Speaker 1: The first time I held one of the hellstones, I
Speaker 1: was half expecting to find the imprint of some one's
Speaker 1: thumb pressed into it, with a familiar grain of rainbleashed quartz. Instead,
Speaker 1: the stone felt unnervingly smooth, the kind of cold surface
Speaker 1: that comes in and settles. At the same time, I
Speaker 1: found it by accident near the bottom of about a
Speaker 1: box marked misk rural tool slash pots slash LEAs I
Speaker 1: was three hours into my third cataloging day for the
Speaker 1: kinnel And Village Historical Society, knees protesting, fingers, dirt smudged
Speaker 1: and papercut. Wishing I brought my old gardening gloves. At
Speaker 1: first glance, the box was nothing a child's copper brooch,
Speaker 1: hollowed with age, a brustbackut, and half filled with rusted nails,
Speaker 1: the teek painted in an ambitious blue dots. Then this
Speaker 1: single graystone, unmistakably deliberative form, slipped into my palm as
Speaker 1: I cleaned away shredded paper. It was smaller than the
Speaker 1: old crocode balls, larger than a conker worm. From noon
Speaker 1: sun through the window and edge with precise geometric lines,
Speaker 1: triangles within circles of square nested in a spiral. I
Speaker 1: turned it over. The etching looked deeper than scratching at it,
Speaker 1: niquely and direct, unlike any child's idledoodle. I said it
Speaker 1: a sigh puzzle, then rifled through the rest of the
Speaker 1: box four more stones, each with their own inscribed puzzle.
Speaker 1: A pattern of parallel lines radiating from a circle, A
Speaker 1: braid of overlapping pentakens, something almost like Runitec's, but perfectly stray.
Speaker 1: I placed them on the table in a loose row,
Speaker 1: striving for order. Their weight and smoothness set them apart,
Speaker 1: their odd, subtle gleam catching the wintry light. They look
Speaker 1: recent somehow, but also impossibly all dot facts adrift between times,
Speaker 1: curiosity bubbling. I called through the open doorway to Morok,
Speaker 1: the society's chairperson, who was elbow deep in a collection
Speaker 1: of ration books across the hall. Morac, have you ever
Speaker 1: seen these? I must have sounded, faintly, amused, half apologetic.
Speaker 1: Someone's gone to a lot of trouble for pebbles. Morgan emerged,
Speaker 1: her hair wild above her reading glasses, cardigan sleeves rolled
Speaker 1: to her elbows. She gave the stones a glance, then shrouked, Oh,
Speaker 1: those scrimtious stones. Nothing much. Folk pick them up in
Speaker 1: the hills. She wiped us from her hands on her skirt.
Speaker 1: Only half looking kids bring into school sometimes if they
Speaker 1: find a nice one. There's always a few about some
Speaker 1: years more than others. I ran a thumb over the
Speaker 1: triangulated lines and frowned. But no one's tried to date
Speaker 1: or cattle of them. She shook her head, her dismissal.
Speaker 1: Matter of fact, OK, not really, not worth the fuss.
Speaker 1: Every other box there's a stone or two. Sometimes we
Speaker 1: toss them into the garden after inventory. Bit of a nuisance,
Speaker 1: if I'm honest. There it was a clear divide between
Speaker 1: what my hands insisted was out of place and what
Speaker 1: the village considered barely worth a second glance. I tried
Speaker 1: a further notge these marks. Do you know who made them?
Speaker 1: They're quite precise, modern perhaps or older. If you want
Speaker 1: to write up a note, you're welcome. We've never managed
Speaker 1: to trace anything, and the hills are full of odd bits.
Speaker 1: She' patted my shoulder, already retreating to her ladgers and
Speaker 1: postwar coupons. Best not to overthink it. There's only so many.
Speaker 1: I was in a cataloging day, so I was left
Speaker 1: with a puzzle as well as a faint sting. These
Speaker 1: stones so marked and deliberate, accounted for nowhere. They didn't
Speaker 1: appear in any of the hand typed inventory sheets on
Speaker 1: the table, nor in the faded no card files, I say,
Speaker 1: votered for weeks, no provenance, no proud of place in
Speaker 1: the glass cabinets of the Society's modest EXPII. I stacked
Speaker 1: and gingerly beside a chipmug and tanned them, waiting for
Speaker 1: a spock of recognition that never quite came. Later, carrying
Speaker 1: them home in an altee towel for safekeeping, I found
Speaker 1: my mind drifting inconveniently. Wasn't it strange that something made
Speaker 1: so attentively would be so carelessly handled. Thus, something found
Speaker 1: only in the hills was neither prize nor explained. It
Speaker 1: set my thoughts turning in elliptical orbits, as if the
Speaker 1: stones contained a quite challenge that no one in the
Speaker 1: village past or present had properly answered. By dusk, I'd
Speaker 1: reached no conclusions, only the sharpened certainty that the stones,
Speaker 1: with their patterning were neither as dull nor as commonplace
Speaker 1: as every one insisted, and I wondered very much who
Speaker 1: had put them there and why they prompted only shrugs
Speaker 1: and offhand laughter from those who had grown up among
Speaker 1: these hills. I've lived a great many years surrounded by
Speaker 1: other people's mannerisms and stories. Teaching children for forty three
Speaker 1: years in and around Aberdeen, I learned how quickly the supposedly
Speaker 1: normal can slide into the quietly improbable. And yet I'd
Speaker 1: come north to Kinnelan from the ordinary. My grandmother's cottage,
Speaker 1: a place of low ceilings in Pete Smoke, sat on
Speaker 1: the edge of the village with a squad garden, and
Speaker 1: of you that every visit acclaimed was unchanged since before
Speaker 1: the Wars. I'd plan my days around routine Monday's shopping
Speaker 1: at Grant's Grocers, where the apples are never crisp, but
Speaker 1: the gossipy shop. Tuesdays at the Historical Society. Wednesday's turning
Speaker 1: composts were mending fences after sheep nosing through evenings by
Speaker 1: the hearth, alongside selections from the village landing library, Romances
Speaker 1: with predictable innings, local memoirs that revolved around church committees,
Speaker 1: and the bound copy of the Song of the hills
Speaker 1: my grandmother left dry with pressed wild violets. It was
Speaker 1: a peaceful monotony, padded with neighborly familiarity. Every face was noble.
