The Black Swamp: Winged Inanna

Part One

There have been a few inquiries on my tutor, Professor Leonard Adelson's recently announced retirement from the Institute of Assyriology at the University of Cato. It was not a very unusual decision, considering that my dear tutor has approached his seventies. Retirement at this age might be regarded by some as premature for someone of his academic establishment, but it is still a fully understandable situation.

As a doctoral student, fellow researcher and personal friend of his, however, I have been worried about his well-being ever since he came back from a dubiously secretive field trip that he didn't mention to anyone before his sudden announcement of retirement about two months ago. I asked to pay him a visit during the Vorlesungsfreie Zeit but he turned me down, claiming that he needed an undisturbed respite with a phone call. He sounded a bit weak but determined, so I had to oblige. Afterwards, I have not heard from him for almost two weeks. He had not answered his phone or telegram anymore. It isn't easy for a senior person like him to live alone in a small town such as Cato in Germany. On the twelfth day of his disappearance, I made up my mind to leave my position at the Humbolt University in Berlin temporarily to seek him out personally. Just before my departure, however, our faculty at Humbolt received a package from him which was addressed to me. It was an old-fashioned notebook. A short and tersely written note was attached to the first page, also addressed to me.

Dear William, I am in a place where no one would be able to find me. I have found peace. Please do not come for me. If you wish to know what happened, inquisitive that you are, read this memoir.

The content of his memoir itself, I must admit, led me to believe that my poor old tutor had suffered from some kind of schizophrenia or other form of mental illness which bereft him of his once brilliant mind of reason and sense. It was mostly about his expedition, along with several other prominent figures in Assyriology, to visit a personal collector of cuneiform tablets in a small town near the border of West Germany and Netherlands. The events narrated in his notebook appeared to be so terrifyingly hallucinative and unfathomable that the only rational conclusion would be to deem it a nightmare of a person whose mental state has lamentaly taken a severe toll.

Nevertheless, I was not ready to be carried away by this most obvious assumption. Some of the academic details described here could not be fabricated by someone who had entirely lost his mind. Out of my respect and understanding of Professor Adelson, this led me to question my own perspective on this problem. I held onto this notebook for a few nights, sitting at my fireplace after my wife and children went to sleep, contemplating on the unspeakable and crazy aspects of these possibly most disturbing words I have ever received from my tutor. Gradually, my insomnia encouraged me to dare to take Professor Adelson's viewpoint and presuppose that they were not fantasy altogether but contained bits of truths, weaved between those seemingly ridiculous statements during his academic escapade.

Anyhow, here is the whole chain of events that he, supposedly, faithfully reproduced after that nightmarish odyssey of his:

If chances ever come, I might wish to publish this summary for the events that have happened to me recently. But for now, I intend to keep this only as a memoir for myself, since what I have experienced in the past days have been ultimately unsettling and nearly destroyed my will to trust my own basic logical judgment. Such unchecked hysteria within my words certainly were not suited to be made public, since I would be quickly deemed a lunatic and then kept away in some asylum for the rest of my life.

Let me recount the whole story from the beginning, from where we received a sudden invitation from Professor Kai Lesch.

Prof. Dr. Kai Lesch had been an accomplished and well-known scholar in the field of Assyriology, especially regarding his vast knowledge on the subject of divination and soothsaying rituals of the Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian Periods. His foundational work on the art of horoscopy and hepatoscopy had been awarded the Leibniz Prize for his unrivaled insights garnered from an unimaginably large collection that he somehow managed to translate into German single-handedly. On a cold winter night of December 1984, he made a phone call with me while I was still in my office and told me excitedly about how he had found clues to the lost "Kish Collection."