I remembered watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos as a kid. I remembered the first episode, narrated in Sagan’s calming voice, lamenting the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. All the knowledge of the ancient world, said Sagan, was within those marble walls. Its burning was a great tragedy, and a warning, letting us know that we must never let it happen again.
I spent many hours reading up on the Library of Alexandria as a kid, inspired by this episode of Cosmos. I learned about the city named after Alexander the Great, and the library that came to live in that city. I learned about how it was created, sustained, and nurtured over many generations, until it became the stuff of legends. I learned that there were all sorts of theories behind the library’s destruction. From random fires, to conquests by Julius Caesar, successive Roman Emperors, and others. A slow decline mirroring that of the city itself, or perhaps a series of clandestine thefts, or purges based on puritanical religious beliefs.
In high school, I learned about the House of Wisdom in medieval Baghdad. Like the Library of Alexandria, the House of Wisdom had been a great center of learning and a repository for all the knowledge in the world. Made possible because of a tiny battle in the mountains of Central Asia, where a squabble between local tribes stretched the boundaries of two large empires—one Middle Eastern and one Chinese—and made them touch tips. One small military victory, which led to the capture of a few artisans and workers, helped the technology of paper spread West, all the way to Baghdad, spurring on a movement for translation, consolidation, and creation of knowledge across every conceivable field of learning. Somehow, finding out that the Library of Alexandria had not been an outlier, and that humanity seemed to want to collect and pass on its knowledge to future generations so badly that it would make not one, but two great libraries, made me incredibly hopeful. It wasn’t unreasonable to say that the image of these two great houses of knowledge helped motivate me to study as hard as I could, which got me into the college of my dreams.
But in that college, I learned that the Great Library of Alexandria, that amazing bastion of learning, that unparalleled repository of knowledge, that romantic analogue for humanity’s yearning to know more than it could ever know in one lifetime, was probably not real. Or at least, it was never what I had thought it was. It was not as grand as it was made out to be, its loss never representing the fall of humanity into the darkness of ignorance, as much as Carl Sagan had led me to believe. No, the library of Alexandria was probably two separate collections, consisting mostly of documents and bureaucratic records, with most of its ‘knowledge’ being passed down through word of mouth or tradition, anyway.
And the House of Wisdom was worse still. There was barely any evidence for its existence at all. If it had existed, it would have been as a private library of sorts for the rulers of the city. The translation movement, although large and influential, was probably spread out throughout the medieval city of Baghdad or even other cities in the region, and did not center around the House of Wisdom. Even its destruction at the hands of the Mongols was disputed. Baghdad did not fall to Genghis, but to one of his descendants. By this time, the Mongols also collected knowledge, and would have tried to steal and preserve books, rather than destroy them.
Yet, an image from the infamous story of the destruction of the House of Wisdom came to my mind. Narrated many years after the fall of Baghdad, and therefore unreliable and untrue, this account and its imagery had always been a haunting one to me. Like Sagan’s image of the burning library, the image invoked a grand sense of loss: a river turned black with ink, its surface so thick with books one could walk their horse across it.
I stooped low, pressing my hands on the surface of the river. It was solid, like congealed blood. I brought my fingers away, and saw them covered in fibers and hair. As far as the eye could see across this large, flat river, the surface was filled to the brim with scrolls. Scrolls made of monster hide, plant fibers, and other materials that I had not seen before. Little islands of texts, like blood clots, scattered across the surface. Only to sink into the river slowly, underneath my gaze. I stood frozen on the banks of the river as the rest of the army rushed forth. They were running into the city next to this river, with everyone but Kelser shouting for help and trying to coordinate a search. A few people tried to fish out the scrolls from the river, but they were dragged away by their superiors to the city, to mount a search and rescue operation. Kelser was saying something to me, but I couldn’t hear him. Eventually, he ran inside the city as well.
Sitting on the banks of the river reminded me of my last day on my Earth. It had been darker then, and colder. I’d had thoughts in my head, muddled but many. Now my mind was clear, but felt muddled just the same.
I was reminded of the library where I’d spent many a night, working hard on homework and other assignments. The smell of old books, of knowledge recorded by people who had died long before your parents were born. Musty, comforting, familiar, like an old coat or your childhood home.
Eventually, I picked myself up and looked at the city. A massive fire was ravaging it in every direction. Humans and demons tried to put it out, but nothing was happening. I saw Kelser focusing on looking for survivors, and thought to myself that he must have been shaken by the city and the river, too. Why else would he forget to do what I was about to do?
I stepped forward, putting the river out of my sight. I raised my hands, took a deep breath, and began pouring my energy into a spell. Clouds roiled, thunder rumbled, and the first drops of water fell on my cheek. The heavens opened up and a mass of water slammed into the city, vanquishing the fire and dissolving the smoke. The water hit my hair and doused my own confused, inflamed emotions. I turned around.
A wave of ashen water, brackish and full of soot, pushed the glut of scrolls downriver. I bit my lips and began using my magic in a frenzy. Magic hands pulled soggy monster hide out of the water while jets of water shot out scrolls onto the banks. It felt futile bringing a few dozen of them out when the river relentlessly pushed the rest forward, propelled by the rainwater that I had caused myself, but somehow I did not want to stop, to think, to find a rational way to save everything.
When the clouds cleared, the river was clear and gentle. Its banks were a soggy mess. My own body was aching, my head hurt, and I collapsed to the ground, breathing deeply but slowly. Kelser came over to tell me that they never found any survivors. But they did find the first signs of resistance that we had found so far in our excursion into the Republic.
Broken wood, splintered and smashed, lay around a door. Inside, markings of ink, untreated hide, and rolls of unfinished scrolls.
I sat beside Kelser on the banks of the now clear river. Collecting my thoughts, waiting for the army to move again in the morning, I sat silently. Kelser was eating meat on a stick. I ignored his munching, closed my eyes, and relived this awful, awful day. I felt like I had to say something, a quote from another world, that might not make sense to Kelser, but would make me feel better:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. One glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that people are capable of working magic."
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