Pe as in pen, hard on the p, Dr. Randolph Elminster pursed his lips; la as in last, a dropping, breathy a; gic as in magic, firm and conclusive through tight teeth. Pelagic.
A black, briny word for the sea, more Proteus than Poseidon, a mid-Mediterranean shipbreaker storm glazed in the wide eyes of lanky potash heroes a thousand yearless years ago in Corinth, weary Corinth of King Sisyphus, white-sand Corinth of leather tourist boots following their Saint Paul, the high villa of the Mediterranean Marine Archeological Society keeping watch over her sinking walls under blue seas and skies.
Dr. Elminster pushed up his Ray-Bans. Ocean. Thalassic. Abyss. His veiled gaze fell over a bright port of painted ships in the Sea of Crete. Faraway gleaming, a seaplane from Istanbul splashed down, welling up the generative foam of Aphrodite. Abyssos, he mouthed. Bottomless. Words on a green university chalkboard scratched in a dusty chamber. A Greek formulation of the Hebrew tehom, the primordial waters; formless, faceless. A fragrant tweed sleeve passed behind. He brushed the line recof thinking away with his cigarette-bearing hand.
Pure absence. Not in this life. Wine-dark works as well today as it did then, and if we’re to be scientific, its pelagic.
He stood slowly, feeling twice his age under shady linens and the Corinthian summer sun, and arched his stiff sternum east in that wide, familiar pose which might have seemed to passersby less a gesture of surrendering peace and more of an invitation to debate. The empty symbology melted as he made his way for the port. More pressing than the traditional cosmologies ringing the Mediterranean Basin was the matter of a white jade tablet recently acquired by his friend and confidante Ibrahim Zaid, an artifact broker from the shore country of the near east. Though he would occasionally play into the Orientalist mystique of his profession at parties, Zaid was a direct, keen-eyed man quite outside the long shadow of Rudyard Kipling. His letter had been a concerning one, and Dr. Elminster was apprehensive about greeting him on the off chance it had been a bad joke, if he had torn the Society’s library upside down for nothing. It read:
Randy,
Hope you’re holding up well in spite of everything. Turks cracking down on Black Sea trade, Russian warships running drills out there. Don’t like it. Bad time to be in the history business, but isn’t it always?
I found something. May be relevant to Troy 1 research.
Object is a rectangular jade tablet measuring 21 x 44 x 3 cm. Remarkably intact despite composition, some chips and scratches. Pure, white jade like you’ve never seen. Near match for Ningshao deposits at a glance. One side covered in carved letters (technique uncertain) resembling an offshoot of Phonecian, obverse a grotesque chimera figure - sophisticated form of animal style - closer to later Siberian (?) forms. Easier to show you. Would dismiss as clever forgery but line of provenance is clear. Have papers + interviews.
Dig up everything you have on long distance trade routes + navigation 1000-2000 BC. Center on Turkey/Black Sea. Stay in Corinth I’ll be in last week of May.
I.Z.
And that was that. Dr. Elminster’s main concern in preparatory research had been the connection between literate Phonecians and the Chinese precious stone trade (he was not at all interested in visual art), a connection which failed to materialize in any meaningful capacity in Zaid’s space and timeframe. Furthermore, the size and quality of the stone described would have been nearly impossible and, more importantly, irrational to move from one side of the ancient world to the other. Such irrationality implied an unknown deity with a widespread cult, influential leaders, religious infrastructure and texts, an entire society hitherto unknown to history. If he were more clever he could find the knowledge gap into which these people and their jade tablet must fit. But he could not, and so he felt stupid.
Down and out he tumbled past curly heads he once identified with late medieval impressions of antiquity, when he was a young man in Greece for the first time, sensitive and brimming with awe. Each had been an Adonis in his own right then, now faded to neighbors and shopkeepers. He was not sure when that change had been effected, or whether it was an inner or outer change, or if it happened at all and perhaps instead he always saw as clearly as he did now. But he did possess the sort of spirit which recovers its sense of the extraordinary character of the world in time and with experience, so let us not begrudge his behavior now.
Mumbling broken apologies as he pushed his way through narrow streets, lines of force danced on a foxed map like a Victorian etching of battling octopi nearly representing the age-old divide between East and West, the notion of which made his present pursuit seem as infinitely indefinite as the arc of Zeno’s arrow, that luminous flight who does, as all experience proves, find her way from marksman to target in the fast-moving river of time, though the logic of each decomposed, static instant in time forbids it. The fatal fact of the arrow was, if he and Zaid were seeing clearly, no different from the fact of the jade tablet.
And what is theory but a broken mirror to the world? To an abyssos. A deepness eating our boundless energy. Thallasa, tehom, Tiamat. And darkness was over the face of the deep.
A different corridor now, different shafts of disclosing dust in the autumn sun. The days are long but the years are short, yet even in the quickness of years he turned and found that place so remote as to be scarcely identifiable with his own life and time, a high ceiling holding celestial aether transmuted to air, the breath of a numinal organ trembling in ponderous pulls each syllable of the Shem ha-Mephorash. Rise, child with your arched back low and stiff in the forbidden Apocrypha snuck in from the library across town, recite psalm, hymn, prayer from the right book as though you should know one from the other. Something stirs in the sacramental wine.
He opened his eyes. A skiff came to dock at the end of the pier; a little yellow cloud of pollutants drifting over flying ropes and bollards. Curly-haired Zaid in a blue button-down held a swaddle of white towels close to his chest. Eyes like precious pearls caught him behind thick, black frames like the secret compartments of a jewelry box. At once they were almost touching.
“Well, this is it, my friend. All or nothing,” said Zaid in a dry, sandpaper voice. He was ill, or had been ill, and the pale lines of illness and age were blooming under his skin. Dr. Elminster had the impression he might collapse any minute under the weight in his arms. “What have you found?”
“Ah, can I get your bags for you?” Dr. Elminster dodged, leaning left and right around his friend and the intense beams that seemed to radiate from his eyes and mouth, searching for a menial distraction.
“No bags,” Zaid said, “We had to leave everything in Turkey. There is one tape in my pocket and nothing more.”
“I see. Cigarette?” he offered as Zaid staggered inland, animated not by his own living will and supple muscles, but by the necrotic drive of a pupating maggot.