Speaker 1: Angus the postman, whose morning rounds accompanied an endless monologue
Speaker 1: about rainfall and missed football goals. The Cess Mummer, my neighbour,
Speaker 1: always sweeping her stupid twice the necessary frequency, and alert
Speaker 1: every rod in the road. Jenny, the only true archivist
Speaker 1: at the Historical Society twenty six, in flush with academic zeal,
Speaker 1: occasionally trailing fragments of university, jogon behind her children darted
Speaker 1: between a schoolyard and the river, inventing rules attack no
Speaker 1: adult could follow. Evenings, the old men of the village
Speaker 1: played dominoes at the pub, Noses pink and voices carrying
Speaker 1: through open windows in summer. Yet above it all, above
Speaker 1: the amiable shuffle and repetition, stood the hills, twelve of
Speaker 1: them by local agreement, though some call for ten or
Speaker 1: sometimes even thirteen. When counting stray knolls. On misty afternoons,
Speaker 1: they loomed green and brown bulges running the north horizon,
Speaker 1: the line of twelve, as old stories had it. Their
Speaker 1: ships punctuated every conversation about place. Take the left by
Speaker 1: the twin knobs, or meet me with the saddle dips.
Speaker 1: Children used them for gains, chasing dragons behind the birch,
Speaker 1: climbing the old man for stolen apples, daring each other
Speaker 1: to sleep at near the witches shoulder. Tourists asked after
Speaker 1: giants and hills or the fabled Kinnel, and treasure their accents,
Speaker 1: trailing away before long bus rides back to Inverness. For
Speaker 1: the locals, the hills were a background, as fixed as
Speaker 1: to whether or the stone Walls school house near the
Speaker 1: cross roads. The names wore through nursery rhymes, Their slopes
Speaker 1: lent themselves to generations of grazing sheep. Their silhouets marked
Speaker 1: the passage of days. It made the indifference to the
Speaker 1: etched stones, all them all puzzling. Here was something unique,
Speaker 1: tangible evidence of del bircraft found only among those older
Speaker 1: finding hills, and it routine ignored, treated with less important
Speaker 1: than the crat butter churns or the faded wore medals
Speaker 1: in the display cases. Not even Jenny, with her enthusiasm
Speaker 1: for overlook things, had mentioned them in our many cups
Speaker 1: of tea at the Society's kitchen table, in village council minutes,
Speaker 1: in the Parishes, annals of box of cobbon, cuppered notes,
Speaker 1: garraled in the Vickers' house. In Backhouse's Meditations on a
Speaker 1: Highland childhood, the stones are in no mention worth noting. Instead,
Speaker 1: stories focused on what the land had always been, not
Speaker 1: what might have changed. I asked Misses Munroir one gray afternoon,
Speaker 1: as we snapped beans outside. Why no one seemed interested?
Speaker 1: She paused, snapped another string with deaf fingers. Some things
Speaker 1: are just the hills business, she said, not Unkindly, there's
Speaker 1: nothing to explain. You should have seen mister Munroe picking
Speaker 1: up stones for years, tossing them at rooks, never a
Speaker 1: riddle in it. But even then I caught her watching
Speaker 1: the sky line as if taking slid attendants. On morning walks,
Speaker 1: I found myself stirring at the cress birch saddle, old
Speaker 1: man knee, name of tongue in cheek convention by school children.
Speaker 1: A willing or unable to reach consensus, I tried sketching
Speaker 1: a line of hills from my kitchen window, using an
Speaker 1: old watercolor set left by my grandmother every sketch felt
Speaker 1: subtly wrong me. Either the fifth hill was too close,
Speaker 1: or the dip behind the old man's bump seemed higher,
Speaker 1: or the arrangement was off by a degree impossible to
Speaker 1: pin down. Talking to Angus as he delivered the day's posts,
Speaker 1: I tried to float my observation. You know, I can
Speaker 1: never get the hills to come out right when I
Speaker 1: draw them, He grinned, flicking a dog eared envelope. Ak.
Speaker 1: That's because he are not from Kinnealen, not properly. Don't
Speaker 1: worry they grow on you. Then he's quinted, as if
Speaker 1: counting himself. There's eleven proper hills mine counting the witch's shoulder.
Speaker 1: But folk will tell you what they like. Was that eleven?
Speaker 1: I asked, not twelve? He frowned, looked north. Twelve's a
Speaker 1: nice round number for stories in the guides. Perhaps we
Speaker 1: know what we know. His certainty seemed unshakeable. Mine, however,
Speaker 1: was a freshly planted thing, swedeasily by ever shifting perspective.
Speaker 1: What unsettled me, what edged at the edge of thought,
Speaker 1: was how this unchanging landscape was treated as both eternal
Speaker 1: and feigny negotiable, wrapped into routine, with nothing fixed beyond
Speaker 1: mem and how just occasionally, as dusk foul or as
Speaker 1: folk slid from the river, it seemed to me that
Speaker 1: a notch or cleft or slope had slipped somewhere, that
Speaker 1: perhaps a certain rise hard trunk, or disappeared entirely since
Speaker 1: the morning. Of course, I would chide myself for such figuries.
Speaker 1: My memory was not what it had been. Also, my
Speaker 1: sister reminded me with gentle teasing from her flat and dundee.
Speaker 1: But still, why would no one risk caring about stones
Speaker 1: carved so exactly? Why were the hills at once icons
Speaker 1: and afterthoughts? How could something so concrete as geography seem
Speaker 1: now and then as uncertain as the weather. Three days
Speaker 1: after finding the stones, as trizzle paned the windows in
Speaker 1: shifting streaks, I returned to my cataloging in the Society's
Speaker 1: back room, Feeling more like a detective than a volunteer.
Speaker 1: I'd begun combing through the most recent entries in the
Speaker 1: Society's database, a mixture of handriton and type pages stitched
Speaker 1: together by a patchwork of thirty years volunteers. Flicking through
Speaker 1: the lists, my eye caught a rec of from three
Speaker 1: years earlier, ridden in the fine leaping hand I recognized
Speaker 1: as mass Esque Grants, who'd run the society before Morrek
Speaker 1: could SETI five stones from Curik Hill marked with octicons spirals,
Speaker 1: donated by seven Class Apor twenty eighteen. I hurriedly Rummishtrudinius
Speaker 1: labeled crate is plastic lid, brittle with age, expecting to
Speaker 1: turn out the matching stones for inspection. Inside I found
Speaker 1: three stones, only a triangle with radiating lines, a pentagonal grid,
Speaker 1: something that looked almost like a compass rose, but no
Speaker 1: octagons and not a spiral in sight. In fact, none
Speaker 1: of them matched the written description at all. I checked
Speaker 1: the entry, check the box again, cross referenced definite mismatch.
