Next Friday Saturday and Sunday Oct 21, 22, 23,  is the Camelback Studio Tour, and Three Star Owl will have wares available for you to peruse and perhaps purchase. Other artists’ studios nearby in the neighborhood will be open as well, with more than 20 artists offering their art for pre-holiday shopping. Support local artists and artisans and stop by: 10-5, free to enter all the studios.  Click here for details.

<< sneak peak of a piece that’s about to fly across the country

During the event, a new piece called “Ossuary, An Archæology of Resurrection (<< detail left) will be lurking in the corner, awaiting shipping to St.Louis for an upcoming show, “Death and Rebirth” at Maryville University, curated by James Ibur.  St. Louis artists Ruth Reese, Ron Fondaw, Eric Hoefer, Lili Bruer, Renee Deall, Tim Eberhardt, Mary Ann Swaine, Matt Wilt, Susan Bostwick, Jimmy Liu as well as national artists Amanda Jaffe, Chris Berti, Russell Wrankle, Kurt Weiser, Adrian Arleo, Arthur Gonzalez, Ben Ahlvers, Mark Messenger, Pete Halladay, Paula Smith, and Allison Shock will have work displayed from Nov 2, 2011  through  Friday, Dec 2, 2011.

This is the twelfth installment of a series. There’s a link at the bottom of the page to the thirteenth installment.  Read Part 11 by clicking here, or start at the very beginning by clicking here.

Previously:

After encountering an anomalous fragment of pottery decorated with a bee and a possible flower, the Beit Bat Ya’anah staff were hotly debating its origins. Leaving them to it and wandering out across the moonlit compound, Professor Wayfarer had recalled a fragment of poetry with a similar motif, causing her to wonder who the people were who had made this rocky site their home.

The Nature of the Hill: secrets and surprises

Outside the lab building, Einer Wayfarer glanced at her watch.  It was not quite 8.30, and she was ready for bed, unaccustomed to the long active hours on the hill, which were so different from her sedentary days behind a desk in her office, at the library, or in the classroom. She was surprised to find that she could read the hands of her wristwatch in the moonlight – the waxing moon was only slightly more than half full, yet she noticed her squat shadow running ahead of her sharp along the stony ground. In Lassiter the lardy moon was never this bright, even full. Here, colors were discernible in the clear desert moonlight. You could read poetry by it, Wayfarer thought – hell, you could write poetry by it, if you were that sort of person. If you were that sort of person.

As though intent on enabling such romantic pursuits, the moon lit two spots of bright color as the professor passed downhill of the shadowed dining tent: aniline pink hair and a man’s white shirt – two figures, leaning together against the end of one of the tables. Mikka the ex-cook/photographer and the elusive Dario had found a way to pass the evening that didn’t involve tiresome record-keeping in the ill-lit lab.

Unsurprised, Wayfarer looked and then looked away. To judge by the intimacy of their embrace, she concluded that the rearrangement of kitchen duties hadn’t impaired their acquaintance. It occurred to her to sympathize briefly with Avsa Szeringka for having to supervise the young man as a graduate student.  He seemed to be expert at simultaneously eluding unwanted contact and attracting attention to himself, a curiously infuriating skill set for an academic advisor to wrangle, and likely to create disruptions in a research setting.

Less earthily and more celestially, it also seemed to Wayfarer that the gibbous moon was in a forthcoming mood, naughtily giving up other people’s secrets to anyone who was paying attention. It would be foolish to not take advantage of its revelations, so she changed her mind about heading to bed. Instead, she climbed upward to the crest of the ridge where she had first stood with Wilson Rankle, just yesterday. She arrived at the top, puffing slightly and disappointed in her hope for a slight breeze.

