The Mysterious Departure of Professor Flanderdrack

I'm still not entirely sure what happened today, so I'll start with my second visit to Scarloe. I went back for another hour or so while the Train was unloading a few large crates of pickaxes.

Tourists are not allowed down in the mines, of course. The last thing the miners want is a constant crowd of people getting in their way. Instead, I went to the bookshop that sells what comes out of them.

Like nearly all the buildings in Scarloe, the bookshop doesn't have a real roof. There's no rain to keep out, after all; the only reasons to have buildings at all are warmth and privacy. Most of the buildings in the village are just walls with cloth stretched over the top. The villagers add extra layers in the Winter.

It was around noon when I went to the bookshop, so the sun was shining through the canvas ceiling. The whole shop was full of soft, brownish light that didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. Several other people (all of them passengers from the Train) were wandering through the shelves.

The books made in Scarloe are all different sizes; they have to be. No two pages from the mines are exactly the same size. The largest one ever found was almost six feet high. It hangs on the front wall of the shop, behind the counter. The smallest ones are the size of postage stamps. The books in the shop are sorted by size - like the Illegible Library in Sconth, nothing else makes sense - so the smallest ones have several shelves to themselves, at the back of the shop. The shelves are about three inches high; the books are slightly less than that, little leather-bound cubes the size of walnuts. The very smallest ones have one letter (or symbol, anyway) on each page.

The books grow steadily in size all the way to the front of the shop. At the very front are massive volumes the size of the "atlases" produced by mapmakers (a different way of filling entire books with nonsense, only in diagrams instead of writing). A few are even bigger than the Sconth Extended English Dictionary.

I didn't buy a book, of course. (What would I do with it?) All I did was flip through a few of them. I recognized very few of the languages in the creased and dust-stained pages. When I finally found one in English,* it stood out like a lighthouse on a dark night. Of course, I only understood the individual words, not the sentences they formed. Here's an example:

Unfortunately, when the frog got out of bed, it found that an eggplant had invaded its nest and stolen all its jewelry. This was a catastrophic occurence, for the frog's jewelry was the key to the box in which slept the kidneys of a very old fish, and not a drop of wine could be had to bring them back. It was most inimitable. After weighing the options on a small scale, the frog decided there was nothing to be dome but call in the camel passages to worm their way out of the loch. This would take time, though, and every second was a second that could have been spent playing the violin. There was simply no replacement for all that fur. Time could wait, but clocks are notoriously impatient when their lunch is on the line. That, then, was the state of things when the new year arrived in a stagecoach and dropped her teeth like snow over the city. The sewers froze overnight. Clams fled to the streets, clamoring for sausages to save them from the cold, but it was no use. They were all washed to sparkling sanitation before the pipes could say a word. Fingers would never have accepted such an impasse in their digits. Disaster loomed. Trains buckled their belts and settled down for a long Winter. Ice crept over the line and was punished. The frog hardly knew which handle to turn, because they were all misty in the half-dusk. Moldy spiders were no help. And worst of all, the jewels were still missing, for the sleet had kept them silent against their will. No one noticed. Come daybreak this evening, it will all end in tears. Mark my words. They are written in ink.
No good can come of this.
Limber.

Professor Flanderdrack was there as well, but he hardly stepped into the shop at all. He just went to the very first shelf inside the door, picked out a gigantic volume half as tall as himself - I assume he picked it for the cover, as he barely glanced at the pages inside - and bought it.

The Train left shortly after that. The Professor spent most of the rest of the day making more notes or calculations in his notebooks, which he packed neatly away in various suitcases when he had finished. The book from Scarloe was the only thing he left out. He then placed it on the floor, picked up all his luggage at once - no small feat by itself - and proceeded to stand on the book. He swayed slightly with the motion of the Train.

"Well," he said cheerfully, "it has been a pleasure to travel with you three gentlemen. I have enjoyed your conversation immensely. Remember to look for the Caribou Rotunda - it likes cheese. Wish me luck!"

"Good luck," I said, bewildered. Flishel said something that sounded equally confused. The sleeping passenger snored. There was a noise outside the compartment just then - the beginning of an impromptu game of sea-legs ninepins in the corridor outside, as it turned out - and I looked out for a second to see what it was. When I looked back, Professor Flanderdrack and his luggage had disappeared. The floor of the compartment was completely empty.

I still don't know what happened. I can guess, of course; perhaps the Professor found out how printed pages get into the ground beneath Scarloe, and perhaps he managed to turn that form of transportation to his own use. Perhaps he was pulled away to somewhere else like the words in an ambiguous novel. Perhaps it was something else altogether. The Omnipresent Telescope probably had something to do with it, if that was what he found in the Vanister Museum, and the book from the mines of Scarloe was obviously important. Unless it wasn't. In a few years, maybe everyone will be traveling by book. Maybe not. I suppose I'll never know.

I never did find out what he was a Professor of, exactly.



* One of the great unsolved mysteries of the page mines is how a geological layer thousands of years old, at the very least, can contain languages that have only been around in their present forms for a few hundred years. This is one of the main arguments used to support the theory that the mines are somehow getting words from somewhere else, like an enormous subterranean ambiguous novel that's completely lost its mind. It's also used to support the theory that the whole thing is an elaborate hoax.