Speaker 1: Crossing the corridor, I tracked down Jenny, who was toweling
Speaker 1: faded photographs. She stretched, took off her glasses and listened.
Speaker 1: Journey the entry from Craig Hill. This stones missing and
Speaker 1: the ones left don't match the lock. She fled quickly
Speaker 1: through the digital catalog. You sure the crate's right, absolutely
Speaker 1: same code, same date, but the description, no octagons, no spirals,
Speaker 1: only triangles and grids. She shrugged, catching my note of frustration.
Speaker 1: Stones get swapped, sometimes people move things about, or the
Speaker 1: list was wrong. Half the school donations are off by
Speaker 1: one or two. But wouldn't someone have noticed, wouldn't a tea?
Speaker 1: She smiled a little sheefish. Teachers just want the kids
Speaker 1: to get fresh air. Nobody's auditing hillstones. I loose sleep
Speaker 1: over the silver were sets not rocks? I felt my
Speaker 1: protest slipping away. Was I perhaps over attaching meaning to
Speaker 1: a child's collection of field fines? I tried to let
Speaker 1: the matter rest, but the discrepancy nagged. Why did the
Speaker 1: written and the physical so rarely line up? Next afternoon,
Speaker 1: determined to resolve things before my restlessness crew, I set
Speaker 1: up for Craig Hill itself, boots Leigh type stones from
Speaker 1: the society box in my satchel for comparison. I trdged
Speaker 1: the well worn path that skirted cheap fields and ranches
Speaker 1: of bramble. Craig Hill wasn't much to look at on
Speaker 1: its own, little more than a mound. It's summecrested by
Speaker 1: dragos and a single wind stunted birch. I knelt where
Speaker 1: the last geography clas supposedly scoured every into the previous
Speaker 1: summer and began to scour myself the base of the birch,
Speaker 1: the shadow of an old wall, the cleft where a
Speaker 1: root split the turf. To my surprise, within minutes I
Speaker 1: unearthed a pair of palm sized stones from beneath the
Speaker 1: cluster of most, both and mistakeably marked with ditch lines.
Speaker 1: One shroud a perfect spiral, the other a fretwork of optagons,
Speaker 1: so precise it nearly seemed machined. I jotted it, dan breath,
Speaker 1: fogging behind my scarf. If these stones had been missed
Speaker 1: by a class room of twenty, what did that suggest
Speaker 1: about the supposed searches or the certainty of the schullless?
Speaker 1: And if they had been found and lost, why had
Speaker 1: none of the adults in charge ever corrected the record.
Speaker 1: As I stood brushing out for my knees, Gordon the
Speaker 1: Shepherd appeared on the footpath, his boar de Collie at heel,
Speaker 1: out collecting the hills toys? Are you? He called? The
Speaker 1: mused I held up the newly found stones. You ever
Speaker 1: wondered why these turn up every year, or even after
Speaker 1: whole classes come the hills? He laughed, readjusting his flat cap.
Speaker 1: That's just how it is, the hills draw up out
Speaker 1: stones now, and then some years you'll find dozens, others
Speaker 1: only mud and sheep droppings. Stn't fret too much. The
Speaker 1: land hides things in its own way. It was a
Speaker 1: gentle non answer, but from Gordon that was as good
Speaker 1: as gospel. He greeted me cheerily, don't let the sheep
Speaker 1: decide to count, and made his way down the trail.
Speaker 1: So I stood two new stones in hand, and no
Speaker 1: clearer to understanding why careless misplacement inconsistent could keeping and
Speaker 1: a curious and curiosity ruled the small but persistent anomaly.
Speaker 1: As the afternoon interrupted into evening and the hells grew
Speaker 1: blue with distance, my questions sharpened. If these stones could
Speaker 1: reappear so easily, and the numbers never align, what else
Speaker 1: might be shifting unseen or unremarked between memory and record?
Speaker 1: And what was it about the shape of things, about
Speaker 1: the certainty of the ground itself that lets such oddity
Speaker 1: slip through so easily? That night I could not sleep,
Speaker 1: for wondering was a puzzle in the people or in
Speaker 1: the hells, or did it lie somewhere between? I knew
Speaker 1: by the time the first birds scattered the morning grade
Speaker 1: that had let this curiosity take root in earnest. The
Speaker 1: next week, I doubled my efforts at the Society, surrendering
Speaker 1: to my long cultivated methas laid out so often in
Speaker 1: my teaching days, of assembling order from a figue of
Speaker 1: misaligned pieces, I started with the tools, battered folios of maps,
Speaker 1: index cars with red incannotations, stacks of photographs bound with
Speaker 1: crumbling elastic, piles of children's priced drawings donated from a
Speaker 1: century of school contests. First the maps, a box set
Speaker 1: from nineteen twenty three, edges browned and notation lapidary nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty six in biro and pencil for Council Year do
Speaker 1: not Lend nineteen eighty five the Village Millennium Project, with
Speaker 1: each hill traced out in colored pastel. At a glance,
Speaker 1: they agreed a necklace of hills flanking the law, each
Speaker 1: given a name by one amateur surveyor or another, but
Speaker 1: the details betrayed certainty. In the nineteen twenty three map,
Speaker 1: though old Man's Bump was squarely labeled and drawn, squatted
Speaker 1: and squared off, the nineteen fifty six map omitted it entirely.
Speaker 1: No such rise were placed instead by saddle, which seemed
Speaker 1: to straddle low ground in two binds. The nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five pastel had both needy boxed, but with such a
Speaker 1: volap that Nita sat where the real slope fell. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: correspondence in the archive revealed squabbling over names. Knee Name
Speaker 1: appeared on two maps absent in the adders. Birch Hill
Speaker 1: shifted its spot from east to west by decade. In
Speaker 1: one anotote of margin a local grocer alarm since passed
Speaker 1: it scold who forgets the thimble ast mc cloud always
Speaker 1: gets wrong. The simple list of hills was mutable, even
Speaker 1: in the most serious of records. One lay the survey
Speaker 1: maps atop one another, tracing their contours with gentle fingers.
Speaker 1: The inconsistencies multiplied, dips became rises, rises vanished, and tire
Speaker 1: into her hill valves appeared or was smoothed out. It
Speaker 1: was as if each map was drawn from memory rather
Speaker 1: than from landscape. I turned to the Society Precious photographs.