Catching her breath, she looked down on the site. Einer Wayfarer was not superstitious, or prone to fancy. But she was also not unimaginative: over the years, she had acceptably and productively harnessed an active imagination to the yoke of scholarly creative thought. So although she didn’t expect to see a ghostly diorama of moonlit re-creation laid out before her — an ancient town’s crenellated stone-and-mud walls dimly peopled by long-dead shades of priests and goat-herds and potters and children and soldiers and dogs, shouting and tending smoky cooking fires, chasing screeching chickens, drinking wine, dying clothes, writing letters, and tanning hides — she was open to the possibility that the site, seen quite literally in a new light (to use that well-worn cliché she deplored in less careful academic writers) might show her something she hadn’t observed before, something more human than the dry chronological classifications recited by Wilson Rankle in the glare of daylight.

And she was not too stuffy to wish for a time machine to confirm such imaginings, since the methods of archeologists seemed to her, paradoxically, to be both technically sterile and too subjective all at once. Whereas one could easily imagine these walls long ago corralling all the same activities that people engage in today – cooking, lying, loving, keeping secrets, making mistakes, laughing, prevailing, struggling – it was the surprises, the things you’d never guess, that interested Einer Wayfarer. It was in surprises where progress lay in understanding ancient lives, in fleshing out people who lived long ago.  Surprises like a jar handle bearing a hidden ambiguous symbol, a painted bee drawn to an exotic flower on a sherd, and a young man whose tapped initial Rs and slightly retroflected Ss were not fully explained by either southern European origin or Scottish influence.

As she moved along the ridge to a better vantage point, she realized she wasn’t alone. Just ahead of her, perched on a flat rock, sat Amit Chayes.

“Does no one around here sleep?” she asked.

“Sleep? It’s still early,” Chayes said, turning. “Erev tov, Einer. Please sit,” he invited her. “Doing what?”

“Seeing what the moon has to show. And you?”

“The same. And the tables were occupied.”

Wayfarer chuckled. “Danish lessons, do you suppose?”

“I can remember being so young, can’t you?” Chayes smiled. “I met my wife on a dig. These things are to be expected — it’s natural.”

“Indeed it is,” Wayfarer said, not answering his actual question, and doubting the pertinence of matrimony in this instance. “In fact, Rory Zohn was just touting the advantage of working within natural systems, although his example was aptitude for cooking, not sex.”

“If camp gossip is true, perhaps in this case it’s related,” Chayes laughed. “Well, I should spend more time in the lab. I didn’t know discussion there was so intellectual, usually.”

“It seems like you’ve put together a fairly good crew.”

“Young, but good,” he agreed. “Pretty good. Some hard workers, some needing a bit more guidance, more experience. As usual. We were lucky: except for Zvia Ben-Tor, who requested to come, our permit came so late the crew was filled in the last minute with overflow from other site applicants.”

“Why is that?”

“The government is preoccupied with the Lebanese events. And so many archeologists are called up for military service at times like this, the Reshut HaAtikot — the IAA — is slowed down to an even less efficient pace than usual. Our small site had low priority.”

“Why are you digging here, Amit?” Wayfarer asked. She looked out over the hill, onto the squares making an orderly framework deeply cut against the pale, stony hilltop. Within the inky pits were dim outlines of walls and floors, none complete, few rectilinear, not at all aligned with the carefully surveyed lines of the archæologists’ grid, running their own imprecise, human-laid courses under the sternly oriented, scientifically imposed balks.

“Ah, the staff have been complaining to you,” Chayes stated, answering her meaning and not her words. “The simplest answer is archeological: because there are so few remains later than the Bronze Age at the site the Chalcolithic and even earlier levels, if present, should be relatively well-preserved. But also…” He glanced over his shoulder at the sheer cliffs that rose above the site a few hundred meters from where they sat. “I think that the place has… Well, to say it has secrets is too dramatic; all archeological sites have secrets; it’s their nature. So, I will say instead surprises. For instance, I was hoping you’d confirm that character on the amphora handle as wehériəl.”

His words resonated uncannily with her earlier thoughts. “You’re looking for evidence of Elennui culture?” Wayfarer asked. “That is a surprise.”

Chayes shook his head, “No; no, I’m not looking. That’s unsound technique in our field: you almost always find what you look for. But, if it were to show up, that would be a surprise.”  He shrugged. “So, I hoped the symbol was evidence that Elennui speakers have lived here.”

