bookish linguistic skills into operation.
The Horns of the Ox would have to refer to a fairly prominent landmark reasonably close to the old Babylon. Dakkuri probably would have chosen a natural landmark as opposed toa man-made one, because he could not have known how long it would be before this Serpent piece would be dug up.
For a few hours he pored over his map texts, but he realized that nobody knew the ancient landscapes better than his own wife. Her studies of ancient cities gave her an encyclopedic knowledge that he now needed.
Desperately.
Murphy finally tracked Laura down in the faculty lounge. “Honey, you’ve got to get out all your books and maps. I think I’ve found the location of the Serpent.”
“Murphy, really, you figured out where the Serpent is?” Instantly, Laura shed her counselor’s cloak and was one hundred percent archaeologist.
“Well, it was really Dr. McDonald. And it’s only the clue to where the first piece of the Serpent is hiding. According to her, the scroll is a kind of Chaldean treasure map, with the Serpent piece as the treasure.”
“How exciting!” Laura said. “But where is it?”
Murphy knelt down and showed Laura where he had written
The Horns of the Ox
and sketched out several rough pencil drawings of landscapes that could have inspired that nickname. They all had two high vertical points curved like horns, straddling a mound of land that could be seen as the ox’s skull. “This is about as far as I got. The truth is, I need your ancient-map-reading skills. It’s been a while since Dakkuri wrote down the directions, and I think the neighborhood’s changed a little in the meantime.”
Laura laughed. She took Murphy by the hand and they started off down the hall.
“I don’t know, Murphy,” she said, shaking her head. “Why is it men just can’t read maps?”
As soon as he’d shown Laura the partial translation of the scroll, she had gone into overdrive. Within minutes their already cluttered living room had become a stormy sea of paper, as maps, reference books, and computer printouts had been laid out on the floor. Laura sat in the middle of the chaos, grabbing maps, throwing them aside, scribbling furious notes while she hummed a tuneless ditty to herself.
As she put it, it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was like trying to reconstruct a two-thousand-year-old haystack, figuring out where each individual piece of hay had originally fit before being bumped around by a couple of millennia of winds, floods, and earthquakes—and then trying to find the needle.
Dakkuri’s directions—assuming Murphy and Isis had correctly deciphered the scroll—to the final hiding place of the Serpent’s tail had been pretty specific. Laura gave a more refined interpretation to Horns of the Ox than Murphy’s crude sketches, saying it most likely referred to a particular geographical feature—probably a curved ridge ending in two sharp promontories. Maybe with a big hump of rock or a prominent hill lying behind it—the “body” of the ox. And the whole thing was likely to be visible from some distance, so the surrounding area might well have been relatively flat.
But the landscape Dakkuri had had in his mind’s eye was ever-changing. Sea levels advanced and retreated, erosionmoved hills around like pieces on a chessboard, the courses of rivers and waterways could be diverted, turning desert into pasture and vice versa. And on top of that, earthquakes could shake things up like a kaleidoscope, totally changing the picture from one year to the next.
To see things the way Dakkuri had, it was necessary to reverse the process. To somehow look at the modern landscape and see the ancient one beneath.
Such a task required an uncanny ability to read relief maps in three dimensions, a detailed knowledge of ancient geography, and an intuitive sense of geological transformation through time—not to mention a kind of sixth sense that you couldn’t put
The Horns of the Ox would have to refer to a fairly prominent landmark reasonably close to the old Babylon. Dakkuri probably would have chosen a natural landmark as opposed toa man-made one, because he could not have known how long it would be before this Serpent piece would be dug up.
For a few hours he pored over his map texts, but he realized that nobody knew the ancient landscapes better than his own wife. Her studies of ancient cities gave her an encyclopedic knowledge that he now needed.
Desperately.
Murphy finally tracked Laura down in the faculty lounge. “Honey, you’ve got to get out all your books and maps. I think I’ve found the location of the Serpent.”
“Murphy, really, you figured out where the Serpent is?” Instantly, Laura shed her counselor’s cloak and was one hundred percent archaeologist.
“Well, it was really Dr. McDonald. And it’s only the clue to where the first piece of the Serpent is hiding. According to her, the scroll is a kind of Chaldean treasure map, with the Serpent piece as the treasure.”
“How exciting!” Laura said. “But where is it?”
Murphy knelt down and showed Laura where he had written
The Horns of the Ox
and sketched out several rough pencil drawings of landscapes that could have inspired that nickname. They all had two high vertical points curved like horns, straddling a mound of land that could be seen as the ox’s skull. “This is about as far as I got. The truth is, I need your ancient-map-reading skills. It’s been a while since Dakkuri wrote down the directions, and I think the neighborhood’s changed a little in the meantime.”
Laura laughed. She took Murphy by the hand and they started off down the hall.
“I don’t know, Murphy,” she said, shaking her head. “Why is it men just can’t read maps?”
As soon as he’d shown Laura the partial translation of the scroll, she had gone into overdrive. Within minutes their already cluttered living room had become a stormy sea of paper, as maps, reference books, and computer printouts had been laid out on the floor. Laura sat in the middle of the chaos, grabbing maps, throwing them aside, scribbling furious notes while she hummed a tuneless ditty to herself.
As she put it, it wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was like trying to reconstruct a two-thousand-year-old haystack, figuring out where each individual piece of hay had originally fit before being bumped around by a couple of millennia of winds, floods, and earthquakes—and then trying to find the needle.
Dakkuri’s directions—assuming Murphy and Isis had correctly deciphered the scroll—to the final hiding place of the Serpent’s tail had been pretty specific. Laura gave a more refined interpretation to Horns of the Ox than Murphy’s crude sketches, saying it most likely referred to a particular geographical feature—probably a curved ridge ending in two sharp promontories. Maybe with a big hump of rock or a prominent hill lying behind it—the “body” of the ox. And the whole thing was likely to be visible from some distance, so the surrounding area might well have been relatively flat.
But the landscape Dakkuri had had in his mind’s eye was ever-changing. Sea levels advanced and retreated, erosionmoved hills around like pieces on a chessboard, the courses of rivers and waterways could be diverted, turning desert into pasture and vice versa. And on top of that, earthquakes could shake things up like a kaleidoscope, totally changing the picture from one year to the next.
To see things the way Dakkuri had, it was necessary to reverse the process. To somehow look at the modern landscape and see the ancient one beneath.
Such a task required an uncanny ability to read relief maps in three dimensions, a detailed knowledge of ancient geography, and an intuitive sense of geological transformation through time—not to mention a kind of sixth sense that you couldn’t put
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