What the Field Kept Without a Name

A geographer in Alexandria wrote down a word and two numbers for where it was, thirty-six degrees, forty-six and two-thirds, and a river coming in from the north at the same place. He had it from someone who had been there, or from someone who had it from someone.

Copied by hand, then by press, the word went on across eighteen centuries of desks without once touching the ground it was about.

Downriver from Linz the ground went on too. Around the year one-eighty the coins stop. After that no one set a later wall on the earlier one, no church on the bathhouse, no village on the grid. The plough went over it, year after year, a hand's depth.

So for a long time there were two kept things: a word with numbers and no field, a field with streets and no word.

Now a cart of magnetometers crosses the wheat, radar goes down three metres through the gravel and sand, and blocks come up, and a bowl where eight thousand people could have sat and shouted.

Everyone wants the word to drop into the bowl. It may. One stone with letters on it could settle it in an afternoon. Until then the word stays where it has been, riding in a book, pointing at whatever one informant saw, and the field stays what it has been, a plan laid out once and never written over, readable for the plain reason that the later hands went a few kilometres west and built their walls on somewhere else.