Speaker 1: One black and white from nineteen forty showed a distinct
Speaker 1: cleft between two hills, a feature described in later documents
Speaker 1: as the saddle, But in all my recent walks no
Speaker 1: such saddle could be found with so wide a gap
Speaker 1: were at that angle. Other photographs, more recent and in color,
Speaker 1: portrayed her lines that seemed less dramatic, more blurred, the
Speaker 1: signature shapes always somehow missing the most distinctive elements. The
Speaker 1: Skull's mural, painted by every generation since two thousand five,
Speaker 1: displayed leven humps, painted with such certainty that surely no
Speaker 1: child to paused to question which was missing or added.
Speaker 1: But according to every village recitation and every walking guide,
Speaker 1: the official number was twelve. Seeking voices beyond the recus,
Speaker 1: I began to question neighbors with a teacher's polite persistence.
Speaker 1: This s Monroe, my constant companion in cataloging, and beans
Speaker 1: told me in a clip tone that the which's shoulder
Speaker 1: has always been at the far west. But in the
Speaker 1: next breath she recalled climbing it as a child at
Speaker 1: the east end, and fell silent. When I pressed her
Speaker 1: at a garden club, caloring offhandedly asimus as lindsay about
Speaker 1: the thimble, she frowned, declared there had never been such
Speaker 1: a hill, and then laid contradicted herself in a story
Speaker 1: about a lost doc evening is so definite, before switched
Speaker 1: between counting eleven, ten, and twelve on different mornings. They
Speaker 1: struck me that each person's memory was a closedly potterly confident,
Speaker 1: and yet upon closer inspection, self contradictory and impossible to
Speaker 1: reconcile with the next person's account. My inquiries took me
Speaker 1: into the schoolhouse, where, with Jenny's help, I arranged to
Speaker 1: look through the registered student artworks. Each spring the primary
Speaker 1: classes had drawn or pained to the hills of Kinnelon
Speaker 1: from the playground. Laid out chronologically on a table, the
Speaker 1: images formed the strange usual census eleven blue domes in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety five centuries, then nine and twenty wild shades
Speaker 1: of green in nineteen ninety eight, then ten in charcoal
Speaker 1: and marker in two thousand three. None matched the official count,
Speaker 1: nor even each other, and none aligned with the mural.
Speaker 1: I asked the current head teacher, emmss Bremner, what she
Speaker 1: made of this drift. She smiled, closing a folder. Children
Speaker 1: draw what them I see, or what they want to. Really,
Speaker 1: landscapes a suggestion, not a fact. Besides, the numbers never
Speaker 1: quite madder there the hills, they are just there. It
Speaker 1: was I realized a curiously promissus dance recording was anecdote,
Speaker 1: not evidence, and yet to a person, the adults retained
Speaker 1: an or of certainty about the hill's identity and placement,
Speaker 1: even as their collective memory wobbled unpredictably. On my own walks,
Speaker 1: I tested this myself one morning. I counted ten hills
Speaker 1: as I set out, careful and methodical toweling each rise
Speaker 1: and dip visible from the main road. That afternoon, on
Speaker 1: the same path under milky sun, I counted only nine,
Speaker 1: the old man's bump blending into the ridge line indistinguishable
Speaker 1: unless once quinted ferociously. I checked my note ten in
Speaker 1: the morning, nine in the afternoon, same vantage points, same mind.
Speaker 1: A contradiction bit at me persist in as coarse thorn's.
Speaker 1: How could such concrete physical form shift if the hills
Speaker 1: were miscounted, misremembered, or misnamed. Was as simply bad record keeping.
Speaker 1: But then whose memory was at fault and whose record
Speaker 1: could be trusted? Was there a trick of whether or
Speaker 1: mood at play? I tried taking a photograph, digital time stamped,
Speaker 1: reviewing it that evening, the line accorded with the correct
Speaker 1: count for that morning. Yet standing on my own step.
Speaker 1: The view outside the window felt suddenly off, a missing
Speaker 1: cleft and altered bulge. No explanation provided real comfort. The
Speaker 1: more I looked, the less the wrecords agreed, and the
Speaker 1: less any human memory could anger the line of hills.
Speaker 1: I tended a week end village gathering, passing among clusters
Speaker 1: of old men and women, quietly queering stories. Each insisted
Speaker 1: the hills as stood as they worked since before. The stones,
Speaker 1: then made small slaps, calling one the sleeping pig of
Speaker 1: when it was clearly the thimble, or referencing childhood games
Speaker 1: behind at the east hill of which no one else recognized.
Speaker 1: At some point I grew certain the problem could not
Speaker 1: be merely prodocumentation or lazy recollection. Whatever anomally existed stemmed
Speaker 1: not simply from missing files, but from a deeper disjunction,
Speaker 1: where every wreckor every sketch, and every folk memory was
Speaker 1: out of alignment with every other, and none with the
Speaker 1: living hills outside my kitchen window. Late that night, as
Speaker 1: a pale moon dragged cloud across the north, I sat
Speaker 1: with my notebook and cataloged stones found around me, sketching
Speaker 1: once again, the shapes saluted consistency my fingers faltered, my
Speaker 1: lines drifted. No two sketches match even one minutes apart.
Speaker 1: It was as if the very act of recording, however, ernest,
Speaker 1: could only capture one truth at a time, truce that
Speaker 1: dissolved into contradiction as soon as I tried to join
Speaker 1: them together. I had again to wonder, as the phenomenon
Speaker 1: a matter of erosion, a trick of Scottish weather and
Speaker 1: shifting light, altering hill lines from day to day, month
Speaker 1: to month. Perhaps the collective memory of the community had
Speaker 1: simply grown unreliable, each generation overlaying its own preferred narrative
Speaker 1: until fact and invention, so in time no one could
Speaker 1: entandle them. But each new theory bruised itself and stubborn
Speaker 1: recurring facts, the deliberate stones, the recurring but always shifting
Speaker 1: patterns with maps and children's art, the simultaneous confidence and
Speaker 1: confusion with which every villager spoke of the hills and
Speaker 1: the stones above all neither explained nor explainable, made with
Speaker 1: a precision that broke no lazy accident. I molded over
Speaker 1: in the Society's kitchen with Jenny one blustery Tuesday. Both
Speaker 1: of us hunched over tea and a pile of duplicated surveys, sketches.
Speaker 1: You're saying the records are the problem, she asked, tearing
Speaker 1: her muffin methodically. Not just the records, every kind of
Speaker 1: record of memory, sketches, maps, even these stones. None of
Speaker 1: them agrees for long, not with each other, not even
Speaker 1: with themselves. She considered this, shrugged, then laughed. Maybe the
Speaker 1: hills have minds of their own. Maybe we just get
Speaker 1: the hills we deserve. Her tone was playful, but she
Speaker 1: glanced at the window as she spoke, as if expecting
Speaker 1: a retaliatory flicker from the skyline. I admitted, I don't
Speaker 1: know what I'm chasing. At this point, even accounting has
Speaker 1: become suspect. She drained her muck, grinned, embraced the confusion.