Wayfarer cleared her throat. “I wish I could have confirmed it, but…”

The archeologist waved a hand. “No; of course. It was sound scholarship, much more important. And no matter – there is still much dirt to move.”

“Who has lived here?” she asked. Responding to Szeringka’s peremptory summons, Wayfarer hadn’t had time to read site reports, and Rankle’s dull orientation had meant little to her.

Chayes paused before responding. “Do you mean people of the Bible?”

She supposed he was accustomed to that question, perhaps irked by it. She replied, “No, that’s not my bias. I simply mean people.  Any people, of any book.  Or of no book. Who has lived here?”

“This is Israel – who hasn’t lived here?  Over the millenia, this ridge has been occupied by foreign soldiers; nomads from far and near; tale-telling hunter-gatherers with stone tools; well-organized patriarchs with scribes and cisterns, pottery and laws; zionist idealists; entrepreneurial ostrich farmers. Optimistic archeologists. People who left things, and people who are looking for those things. People hoping for secrets – surprises. But the site has kept its secrets well, I would say.”

“So, it’s not a tell…” Wayfarer punned, not sure Chayes’s English was colloquial enough to catch it.

He shrugged and made a literal reply. “Our hill is not a tel, technically.  Just superimposed occupation levels along a ridge – most of the topography is geologic, natural – piled up outwash from the upper wadi, now eroding slowly. But I understand your joke – and no; it is not a tell, in any sense. Especially in one way,” Chayes added, “the site has been entirely mute. The staff is right – Beit Bat Ya’anah is missing something.”

Wayfarer waited.

“We’ve sounded, and surface-surveyed across the whole ridge, and even searched downstream in the wadi. It’s a small but enduring habitation: one would expect…” the archeologist broke off, then finished bluntly, “No bones, no teeth. No evidence of burials or any human remains.”  He shrugged once again.  “Well, as I say, there is much dirt yet to move.”  Chayes turned back to the moonlit walls below, perhaps again hoping to be shown secrets, or at least surprises.

Einer Wayfarer took the hint, and stood to go. But she couldn’t keep from asking one more question. “Ostrich farmers?”

“You don’t know the meaning of Beit Bat Ya’anah?” Chayes asked.  “ya’anah is the female form of ya’en, ostrich. The name means ‘House of the Ostrich’s Daughter’. Ask Moshe sometime – he loves to tell that story.”

To be continued…

To read the next installment, Part 13 “Correspondence” click here

This is the eleventh installment of a series. There’s a link at the bottom of the page to the twelfth installment.  Or, to read from the very beginning, click here.

Previously:

“Our other on-going personnel matter,” Amit Chayes had explained about the sound of argument coming from the mess-tent. “I take full responsibility. I should have hired a cook with more experience, only, it seemed so fortunate to find a site photographer who was willing to cook as well. But we’ve had to re-kasher the refrigerator twice this season. If you’ll excuse me, I should go to mediate.”

Natural systems: flowers and bees, pottery and poetry

“Mikka quit?” Rory’s disbelieving shout of laughter caused Einer Wayfarer’s head to snap back upright.

The professor had volunteered to help in the lab after the evening meal partly out of the acerbic goodness of her heart, and because she was interested in seeing how these things were done. Recording data points from Rory’s grimy Area D field notebook onto locus cards proved to be no less mind-numbingly tedious work than the actual digging, so she felt entitled to occupy herself by eavesdropping on the staff’s conversation. That was worth staying awake for – the patois in the group was a casual shakshuka of old world languages, bound together in a matrix of English of several flavors. And it wasn’t really eavesdropping: with a voice as loud as Rory’s, hearing was hardly avoidable in the small, stuffy room. Now conversation had come around to gossip about the afternoon’s kitchen fuss and the absent Dario, who, per Amit according to Zvia, had been appointed as replacement for the unsatisfactorily breezy Mikka.

“She quit on the spot as cook,” Zvi said, “but not as photographer – she’ll be concentrating on site-and-find photography for the last two weeks of the dig.”

Rory groaned. “What did she do this time?”

