouched room such as this.
But in that first fit of excitement he focused all his thoughts on using this discovery for his pet project, viz., of doing himself in. His life had been so full of misery and loss and half-imaginary persecution that he had, over the years, fallen into the habit of nursing a resentment towards his own continued existence. He knew he was incapable of ending his life by his own hand. So he often played tricks in his mind of devising ways of making it necessary for someone else to do the job for him. Such roundabout ploys had backfired in the past. But here he immediately saw the potential for another suicide scheme.
So without hesitation he descended the creaking steps, found the pen and paper he expected, scribbled his mad note and left, putting the room and all its contents out of mind until his plan burst like the bubble that it was.
Now he would revisit this cellar with a better purpose. In the late afternoon he spotted the familiar line of hills from another hilltop. He camped in a valley to reach his destination early the next day. He didn’t want to reach it that night. He felt the thrill of a boy ready to explore a new place, or open some presents, and he wanted to do that the moment he got there.
Next morning he was again setting foot on the creaky steps. The dim light from the hatch poured into a dust-filled room. He tried not to unsettle it too much and stood motionless while his eyes adjusted to the dark. In a state of tingling excitement he focused and then discerned the objects of his heart's desire. In several piles in one corner of the floor and then along some low shelves behind the steps were ranged rows of books. It annoyed him that he’d failed to notice them before.
He went to the shelves and handled one greedily. A fog of dust flew up and made him cough. So he carried them up by the armload and deposited them in stacks in the open air. He took up everything he could find, the lamp, the papers on the desk, the contents of its drawers. He found a few boxes of items besides these, shoes and rotting clothes and a large cupboard full of canned food, but he didn’t bother with that for now.
Without much trouble he deduced this must have been both a storage room and a study for some long-gone settler. It was probably dug into the hillside as a cool retreat from the midday sun. It must have been the first thing built, the desk couldn’t have passed through the narrow hatchway. Then the house was built on top of it, pretty much obscuring it from notice. "There might be quite a few of these overlooked caches scattered about," he thought, "good news for mankind, and for me."
He went back up the steps to examine his treasures. As he raised his head above the flooring, what a feast greeted his eyes! There were colors there, the whole spectrum in the faded reds and blues and yellows of the book covers. He hadn’t seen such a glow of colors in almost thirty years, harmless colors.
For a while he merely fingered the books, dumbstruck, sitting between the stacks of them. Then he began going over the titles and sorting them in separate piles by subject. The majority were books about husbandry, veterinary works and agriculture. A few contained old plates whose colors were still fresh and striking. His eyes lingered over these a long time. There was one that especially detained him. It was a picture of several black and white cows grazing on the greenest pastures of grass. In the background stood a trim, red barn, above which stretched an azure sky flecked with innocent clouds. At the bottom of the picture the inscription read: "Dairy farming in New England".
Besides this there was a stack of cheap novels, obscure and dated things. But in the pile of twenty or so there were also a few good ones, a Steinbeck and a Hemingway. There were some school books of math and science, an English reader and a high school history which he singled out. Finally there were two far greater finds, as far as Jonathan was concerned. The first was an atlas of the world, with color plates, circa 1980, and all the names of the now nameless places. The second was a single volume of Toynbee, half of his abridged "Study of History", a valuable guide to civilizations, spanning most of recorded time. "With this" he thought as he took it up, "I can pass my days. I could spend years filling up its outline from what I remember, and slowly restore a great part of history."
He sat there doting on this project for a long time. He was all alone, in the middle of nowhere and he knew it. He began reminiscing on a night some twenty-five years past when he was a young man at the university. It was another night of riots and the first on which they dared transgress the boundaries of his university.