Speaker 1: The archeves are stuff with mysteries that never straightened themselves out.
Speaker 1: But I could not quite let it rest. More and
Speaker 1: more my interest had shifted morphing from a Cattalogero's puzzle
Speaker 1: about missing objects into something that gnawed at the reliability
Speaker 1: of experience itself. The hills, so solid on the horizon,
Speaker 1: seemed to participate in a dance with those who tried
Speaker 1: to pin them down, resisting record, eluding summary, quietly reshaping
Speaker 1: themselves in the margins of habit and forgetting. The more
Speaker 1: I tested maps, the more their polygons slit. The more
Speaker 1: I compare memories, the further apart they drew. Even my
Speaker 1: own notes were unreliable, slide in number of shifting insequence,
Speaker 1: never matching my memory. Come the next morning, I ran
Speaker 1: at last to a hypothesis, refined one sleepless night as
Speaker 1: rain battered the eaves of her head. Perhaps there were
Speaker 1: three possibilities. First, a natural one that the hills, subject
Speaker 1: to slow violence, erosion, slides, shifting light, had changed enough
Speaker 1: over decades that only the memory of permanence remained. Second,
Speaker 1: a social one that a persistent community story or tradition
Speaker 1: encouraged collective editing, a kind of subconscious agreement to let
Speaker 1: fact slip so that stories could serve the needs of belonging. Third,
Speaker 1: and most troubling, possessed not in the hills nor the memory,
Speaker 1: but in the act of recording itself, that perhaps something
Speaker 1: about the way information was fixed in any modemid certain
Speaker 1: elements of the landscape fundamentally and commensurate, always refusing to
Speaker 1: be pinned together. I put these questions shyly to Jenny again.
Speaker 1: Days later, as she sorted a new pile of donations,
Speaker 1: she twirled her pencil. Don't look at me. I'm still
Speaker 1: trying to decide if we even have a full inventory
Speaker 1: of the war badges. Never mind the hills. That liked
Speaker 1: the idea of the hills deciding what's written down, though,
Speaker 1: like some big collaborative joke. She imagine that nature running
Speaker 1: circles around us. Her amusement was contagious, but it also
Speaker 1: left room for my growing suspicion. The more I tried
Speaker 1: to dig around the hills, the more they seemed to die. Gramy.
Speaker 1: After another week of late afternoons in the archives and
Speaker 1: squinting at Survey's folios, of fresh line of inquiry struck me.
Speaker 1: I spread out every society map I could borrow, overlaying
Speaker 1: them on trees in paper top a white pine table
Speaker 1: in the meeting room. The discrepancies at first formed muddle lines,
Speaker 1: secluding lines, blurring all into a lotsiut its marge of
Speaker 1: valves and peaks, But then methodically I shifted my approach.
Speaker 1: I began to isolate the location and date for each
Speaker 1: a stone, plotting their discovery by eratop the corresponding hand
Speaker 1: drawn map, easing colored pins. A pattern fign at first
Speaker 1: emerged by degrees. In years when the map strewed eleven hells,
Speaker 1: the stones unearthed bore triangles. In years with twelve mapped hills,
Speaker 1: the stones nearly always carried circles, nestive within circles, or
Speaker 1: concentric spirals. Certain years, the arrangement of stones and mate
Speaker 1: rises formed in the sauceiles triangle, or at times a
Speaker 1: perfect pentagon. When I joined the dots on the page,
Speaker 1: my pace quickened. As I searched through society catalogs and
Speaker 1: oonation books. In the thick hard bachnobos donated by the school,
Speaker 1: I found annual class hill field entries. Each student group
Speaker 1: had been asked to sketch the hills from the main
Speaker 1: road every spring since some time before nineteen sixty as
Speaker 1: part of their geographica riculum. I flicked through dozens in
Speaker 1: nearly every year. The children's numbers and drawings didn't match
Speaker 1: the recorded hill camp for their time, but when compared
Speaker 1: to the following year's map, were photographs seen to predict
Speaker 1: the next year's configuration. It was as if the art
Speaker 1: anticipated rather than recorded reality, most eerily patternsted on the stones,
Speaker 1: frequently matched motifs in the Sculpturldren's sketches, A tangle of triangles,
Speaker 1: a spiral till line, a configuration that I could the
Speaker 1: precise arrangement I just mapped on tracing paper energy humming.
Speaker 1: I pasted together timelines, comparing each set of Fieldbrook stones
Speaker 1: with that year's map, tales the symbols occurrence over decades,
Speaker 1: correlating the geometric relationships in a way that, to my
Speaker 1: growing astonishment, proved too intricate to be accidental. It was
Speaker 1: as if each set of stones marked the existence, or
Speaker 1: perhaps the identity, of the hells present at any given time.
Speaker 1: Armed with my findings, brought this simple diagrams, stones and
Speaker 1: sketches to the next Historical Society meeting, a Thursday evening,
Speaker 1: drizzle pattering at the windows, as more upoored strong tea
Speaker 1: for half full table, I presented the emergence of these
Speaker 1: subtle patterns, sizing years shades, the overlap between stone and map,
Speaker 1: stone and child's drawing. My notes ran two pages. My
Speaker 1: voice I fear raised with excitement. The assembled company took
Speaker 1: it with stoke resignation. More grazed her eyebrows, impatiently curious.
Speaker 1: If there's a pattern, I can't see it. Maybe it's
Speaker 1: all in how you're drawing the lines. One of the
Speaker 1: eldest sept tee then responded with a gentle aye, that's
Speaker 1: just the way it's always been. Hill's do what they like.
Speaker 1: Jenny smiled encouragingly, but added, people see what they want
Speaker 1: to see. I'd be happy to read over your notes.
Speaker 1: Though a few others look politely interested, but no one
Speaker 1: seemed showed my sense of discovery or disquiet. Angus, making
Speaker 1: a rare appearance, laughed, the Hills have always kept discussing.
Speaker 1: Folk get worked up of a less. The debate, such
Speaker 1: as it was, fizzled into comfortable talk of the changing
Speaker 1: council bins and the price of aches. I pressed a
Speaker 1: little further in discussion, hoping at least for a glimmer
Speaker 1: of concern or share curiosity, but the consensus was unbothered.