“Moshe found the skull of a shafan…” Lior looked at Zvia for vocabulary help.

“Rock hyrax,” she supplied.

“… a hyrax skull on the dairy shelf in the refrigerator,” Lior explained, his forehead crinkled. “Not cool!”

“So they’re yanking Dario off the hill to cook?” Rory moaned. Wayfarer looked over in time to see him pretend to tear out the hair at his temples. “Damn! That leaves me short of slave-labor in Area D.” When he took his big hands away, the brown hanks twisted out to either side like unkempt ram’s horns.

“You’ve got Eric. And Dr. Wayfarer,” Zvi reminded him gently, tipping her head toward the far corner of the room. Rory moaned again, but not quietly enough.

“I can hear you, you know,” the professor pointed out. “And at least I stay awake under your barrage of monotonous numbers,” she told him.

Rory grinned. “It’s true – it’s more than a fair trade. It’s just that your chapeau’s not as quaint.”

Eric, more concerned about academic technicalities than head-gear, wanted to know, “How can they force him to cook? Isn’t he getting credit for excavating?”

“More importantly,” inquired Rory, “does he actually know anything about feeding people?”

Wayfarer heard Zvia make a small noise of modest expertise. Everyone looked at her expectantly.

“Actually,” she said, “they aren’t, he isn’t, and he does.” She explained, “Remember, he’s primarily a lit student, not an archæologist – Amit took him on as a favor for Dr. Szeringka…” (that makes two of us, thought Wayfarer) “…so he’s purely a volunteer, I guess. And Amit said Dario was happy to take over the kitchen. Supposedly he learned English at some school in the UK by working for the whole year as the cook.”

“Edinburgh,” stated Wayfarer, mostly to herself.

“Yes,” said Zvi, “Amit said Scotland, now that you mention it. But I don’t think he sounds Scottish at all.”

The professor shook her head. “He doesn’t; not entirely.” She’d detected a hint of it in the few words he’d said on the hill. “But it’s in the mix.” She didn’t go into detail; no one wanted to hear about rhotic differentiation and epipenthic vowels.

“I thought Dario was Yugoslavian or something,” said Shams, finally looking up from the light table.

“I thought he was Greek,” Eric said. “So what would he know about kosher food?”

“There are Greek Jews, Eric,” Zvia pointed out. “Besides, he’s not Greek. Or Yugoslavian. I don’t think... Anyway Moshe’s given him a crash course in kashrut.”

“Let’s hope that works better than it did with Mikka,” Lior muttered.

Zvi went on. “Anyway, she’s lucky: Rankle and Moshe wanted to fire her completely. But Amit prevailed. To settle the mess, he’s split meal prep up: Dario’s doing the actual cooking – breakfast and the main meal. Moshe’s in charge of supper since there’s no cooking, just chopping veggies. Mikka’s still putting out tea, and doing the washing-up. Plus the photography.”

Rory observed philosophically, “Well, if Mikka can’t de-koshrify the joint by washing dishes –” here Wayfarer distinctly heard Lior and Zvia snort in unison “– and Dario’s better at dinner than digging, I say go with the natural system. It’s more comfortable for everyone.”

“koshrify isn’t a word,” Zvi said instructively. “And, Dario’s not out of the dirt entirely. He’s still supposed to work on the hill when needed, and help with paperwork in the lab.”

“Invisibly?” wondered Shams aloud, looking around theatrically.

Eric giggled, “Now you sound like the Wrinkle…”

Because she felt she was expected to, Wayfarer cleared her throat, simulating perfunctory disapproval. It had an effect: the laughter trailed off, although slowly. Rory and Zvia returned to their sherd-sorting, still snickering. Suddenly Zvi exclaimed, “Oh, hey – cool!” She held up a clay fragment that was decorated with a chocolate brown design on a buffy background. “Nice bichrome.”

Rory said to Lior, “Hey, Pottery Man, did you see this? It came up today, when we were clearing a well.”

Lior hung over Zvia’s shoulder. “It’s tsir’a, a wasp,” he said. “One of your friends, Eric,” he teased the younger man, who self-consciously raised one hand to his still-welted neck.

