Upon whose lock was written Peradventure...He was lying on the sofa, looking at the big ornithology book Louise had bought him for his birthday, when he noticed that the laminated cover had the impression of writing on it, invisible till it caught the light right. Someone had used the book to write a note on and the pen-nib had left its trace in the cover. The writing was clear, distinct, thirty or forty words, followed by what was looked like a signature, scrawly rather than clear. But he didn’t recognize the alphabet. He tilted the book, letting light slide over the rest of the front cover, over the whole of the back, but that was all he could see. He turned the book back and counted the ghost-words on the front cover. Thirty-six of them and a signature. It must have happened in the shop. Some foreign assistant writing a note, resting the paper on the book, not realizing the words would be captured by the cover, or not caring, because the note was trivial or the alphabet obscure. Georgian or Armenian or Syriac or something like that. No, not Syriac, that went like Arabic and the words seemed to be written left-right. He looked more carefully. Yeah, definitely left-right. He put the book on a table and got up from the sofa to fetch a pen and piece of paper. He’d copy the words down and find out what the alphabet was, what language they were written in. A little mystery to solve.A.C. Swinburne, “A Cameo” (1866), line 14.
The next day, when he was in the university library returning a couple of books, he took the piece of paper from his wallet and went to solve his little mystery. “It’s Arabic, isn’t it?” Louise had said without much interest when he’d shown her the paper. He hadn’t bothered explaining about writing direction. It wasn’t the sort of thing that interested her. A good book on alphabets, writing systems, that’s what he needed now. He looked at the library map near the photocopiers. Linguistics was on the third floor, so he took the lift. A new one had been installed since he last used it, with a dark red carpet and shiny metal ceiling and walls, dimpled so that his four reflections were wavery and imprecise. The buttons had a new lay-out too, arranged in a circle, not vertically, and they weren’t numbered, just had red dots. He pressed the button with three dots arranged in an inverted triangle. It reminded him of a face. An owl’s face. Two eyes and a gaping mouth. The doors closed silently, cutting him off from the bustle of the ground floor, then opened again a couple of seconds later on the shelves of the third floor, though the lift hadn’t seemed to move at all. Very smooth operation. He got out and crossed to the nearest set of shelves to see what class-marks its books had. 368.12 was on the first spine he looked at, but the book itself wasn’t labeled in English. Nor were its neighbors on left and right, above and below. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand, then back at the books. It was the same alphabet. Strange coincidence. But this must be a foreign language section, logical enough on the floor that contained linguistics.
But when he walked further on, he found more of the floor was devoted to books in the alphabet he had copied onto his piece of paper. Hundreds of books, thousands, too many for a language that must be fairly obscure. He reached the 400s, the linguistics section, without seeing any books in English. Had he made a mistake, come to the wrong floor? But why would a whole floor be devoted to books in a foreign language? And it did seem to be the whole floor: he walked on to the 500s and still he saw nothing in English. Maybe the university was taking in a lot of students from one of those Central Asian countries with lots of oil and had decided to devote a floor to them. Uzbekistan or somewhere like that. He pulled one of the books out from the nearest shelf, 516.13, and opened it, hoping to find some clue inside as to what the language was. Maybe the publication details were given in English or Russian, to help outside libraries catalog it. But no, there wasn’t anything when he looked at the front and back of the book. He fanned through the rest, complicated geometrical shapes jumping at his eyes as the pages flickered past. He stopped fanning and looked at one of the shapes more carefully. He thought it was a polyhedron, a hybrid one, its dozens of facets bristling with spikes like a surreal diatom or pollen-grain. He put the book back into its space and walked back to the lift. He pushed the floor button and the doors opened immediately, as though the lift hadn’t been called by anyone else while he was on the third floor. He walked inside and now all the buttons had three red dots on them, like the eyes and gaping mouth of an owl. He swore and pressed one of them, the one that had been in the same position as the ground floor button when he first entered the lift. The doors closed, then opened again a couple of seconds later on shelves of waiting books.