Speaker 1: Sometimes a vasa, often gently mocking the Hills change with
Speaker 1: the light. Gordon repeated, next, you'll be telling us a
Speaker 1: river ran upstream. As I troached home with my satchel
Speaker 1: full of record, I felt not deflated, but deepened In
Speaker 1: that fascination, it was as though the phenomenon did not
Speaker 1: just persist, but actively resisted explanation, even attention. The stones,
Speaker 1: the maps, the sketches, the memories all flashed tints of order,
Speaker 1: but retreated when pressed. I found myself thinking not of conspiracy,
Speaker 1: but of a process, the pattern shifting of aspects, a
Speaker 1: code perhaps, that kept explanation always out of reach. On
Speaker 1: the verge of the next question, The code, if it existed,
Speaker 1: seemed as much in the looking as in the hills themselves.
Speaker 1: I realized the curiosity had escaped the boundaries of cataloging.
Speaker 1: Now the entire landscape and the story of its recorders
Speaker 1: was alive with a nod refusal to be pinned down,
Speaker 1: as if it wanted to be both seen in secret.
Speaker 1: At once, Jenny's voice trailed after me as I left
Speaker 1: the meeting. Let me know if you want help with
Speaker 1: those spadsheets. Sometimes a bigger mess is more interesting, right.
Speaker 1: I managed to half smile in it, acknowledgment, but by
Speaker 1: there my mind was already worrying, stubbornly, unwilling to let
Speaker 1: the indifference of the group's snuff out the spock of
Speaker 1: the pattern. I had seen emerging. The rain picked up
Speaker 1: clinking light pins against the collar of my jacket as
Speaker 1: I walked the cover of the lane home, stones in
Speaker 1: my pocket, notes pressed flat in my back. That night
Speaker 1: I barely slept. Some time around four I found myself
Speaker 1: at the kitchen window, peering northward as if I might
Speaker 1: catch a hell in the act of inverting or sidling away.
Speaker 1: No such luck, only the velvet dark and the suggestion
Speaker 1: of land on land. When dawn came to fuse and
Speaker 1: pale above the ridge line, I was no closer to certainty,
Speaker 1: but my curiosity had grown charperquisitive, almost Perhaps there was
Speaker 1: some vanity in wanting the mistrue to Matamore to be
Speaker 1: a mark of attention rather than an attention. I resolved
Speaker 1: to test what could be tested. After too strong teas
Speaker 1: and a single slice of tourist, I packed my satchel nope,
Speaker 1: two digital cameras, a bad aer GPS borrowed with some
Speaker 1: drolling from the village primaries, geography cupboard, a compass, several
Speaker 1: sticks of soft charcoal, my grandmother's field glasses, and the stones,
Speaker 1: five of them, all marked, all mapped in my grourt.
Speaker 1: I phoned Jenny and to my modest surprise, three to
Speaker 1: join me, citing the prospect of research. Chumpfort is a
Speaker 1: blessed alternative to another day buried in wartime. With seats,
Speaker 1: we set off up the Craig Hill path Mistio Kong
Speaker 1: to the valley, blurring the early light to mutting every distance,
Speaker 1: each step twofold, once for simple locomotion and once as
Speaker 1: demonstration a test of our senses against the world's invariants.
Speaker 1: Jenny was brisk and chatty as shield, perhaps against the
Speaker 1: sense of pursuing a ghost. Let's make it official. Che grinned,
Speaker 1: clutching the digital camera without stretched on scientists and witness.
Speaker 1: We stopped at the school fence, our vantage over the
Speaker 1: ridge clear. Each of us took a panoramic sweep of photos,
Speaker 1: sending shoulder to shoulder, Jenny facing slightly left me head on.
Speaker 1: For good measure, I recorded the GPS coordinates, the compass
Speaker 1: bearings of each visible peak, and jotted the weather cloud
Speaker 1: low visibility patche but fair mood, uncertain, proper field work,
Speaker 1: Jenny said in mock solemity. Then produced a bowl of
Speaker 1: blue clay from her cup pocket. I told the petherres
Speaker 1: we'd need this for science for a leaf mapping. You remember,
Speaker 1: we pressed the clay against a flask slab stone and
Speaker 1: tried to reproduce the line of hills as a tactile sequence.
Speaker 1: One dent per visible crest, my first attempt, due to
Speaker 1: ten Jennie's eleven. We compare different bumps, different dates, all
Speaker 1: on the same view, all matching neither the official map
Speaker 1: or each other's photographs. Upon review a top craike heel.
Speaker 1: We compared the camera images side by side, then larger
Speaker 1: on the screens. To the naked eye, our views seemed
Speaker 1: identical under scrutiny later at home, subtle differences multiplied in
Speaker 1: Jenny's images. The notch before the saddle seemed larger, blooming,
Speaker 1: bearre and sharp. In mine. It was softened, almost continuous
Speaker 1: with the adjacent rise. The old man's bump, which had
Speaker 1: loomed singly as we stood together, divided in my shot
Speaker 1: into two distinct humps. I felt tingles up my arm.
Speaker 1: Surely a trick of anyl or focal length. And yet
Speaker 1: our footprints are shadows o'lafter remain fixed duplicated figures at
Speaker 1: the margin of shifting land. I tested the GPS two
Speaker 1: readings minutes apart steps, never more than three paces apart.
Speaker 1: The digital device chirped in mapden were loaded onto the
Speaker 1: school computer. That evening returned two sets of coordinates that
Speaker 1: diverged by full twenty meters, enough to lift one's position
Speaker 1: from the base of a head to its mid flank.
Speaker 1: Old software Jenny allowed, but the sense of variable ground
Speaker 1: now dagged me. We repeated the process across two more
Speaker 1: hills before the drizzer forest us back toward the warmth
Speaker 1: of the Society's kitchen. I insisted we try again from
Speaker 1: the pronounced cove midway of the Birch Hill footbath. This
Speaker 1: time we recruited Missius Monroe and Gordon, who happened all long,
Speaker 1: both with the mild skepticism of the untempted. We'll sketch together,
Speaker 1: I explain, in silence the same view. Then compare four pads,
Speaker 1: four pencils, shivering hands as the cold bit deeper. Five
Speaker 1: minutes of quiet effort. When we lined up the results
Speaker 1: on a fallen birch trunk, de Vergen sprang up again
Speaker 1: with cheerful resilience. Gordon's drawing gave the old man a
Speaker 1: flat head, a detail not matched on any other mine
Speaker 1: had the witch's shoulders. Sounding out bluntly, Jennies presented an
Speaker 1: exaggerated valley between the saddle and birch, while Missess Munroe
Speaker 1: included a small, unidentifiable rise that's always there, she insisted.