“Or devorah, I think, isn’t it,?” Zvia corrected Lior’s biology. “A bee?”

“I don’t think that’s bichrome,” he asserted, counter-correcting.

“Is that a flower? Too bad it broke right there; it looks like a foxglove.” Zvi brought the sherd to Wayfarer. “Did you want to see? We bring up so little decorated pottery at BBY.”

“Or anything else of interest…” the draughtsman muttered over his precisely inked site plan. Wayfarer noticed that no one laughed.

Zvia said, “If it’s not an articulated masonry wall, Shams has no use for it. Although it’s true, BBY hasn’t been the most productive site, so far, either in small finds or architecturally.” She was still holding out the sherd. The professor obediently regarded the small scrap of scuffed clay, only slightly more colorful than the dirt it came out of: she saw there was indeed a bee painted there, wings spread in flight. In front of it the blunt end of a phallic-shaped object just pushed into view from one of the broken edges – Zvia’s “foxglove”.

“The clay body’s too red for bichrome…” Lior was saying, intent on his ceramic thought process. He had trailed Zvi across the room, and was now studying the piece in Wayfarer’s hand.

“A flower? Looks like a cigar to me,” joked Eric.

Lior muttered, “And I’ve seen birds and bulls and ibexes on bichrome, but…”

“Everything looks like a cigar to you,” said Shams, to Eric.

“…but never insects, or flowers…” Lior reached for the sherd and Wayfarer placed it in his palm.

“Sometimes a foxglove is just a foxglove…” she said, standing. To her, the “flower” looked like a geometric space-filler, a result of a Bronze Age potter’s horror vacui. She pushed in her chair to leave: the younger folk, archæologically fervent, were now hotly debating whether the piece was really bichrome and if not, what. She wished them goodnight, and received a polite layla tov in return.

Wayfarer left the lab mulling over the chip of colored clay displayed in Zvi’s square, grubby palm: its date and technical description were for the experts who cared about such things, but the possible flower and bee motif interested the professor, whose efficient memory had shuffled to the surface a handful of lines of fragmentary but appropriate verse. Wandering out across the dark compound, the professor wondered where the foxglove nearest to this arid, rocky ridge grew: probably, she concluded, the Pleistocene.

To be continued…

To read the next installment, Part 12 “The Nature of the Hill” click here.

This is the tenth installment of a series. There’s a link at the bottom of the page to the eleventh installment.  Or, to read from the very beginning, click here.

Dario’s inelegant complaint was not much to go on, and his mildly exotic accent was like a linguistic version of the ambiguous character on the potsherd – it could be anything, from anywhere. Unless you knew what to look for: Wayfarer would have to do some digging to uncover the origins of the young man’s mongrel vowels. To do that, she would need to hear him say more than three words together.

Ptitim with Amit

As the dusty, sweaty excavation team trailed panting off the ridge, they homed in on the mess tarp as efficiently as vultures on a carcass. At the start of the season it had been showers first, but now no one except Wilson Rankle bothered until after eating. Kibbutz-style, lunch was the main meal of the day, and the only cooked meal. As the season wore on, people had grown less polite or more hungry: they helped themselves to the prime portions, and stragglers risked finding protein-short rations awaiting them.

Under the high midday sun, the tarp shaded all the tables well and although there was some habitual grumbling about the repetitive menu and mediocre flavor, there was no jostling for shady seats. People got their food and settled into place by location, polarization, or association: the Aussies were in one grubby, boisterous clump, and the Israelis were in another, but Wayfarer was surprised to see most of the rest sitting with their area teams. She thought that after long hours working together in cramped pits everyone would be ready for a change. As a newcomer, she felt free to stir things up by settling anywhere. Intent on investigating her “artifact with an accent”, she was considering heading for the spot where a wide-brimmed straw hat with a beehive crown had been set on a table, when behind her a voice rumbling with gutterals said, “Professor Wayfarer!”

