michaelmas '96 - Session 18

18. The Writing on the Wall


-- UNEXPECTED TENTACLE SESSION 18 --
--     THE WRITINGS ON THE WALL   --
--             (14/11/96)         --

	We stood maveling at the paintings, apparently some of the
earliest in existance from the style, but that would date them before the
development of the writen language. The Prof. conjectured at least 25
thousand years, possibly before the last ice age.
	Jeremiah was at least partially successful at translating the
sanscrit, but most of it seemed to be an illegible mess. The glyphs along
the sides jof the painting proved totally intractable, but resembled those
with which the paper was set in during our first visit to Eanston. John
looked puzzled, it was obvious what the glyphs said and he started
repeating phrases over and over again. William immediately started to copy
them down and Jeremiah muttered his Sanscrit vocab. When the trance
passed, the Prof had used up 20+ pages of his note book, the same phrases
repeated overe nad over again. The same littary style could be observed in
the Sancrit text, although it looked like the author had tried to see
which bits of the text refered to e=what on the painting and took the form
of questions and annotations rather than a direct translation.
Holding the wand and/or the mask produced a strange sense of similarity in
the painting. When the objects where there to compare it was obvious that
the squiggles represented them - in fact couldn't have represented
anything else. Time apparently passed us by when these object were near
the painting and a gleam could be seen momentarily from the painting -
this turned out to have been caused by an extremely thin coating of some
form of varnish, unscratchable by our knives (and therefore probably most
things.)

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