Stone over Paper

Sure enough, the Train reached Scarloe this afternoon. I'm starting to wonder if Professor Flanderdrack is a Wayfinder. He's uncannily good at finding things.

I have no idea what he's doing here. He continues to explain the occasional theory; this morning, having finished whatever calculations he began last night, he explained the use of three-tower clockboard as a way of predicting the future.

(The complexity of the game, and the fact that no two boards are alike, apparently creates a mathematically unique situation that distorts time. This can be manipulated by expert players of the game, who can interpret their opponent's moves, the outcome of dice rolls, and the order of randomly shuffled cards to correctly predict the future. Experts can even use their own moves to pose questions. Unfortunately, any expert player of three-tower clockboard is, by definition, interested in only one thing: three-tower clockboard. Anyone skilled enough to use oracular strategy will inevitably ask the game a question about the game itself. The resulting paradox distorts time and can have almost any result; it often did two hundred years ago, during the height of clockboard's popularity. The almost daily transformation of overly curious clockboard players - and their opponents - into newts, trees, and small hills was what caused the game to go quickly and severely out of fashion for the next century, and also led to the loss of more or less all the players who really knew what they were doing. The art of oracular clockboard-playing has been lost for nearly two hundred years. This is probably for the best.)

Professor Flanderdrack remains completely silent, though, about what he's doing at the moment. He disappeared into the page mines of Scarloe today without a word of explanation.

No one really knows where the page mines came from.

To be specific, no one knows where the geological layer came from that led to the creation of the mines. (The mines are there because people dug them.) Several hundred feet below the surface of the Dustbowl, a dome-shaped mountain that rainclouds inexplicably avoid like a gardener avoids kudzu, is the Scriptorial Layer, a sedimentary layer made entirely of tightly pressed paper. The Layer was discovered almost a hundred years ago, when one of the many futile attempts to dig a well in the Dustbowl turned up something even better.

Practically every language on Hamjamser appears on the paper dug out of the mines. English, Sikelak, Carvendrone, Common Vreen, ancient Tetravanian, Aggali runes and Rampastulan hieroglyphs, all the variations on Shasta script... To date, the miners have only found eight pages that didn't have writing on them. They've held on to most of these. They're rarer than diamonds, after all; Scarloe is probably the only place on Hamjamser where you can make your fortune by finding a blank piece of paper.

The written pages, though, are what keep the village going. There's not much else on the Dustbowl - no water, no plants, and no animals, except what people have brought with them. All the water in the village comes from a pump that stretches up the side of the mountain from the nearest river. Before the pump and the page mines were built, no one remembers how anyone was able to live in Scarloe at all.

It's strange to visit the village in late Autumn. The weather is normal for November in the Railway Regions - the pump stops at night to avoid freezing - but Scarloe looks like a small piece of the Golden Desert (or would if everything wasn't gray). A place that looks like this ought to be baking under the sun. Instead, the weather is cool and breezy. There's even fog now and then.

In every way but one, the Dustbowl is a perfectly ordinary mountain. It's just that rain never falls on it.

Over the curve of the mountain, the mountains of the Railway Regions stretch away in every direction, looking perfectly normal: green from hemlock and fir and bottle-brush pine, with the occasional stubborn patch of orange. On top of the mountain is nothing but a blank expanse of gray stone. No normal drought ever dried a place out this much. Scarloe's drought has lasted for centuries.

There's not really much to do in Scarloe except mining. There are a few small farms, startling patches of green that wouldn't last a day without the pump; even with the pump, though, there's only enough water for six or seven of them. Most of Scarloe's food comes from outside. Plants spring up around leaks in the pipeline when birds or people drop their seeds in the right place. A strip of greenery and rust stains follows the pipe all the way to the peak, a tilted temperate oasis two feet wide.

The lack of water is generally thought to be why the pages are so well preserved. The mines are as dry as a bank vault. Rot, mildew, and bookworms are completely unheard of in Scarloe; they'd die of thirst before getting within a mile of the mines. Even so, after spending who knows how many centuries under a mountain, the pages are in amazingly good shape. The miners hardly ever find one that's too damaged to read. Most are slightly ripped, or stained, or missing a corner, but it's rare to find a page missing even a quarter of its words. Whatever left them there was surprisingly careful about it.

The miners spend every day digging pages out of the ground, then sell them to the village bookbinders, who stack them neatly and completely at random and sew them into books. The largest building in the village, besides the bindery, is the store that sells books from underground.

Unfortunately, none of the books make any sense. Most of the linguists and literary experts in the Railway Regions have tried to decipher the meaning of one page, even one sentence, but none of them have come up with any likely explanations for the writing. It's nonsense - neatly written, grammatically perfect nonsense, but nonsense all the same. The theories on the origin of the pages are as numerous as they are unlikely. I'm sure Professor Flanderdrack has one. A surprisingly widespread theory is that the pages were left by one or more giant bookworms, despite the complete lack of any tunnel shapes in the layers. Unfortunately, no one has ever actually seen a giant bookworm; the only indication of their existence is the fact that people believe they exist.

Of course, the fact that the mined books are incomprehensible doesn't stop people from trying. A group of authors and linguists called the Refinery has spent the last few decades buying as many mined books as possible. They insist that the books will all make sense if they can just get enough of them together.

If that's true, they've got a long way to go. No one's reached the edge of the Scriptorial Layer yet.