She turned, and found herself within handshake range of a brown, wiry man in his forties with a bent Medici nose and close-cropped hair. “Amit Chayes,” he said, squeezing her hand in one of his and her upper arm with the other. “Shalom! I hear you’ve decided to stay with us longer — welcome.”

“Thank you,” Wayfarer replied. “Please, call me Einer.”

“Of course.” The co-director’s cordial grip was strong and brief. Releasing her he said, “Come – please, sit.” Wayfarer allowed him to guide her to a seat via the food table, while he explained that he’d been off-site since his six-year old had been bitten by a spider at home in Be’er Sheva. “He’s fine now, but he needed a few days in hospital for observation and my wife is away for her reserve service at the moment.”

“She’s not exempt, as a mother?”

“The Lebanese matter has changed things for now.” Chayes shrugged. “It’s not combat duty, anyway.” He waved the subject away with a firm hand. “Are you finding yourself comfortable? Unless one has just come off military duty, the showers take a bit getting used to. And the heat, of course.”

His direct, intuitive manner caused Wayfarer to feel relief on behalf of the Beit Bat Ya’anah staff, especially the younger, more callow ones; she judged that his forthright character adequately balanced Rankle’s peevish authoritarian style. “Visit Lassiter in July if you want to experience oppressive summer weather,” she replied. “And insects. Although, I keep hearing impressive stories about your local entomology.”

“Entomology?” The bench jumped as Zvia joined them without ceremony. “Was young Eric boring you with bugs, professor? He’s obsessed with them. And arachnids. But then, he seems to attract the nastier specimens. And we’ve got some monsters: camel spiders the size of your hand…”

Chayes lifted his chin in acknowledgment. “The Negev is a tough environment. It breeds tough creatures,” he said, spearing a chunk of chicken with his fork. “Have you encountered any of our nocturnal desert wildlife yet, Einer?”

Wayfarer’s eyes shifted momentarily over the archæologist’s shoulder to where the owner of the straw hat was now sitting with a plate heaped with ptitim and tinned vegetables, steadily working through it and taking no part in the conversation around him. She said, “I thought I might have seen a leopard marauding last night.”

“A leopard?” Chayes’s keen eyes followed her pale blue glance, and he showed even, white teeth in a smile. “Ah, you mean Dr. Szeringka’s protegé. Our very own djinn, manifesting in the darkness – his midnight baths are no secret.” He fixed her with an inquisitive look and said, “Perhaps I shouldn’t ask what you were doing up in the early hours?”

“Not looking for djinn,” Wayfarer replied promptly, “I assure you. But other than that, I’d rather not say… on the assumption that Wilson has devised a suitable penalty for dastardly water thieves and their ilk.” At her elbow, she heard Zvia unsuccessfully suppress a snicker.

Chayes showed more teeth. “You shouldn’t worry, Einer. But Bill does have a problem with… ah… well, one of the more independent staff members in particular, you might guess which. One of our few personnel issues. You’d better not mention the incident, in fact. It’s been a long season, and…”

At this moment, a fuss was heard coming from inside the mess tent. Outright shouting in emphatic and unrestrained Hebrew billowed like cooking smoke through the gaping door flaps, making the Israeli students at the next table laugh. Wayfarer could only distinguish the word shafan, which she vaguely recalled was some kind of etymologically significant animal, and — repeatedly — syllables that sounded like lo ba’mkarer, “not in the refrigerator!” The shouting in Hebrew was punctuated by equally vehement but not entirely fluent English denials of responsibility.

“Oh no, not again!” muttered Zvia.

“Apparently so, “ Chayes said. “The other on-going personnel issue. Our cook Mikka is Danish,” he added as if that accounted for it, and took another bite of chicken. Chewing, he listened. “Moshe sounds very angry,” he commented.

“Camp manager,” Zvia explained to Wayfarer. “You haven’t met him yet, I don’t think. Can be a bit, ummm… crusty…”

Chayes said placidly, “Moshe’s strengths are organizational, not social. He’s an invaluable member of the dig team and an old friend, but he has strong beliefs. Not religious as much as administrative – the University requires us to provide kosher meals to dig participants, although out here we manage only the most rudimentary kashrut. Even that’s been a struggle for Mikka. It could be worse – no one on site is very religious, so Moshe’s the only one who minds, because as he says rules are rules and it’s his job.”

