The Cartographer's Daughter

4. Ouroboros

Perhaps of all my father's fireside tales, this was my favorite: long ago, in the third century B.C., a library was built. It was placed in the center of the world map, in the great Egyptian city of Alexandria, and it was right next to the harbor, so that as trade ships came in to port with books from thinkers all over the world, those books and sometimes scholars themselves were received directly to the Library. Its purpose was to house all knowledge of the world, and to cultivate research in its laboratories, observatories, gardens, and zoos. Etched on the shelves, it is said, was this inscription: "The place of the cure of the soul."

But Alexandria, being a city of man, was also a city of turmoil. In 48 B.C. when Julius Caesar wrestled for control of the Roman Empire in a civil war, he was besieged in Alexandria. When it was whispered that the enemy would cut off his communications by sea, Caesar tried to surprise everyone by burning his own ships at harbor. The docks caught fire, and wicked it up to the Library where a great portion of the papyrus scrolls was destroyed. Some say all was lost then.

But, my father would say, a smile playing at the wrinkles of his eyes, perhaps the library was not entirely burned. Perhaps the story goes like this: the burned collection was replaced, however imperfectly, from memory and interview of scholars of the age by a group of highly trained preservationists called Guardians. And the fire had shown a regrettable weakness, that when all knowledge is safeguarded in one place it is at once accessible and vulnerable. The Guardians set to work copying scrolls and housing them in another safeguard in Alexandria, the Serapeum temple.

But clandestinely, they made a third set of scrolls, quietly shipping them to a secret island at the end of the known earth. Being the cleverest of men - a fact any daughter would never dare to challenge of her own father - my father claimed he knew where the hidden Library was. Suspended between the southern tip of Argentina and the Antarctic is an archipelago known as the Tierra del Fuego, Spanish for "Land of Fire." Truly, it's a land of ice and fog, but explorers across the millennia wrote of fires dancing over the seawater of the strait. The islands were haunted by spirits or cannibals, depending on whom you ask, and the fires were signals of an ambush lying in wait. Journals on the topic are plagued with shaky handwriting. And so the islands went unexplored. According to my father, one among them, in the furthest stretch before the Antarctic mainland, became the home of the copied Library. Its exact location was known only to the Guardians. A white temple in the tundra.

In 270 A.D. Emperor Aurelian seized Alexandria and heavy fighting damaged the Library beyond repair, though the Serapeum survived. The Muslim Army conquered Alexandria in 642 A.D. and set fire to the Serapeum by order of Caliph Omar, who proclaimed, "If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them." Always at this point in the story, my father's eyes would go hollow as he looked into the fire.

"Have you ever seen an Ouroboros?" my father asked one night in the middle of his story, digging in his leather satchel and pulling out a thin gold bracelet. He held it next to the fire so I could see the detail clearly. The bracelet was round, and slightly tapered in its thickness. At the spot where it was thickest, there was a textured snake head, its mouth closing around the thinnest spot to complete the circle. History, my father said, is a snake devouring its own tail. He slipped the bangle over my wrist.

"I have seen it cycle over and over, destroying a little bit of knowledge, wealth, and invention every time. Violence is enlightenment in reverse; it makes us forgetful and stunted." He spun the bracelet absentmindedly on my arm, and then looked up at my face, the fire opal flecks in his eyes mirroring my own. "But what the conquerers didn't know," he said with the mischievous grin he always wore when returning from an adventure, "was that the Library of Alexandria always survives."

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