Speaker 1: Heated but ultimately good natured. De beats sprang up about
Speaker 1: which humps were reel, which imagined, which omitted. Each was
Speaker 1: certain of their version, each version unreconcilable, lot of seeing
Speaker 1: what you want to see. Gordon crowed, waving his pad,
Speaker 1: fields and sheep and hills in any order you pleased.
Speaker 1: Hills don't care either way, he winked, as if the
Speaker 1: whole exercise was some elavera prank we'd fallen for. Yet,
Speaker 1: for all its humor, of a subtle tension remained. If
Speaker 1: standing shoulder to shoulder, we could not agree, even on
Speaker 1: a simple outline, what hope did the historical record have?
Speaker 1: Later that week, fueled by the stubborn refusal of explanation,
Speaker 1: I gathered every available stone from the society box, stolen
Speaker 1: from labeled bags, gathered from shelf corners, passed to me
Speaker 1: with that ceremony by other volunteers, who laughed gently at
Speaker 1: my new obsession. I borrowed Jenny's colored sewing. Fred laid
Speaker 1: the stones out on the long pine table and began
Speaker 1: arranging them in sequences by day on a large blank sheet,
Speaker 1: a plot, a catalog years a long one axis. The
Speaker 1: chain of discovered stones along Gatherer a kind of logic emerged,
Speaker 1: not a repetition, but a structure, like an elaborate dance,
Speaker 1: in which each year's hell's exchange markers with the last,
Speaker 1: advancing by rules visible only in retrospect. Certain stones marked
Speaker 1: with interlacing triangles appeared to stand for hills that recurred
Speaker 1: every two cycles. Spiral stones corresponded only ty years in
Speaker 1: which the hill count spiked up with or downward by
Speaker 1: more than one Penticonal stones marked a hill that existed
Speaker 1: in all sketches for three years, then vanished abruptly. It
Speaker 1: began to resemble not a collection but a language, a
Speaker 1: sequence that marked, transformed, and preserved the hill line over decades,
Speaker 1: as if each stone were a passport stamped with that
Speaker 1: year's arrangement. The hills through the stones tracked their own presence,
Speaker 1: not as fixed geography, but as shifting re code of identities.
Speaker 1: The shift in emphasis was subtle, but seismic Perhaps the
Speaker 1: hills changed not in rock and grass, but in the
Speaker 1: category of attention. Perhaps the act of noticing or recording
Speaker 1: was itself a move in the pattern. Each generation inheriting
Speaker 1: both the stones and the malibility of what could be counted, marked,
Speaker 1: and named. The question, sharp and painfully, was that the
Speaker 1: stones at caused the hills to shift? Was it memory, tradition,
Speaker 1: or an unknown process, a cultural, psychological, or physical mechanism
Speaker 1: that mirrored the codeddenses of permutation in mathematics or in
Speaker 1: cryptic tons. Jenny, when pressed, suggested we run it by
Speaker 1: someone outside proper academics, even a mathematician. I hesitated. Part
Speaker 1: of me feared the pattern would disslve under scrutiny or worse,
Speaker 1: become another artifact for the shelf. Disenchanted, cataloged and ignored. Instead,
Speaker 1: urged by both excitement and a stubborn need for resolution,
Speaker 1: I lost myself in wider reading mathematical ciphers, patent theory,
Speaker 1: permutation groups. Late nights saw me surrounded by borrowed textbooks
Speaker 1: on code breaking, on symmetry, and cycles on traditions of
Speaker 1: tally marks and boundary stones from Artney to Brittany, varied
Speaker 1: in a volume of introductory cryptanalysis. I stumbled across a
Speaker 1: page on permutation cycles, sequences in which a set of
Speaker 1: elament stones or hills are rearranged not randomly, but by
Speaker 1: a roll bound transformation that defies easy prediction. The key
Speaker 1: the book noted is that in non repeating, yet complete cycles,
Speaker 1: every element has its moment to appear in each position,
Speaker 1: a sequence governed not by accident but by invisible structure.
Speaker 1: My hands tremble slightly as I cross reference this with
Speaker 1: my catalog. The stones, set year by year, fit the
Speaker 1: cycle precisely, each pattern recurring after a fixed number of years,
Speaker 1: appearing to tag a hill, cycling its prisons or absence
Speaker 1: in an orderly, if deeply hidden process. When mapp the
Speaker 1: entire landscape over decades resembled a life ving permutation code.
Speaker 1: Each stone and each count of hills one move in
Speaker 1: a century's long quietly continued cipher What then was being
Speaker 1: encoded were who or what was meant to read it.
Speaker 1: I stayed up through the small hours, tracing the cycle,
Speaker 1: overlaying it on the known years of hell, changes in
Speaker 1: on the motifs and the children's drawings, more consistently than
Speaker 1: chance would allow. The children's art mistakes foreshadowed not the
Speaker 1: hells they saw, but the sequence the stones predicted for
Speaker 1: the following year. Child's spiral drawn years before the first
Speaker 1: spiral stone a hell number in that prefigured the next
Speaker 1: reconfiguration in village records. It was almost as if some
Speaker 1: silent communal algorithm, partiological, part cultural, part and specifiable, enacted
Speaker 1: itself to children's play and attentiveness. Each rowing became a
Speaker 1: step in the code. Each thoughn an inductor record of
Speaker 1: the current cipher, there had chings a notation for the
Speaker 1: unresolvable sum of record and memory. I returned to the archives.
Speaker 1: This time. My reading a folklor and song forced me
Speaker 1: to reconsider what had been set aside as nursery, fable
Speaker 1: or whimsy. All verses compiled in my grandmother's song of
Speaker 1: the Hills referred to a hill that comes and goes,
Speaker 1: not mis nor marked, but borrowed by the winds. An
Speaker 1: archaic bower described a meeting place when the moon calls
Speaker 1: the thirteenth from its sleep, and the stones bare secrets
Speaker 1: around us. Timond's boiling curiosity unresolved, I paid a visit
Speaker 1: in the oldest villager, Mary Sinclair, who lived alone on
Speaker 1: the farthest edge, how sunk in bracken and childless, seldom
Speaker 1: seen except at Christmas and funerals. She sat by the fire,
Speaker 1: gnarled hands clutching a shawl, the light of the day
Speaker 1: falling gold and filtered through smoke. I opened as softly
Speaker 1: as I could. Mary. Did you ever hear from your
Speaker 1: parents or grandparents about the hills changing? She smiled, almost
Speaker 1: sly voiced them. Butchuer ochkeye. My father used to say,
Speaker 1: you could lose a hill and never know it if
Speaker 1: you weren't careful. We'd count in the spring, and some
Speaker 1: years we'd have a different set to climb. Meant nothing,
Speaker 1: meant everything. It was just what fook did. Did anyone
Speaker 1: ever try to keep track or explain it? She was
Speaker 1: silent a moment. No, you accept what you see. Every generation,
Speaker 1: a hell goes messing and another appears, so we're never
Speaker 1: quite certain how many we are own. You make a
Speaker 1: new rhyme, children draw new games. If you tried to
Speaker 1: show it to some one from away, the story changed again.
