The 22 Letters Read Free

pigeon.
    As his stomach filled his brain cleared. After all there was no great problem. The lumber teams had come up the mountain to cut the forty trees ordered by Resh. They had nearly completed the job, and then had abandoned the clearing, and instead of going down the mountain they had gone up.
    Why had they done it and where had they gone? There was no way of answering these questions yet. Aleph had heard that it was possible to cross the mountains by continuing upward from this valley, but it was a difficult pass and few had reason to use it. Beyond the crest of the range lived people who were no friends to Gebal. He had heard rumors of armies passing over the flat plains—Egyptians from the South, Assyrians from the East, Hittites from the North. But the people of Gebal were snug in their coastal city, protected by the great mountain wall. Why should they want to cross the pass?
    Why indeed? Beyond lay nothing better than slavery. And yet these log-men had apparently chosen to go. Aleph suddenly stood up. He would have to find out. It was no devotion to duty that turned his footsteps up the mountain, it was not heroism. It was just burning curiosity.
    If Aleph had known that he was as yet only halfway up to the top of the pass he might not have set off so lightly. The track was easy enough to follow, through the edge of the cedar grove, emerging the other side on to the slopes of a valley from where more and more high peaks could be seen. Skirting the edge of this valley, up another crest, over and down again before climbing steeply up the other side. Many times, as he paused for breath on a steep slope or stood on a crest appalled to see yet more rugged terrain appearing before him, he wondered whether he should not turn back. But as the deeper valleys began to fill with black shadows he knew that even if he did turn back he could not possibly reach the town by nightfall. He was in for a night on the mountain anyway, and he felt that he would rather pass it in the company of the loggers, whatever had happened to them, than spend it alone.
    Rather than puzzle vaguely about the mystery of the disappearing log team, and to save his mind from imagining wild and improbable fates for them, he tried setting himself the sort of problem which he preferred to think about, and it was this. The only clear message that had been left for him at the clearing had been made by the hooves of the stupid oxen. The prints in the soft soil said unmistakably: “We went this way.” Now if the unthinking oxen could leave this for him to read, why could not Kaph, the overseer, an intelligent and experienced man, have left some indication of why they had gone? Because Kaph could not write. Of course he could not. Nobody expected him to be able to write. Writing was a mysterious skill known only to priests and scribes. They spent many years learning the meanings of the hundreds of symbols and their combinations, and once they learned them they took good care that no part of their secret was shared by the common people. The very idea that a simple overseer of a lumberman should have any knowledge of writing was absurd. Blasphemous, even. Writing was for the stories of the gods, and the affairs of great kings who represented the gods on earth, not for tradesmen’s messages. So? So an ox could print in the ground a sign which anyone could read as “Gone this way.” But though a man had a burnt stick and a piece of white bark to hand, there were no signs that he could make that mean “Back tomorrow morning.”
    These thoughts took Aleph’s mind off the tiredness of his legs and the effort of his breathing. But they went no farther. He did not say to himself, “This is wrong,” or “Wouldn’t it be better if …” Indeed, alone up there among the abode of spirits, he felt uneasy when he remembered what he had told his young sister. Was that not impious? The gods might punish him for it.
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