The Discovery of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought I might as well do it."
    Max nodded. Now he remembered: the large man in tails, pretending to be astonished as he received the diploma from a lady in an academic cap, as though it were a complete surprise to him.
    Onno looked sideways. "And what about you?" he asked. "What do you do for a living? I can't recall ever having seen your photo in the paper."
    "What a shit you are," said Max, laughing. "I do astronomy." Motioned right with his head. "Over there. In Leiden."
    Onno looked at the town on the edge of the bare fields. "Don't you need to turn off here, then?"
    "I live in Amsterdam, thank God. That's why I have a car." Onno put out his hand and said, "Onno Quist." Max shook the hand. "Delius, Max."
     

3
I'll See You Home
    Onno never answered curious questions about his discovery. "You can read all about it in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies," he was wont to say. "I don't work overtime." Now, however, in response to Max's question how he had deciphered the script, he explained patiently that it was not a matter of deciphering, seeing that it had been legible for donkey's years. It consisted largely of the Greek alphabet, but it was not Greek; it was incomprehensible. It was as if someone who knew no Greek were to learn the Greek alphabet and then try to read the Iliad. The Etruscans were an Italic people, he lectured, living in what was now Tuscany. The Roman conquerors called them "Tusci." Latin was full of Etruscan loanwords, such as persona for "mask," but apart from that there were only a few words whose meaning was known, such as those for "god," "woman," and "son."
    The problem was that there was no long bilingue as there had been with Champollion's Rosetta stone, with the same text in Etruscan and a known language. So they were connected with the Greeks in some way, and at the same time their language was totally unconnected with Greek. They wrote their language phonetically with Greek characters, like first-year high school pupils did with their names, and like Dutch people did with Roman letters. So that in about the ninth century B . C . this people came from somewhere where there were also Greeks. However—and that was the decisive flash of inspiration—it was of course also possible that the Greeks had once borrowed their alphabet from the Etruscans in order to write their own language, Greek. Of course it was a totally crazy idea; but following that line of reasoning, supported by all kinds of archaeological considerations, he arrived at the Cretan languages, Linear B, deciphered fifteen years previously by his late colleague Michael Ventris, and Linear A from the eighteenth century—which in turn had Semitic origins . . .
    "In short, my dear Watson," he said as they were passing Schiphol airport, "through combination and deduction and a lot of luck and wisdom, I found the answer. It's true that Professor Pellegrini still regards me as a fantasist and a charlatan, but that is largely an indication of his autistic nature."
    "What did you study?"
    "Law." Law?
    "It's a family disease."
    "But all those languages. .."
    "A hobby. I'm an amateur, like the great Ventris, who was an architect by profession. If I have to, I can learn a language in a month. I could read by the time I was three."
    "How many languages do you know then?"
    "I'm bad at counting. That strikes me as more in your line. How many stars are there?"
    "We haven't counted them all yet, and anyway, the number isn't constant. In one galaxy alone there are about a hundred billion. As many as a human being has brain cells."
    "Speak for yourself."
    "In addition there are about a hundred million known galactic systems, as many as I have brain cells, so you can work it out. A one and twenty-two naughts. How many languages are there?"
    "A mere nothing. About two thousand five hundred."
    "Can you read hieroglyphics too?"
    "What kind of hieroglyphics?"
    "Egyptian."
    "Nothing to it. I can speak them too. Paut neteroe her resch sep sen ini Asar sa