Speaker 1: And the stones, oh, the stones always came from the hills.
Speaker 1: Sometimes ye'd carry one back, sometimes ye'd set one down.
Speaker 1: My grandmother told us not to bring more than one
Speaker 1: at a time. Ye'll confuse the hills, she'd say. As
Speaker 1: I left, Mary gifted me a stone from her mantle,
Speaker 1: pale smooth, a pattern of sharp angles of form, memory
Speaker 1: or for exchange. It dawned on me in a slow
Speaker 1: tidal swell that the system was both artifact and process,
Speaker 1: not a trick of geology, not an optical illusion, nor
Speaker 1: simply a myth, but a living Covid communal continuously re
Speaker 1: enacted method for holding the world in flux. The stones
Speaker 1: and their patents, the maps and their contradictions, did not
Speaker 1: simply record landscape. They helped constitute it, acting as both
Speaker 1: memory and permission for what could be counted or named.
Speaker 1: Each act of recording was a participation in the transformation.
Speaker 1: No one, not even the keenest observer, could step outside
Speaker 1: the cycle. The following Saturday, prompted by a restless urage,
Speaker 1: I propose a mapping day for the village. Ostensibly a
Speaker 1: frontruiser organized through the society and the skill, but in
Speaker 1: my heart a final test. Three teams set out on
Speaker 1: parallel routes, children leading the way, adults with sketch pads,
Speaker 1: compasses and cameras tracing the northern ridge from the main
Speaker 1: road to the law. At noon, we reconvened on the green,
Speaker 1: arms full of sketches, stones gathered and traded. Digital photographs
Speaker 1: flickering on screens as drawings were compared. Arguments rose good
Speaker 1: natured but impassioned. This hill was counted twice that one forgotten.
Speaker 1: Jenny's group claimed the missing valley as an additional rise,
Speaker 1: while miscess Munro's team insisted on in easternmost shoulder nobody
Speaker 1: else included. Yet, even faced with the material evidence of disagreement,
Speaker 1: each group remained convinced of their version's accuracy. When all
Speaker 1: was done, I laid out the stones from each group
Speaker 1: in parallel rose. The symbols sordid themselves without argument triangles
Speaker 1: predominating in the sets of ten spirals, in the sets
Speaker 1: of eleven pentagons, surfacing only among those who had added
Speaker 1: a mid valley rise. The pattern, though invisible in any
Speaker 1: single moment, was unmistakably persistent and aggregate each vision of
Speaker 1: the land, each memory, each record, and action in a
Speaker 1: code that reshaped the next step. Sitting at home that evening,
Speaker 1: the house alive, with the acrecent of wet wall and
Speaker 1: the steady drip from a slow leak in my porch roof.
Speaker 1: I finally relented, not in frustration, but in a kind
Speaker 1: of relief, a gentle, encompassing embrace of the uncertainty that
Speaker 1: ring the village. Like dawn missed on birch. The stones
Speaker 1: in my palm were cool, unwavering. They did not explain
Speaker 1: the hills, neither in the language of geology nor myth. Instead,
Speaker 1: they inscribed an agreement to participate, to let what could
Speaker 1: be matchif, to make myth continuous with memory, to encode
Speaker 1: change as a condition rather than of law. Even the
Speaker 1: children seemed to know, at least instinctively. I found a
Speaker 1: group of them days later inventing a new game of
Speaker 1: contest to name the extra hell to Etche's symbol in
Speaker 1: the mud. Some rules, they told me, could only be
Speaker 1: invented by those who did not care about correctness. Watching them,
Speaker 1: I understood at last that the hill's shifting nature was
Speaker 1: neither problem nor puzzle. It was a code, ancient and
Speaker 1: co creative, one that required the confusion and the care
Speaker 1: of every generation to keep it alive. My final walk
Speaker 1: before autumns called arrival, was the slow circuit of the
Speaker 1: rage at sunset stones in my pocket, notebook abandoned, and
Speaker 1: the kitchen table. I paused at one familiar spot, then another, counting,
Speaker 1: not counting, letting the hills arrange themselves as they would.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I saw ten, sometimes only nine. Sometimes a hell
Speaker 1: I'd been certain of became a fold and shadow, a
Speaker 1: line to solving behind cloud. Each moment was valid, each
Speaker 1: line a possible order. It struck me that in all
Speaker 1: things hill memory record, a certainty was not the prize,
Speaker 1: nor even the purpose. What mattered was the willingness to
Speaker 1: attend again and again toward ever pattern or absence the
Speaker 1: land presented, to accept contradiction as invitation. The stones in
Speaker 1: my hand, coded but never solved, were enough a reminder
Speaker 1: of the world's quite refusal to abide by a single scheme.
Speaker 1: In the end, I left the doors of the historical
Speaker 1: society open to every version, every new contradiction. There is
Speaker 1: room in the Arqeve now for stories that do not
Speaker 1: cleave to fact, for drawings that must gount, for stones
Speaker 1: whose symbols will not be cataloged out of change, And
Speaker 1: on evenings that run long in gold, I find myself
Speaker 1: most at home not with the Hell's mid certain but
Speaker 1: with the ones that slept slightly out of reach, counter
Speaker 1: recounted turn in the hand, shifting patterns lit by curiosity
Speaker 1: and fading sun. Standing at the margin, a single stone
Speaker 1: pressed in my palm. I wonder how many other things
Speaker 1: in the world make space for so much quiver writing.
Speaker 1: How much of what we call memory or place or
Speaker 1: fact is softly encoded, permitted to move in the fold
Speaker 1: between belief and the hills weight, their code ever incomplete,
Speaker 1: lying just beyond the neat pinning of maps and names,
Speaker 1: a landscape that gathers the gaze and asks gently and
Speaker 1: ceaselessly to be seen over and over, newly, ingraspable, a
Speaker 1: pattern both ordinary and impossibly intricate, offered endlessly to the patient,
Speaker 1: the playful, and the curious. And that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.