Zvia began tartly, “And because Mikka is a…”

“A very good photographer,” Chayes finished for her, firmly. “I take responsibility,” the director went on. “I should have hired someone with more kitchen experience –” here he raised one shoulder philosophically, “– only, it seemed so fortunate to find a site photographer who was willing to cook, too. But it proved to be – what’s the term?”

“A false economy,” Wayfarer supplied, listening to the fuss in the tent escalate.

Chayes nodded. “Precisely: we’ve had to re-kasher the refrigerator twice this season. Work and water we can ill spare.”

From inside the dim canvas doorway came the clatter of metal on metal. The director shook his head and put down his fork. “Please excuse me, I must go mediate.” As he moved away Amit Chayes looked over to the now empty place where Szeringka’s protegé had been sitting, then glanced back at Zvia. “Eyfo Dario?”

“Ani lo yoda’at,” she answered, frowning a little. “Ask Lior or Yael, they were sitting over there.”

Chayes growled the same question at the group of BGU students lingering nearby, eavesdropping on the fracas. Only his grad student Lior replied, with a jerk of the chin that signaled equal lack of knowledge and lack of interest, and Chayes disappeared into the overheated gloom of the mess tent, where the volume of bilingual squabbling dropped immediately.

“Eyfo Dario,” Wayfarer repeated, where’s Dario. No one ever seemed to know. Or, admitted knowing. “That question is asked with some frequency around here,” she said.

“It is,” Zvia agreed, collecting their empty plates from the table. Her brown eyes were fixed on a point somewhere in the desert above the camp, and she was still frowning. “Recently, at least. Anyway, Amit will find him. Or he’ll just show up. He always does. No reason to be worried.”

The professor was not worried. Like a spotted leopard, the wayward Dario seemed to be able to disappear effortlessly against any background and reappear again just as smoothly, no doubt promptly at mealtime. But, assessing the young woman’s knit brows astutely, Wayfarer knew that Zvia — who didn’t strike her as the worrying type — intended the reassuring words for herself, and that was far more interesting.

…to be continued

To read the next installment, Part 11 “Natural Systems” click here.

That’s the motto of The Pseudopod Waltz logo:

Remember it! It’s your sign of quality Three Star Owl fiction (what “quality” I’ll leave up to the reader).  Up until this point, there are two illustrated, serialized stories in this space:

The Ganskopf Incident, which ran in eight short episodes and an epilogue, and is complete (or is it?).  In  personal notes and sketches for an illustrated article on “owl fetishes”, a museum illustrator recounts events at the obscure Ganskopf Institute, involving its librarian Miss Laguna, the sleek and enigmatic scholar Dr. Darius Danneru, a particular artifact, and a cup of tea.  It can be read in its entirety by clicking on The Ganskopf Incident category (under T for The!)  in the left-hand sidebar, or by clicking here.

There is also the currently running What Happened at Beit Bat Ya’anah.  Its longer, more complex storyline is a prequel to The Ganskopf Incident: it begins the story which ends in The Ganskopf Incident (or does it?). During the Lebanese conflict in the early 1980s, professor Einer Wayfarer — an expert in the study of a mysterious extinct language and its arcane body of literature — is convinced by an eccentric colleague to visit a remote and unpromising archeological site deep in the Negev Desert of Israel, in order to examine an artifact which may be of some importance to her field. This tale can be read by clicking the Beit Bat Ya’anah category in the left-hand sidebar, or by clicking here.  The next episode, part 10, “Ptitim with Amit”, will be appearing shortly.

In order to begin at the beginning of each story, the structure of the blog archives requires you to scroll down to the bottom of the page, then click “previous” to move back in time to the earliest posts.  You will need to go back several pages in each story line, and then read from the bottom up.

So claim the comfy chair, get yourself a cup of tea (some luxurious green rooibos, perhaps?) or something stronger (like arak, if that’s more your taste) and enjoy the journey!