The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Online Free PDF Page B

centrality and excitement of these debates and to understand the Lügensteine as legitimately puzzling.
    I do not, however, wish to absolve Beringer of all blame under an indefensibly pluralistic doctrine that all plausible explanations of past times may claim the same weight of judicious argument. The Lügensteine may not have been absurd, but Beringer had also encountered enough clues to uncover the hoax and avoid embarrassment. However, for several reasons involving flaws in character and passable intelligence short of true brilliance, Beringer forged on, finally trumping his judgment by his desire to be recognized and honored for a great discovery that had consumed so much of his time and expense. How could he relinquish the fame he could almost taste in writing:
    Behold these tablets, which I was inspired to edit, not only by my tireless zeal for public service, and by your wishes and those of my many friends, and by my strong filial love for Franconia, to which, from these figured fruits of this previously obscure mountain, no less glory will accrue than from the delicious wines of its vine-covered hills.
    I am no fan of Dr. Beringer. He strikes me, first of all, as an insufferable pedant—so I can understand his colleagues’ frustration, while not condoning their solutions. (I pride myself on always quoting from original sources, and I do own a copy of Beringer’s treatise. I am no Latin scholar, but I can read and translate most works in this universal scientific language of Beringer’s time. But I cannot make head or tail of the convoluted phrasings, the invented words, the absurdly twisted sentences of Beringer’s prose, and I have had to rely on Jahn and Woolf’s translation previously cited.)
    Moreover, Beringer saw and reported more than enough evidence to uncover the hoax, had he been inclined to greater judiciousness. He noted that his Lügensteine bore no relationship to any other objects known to the burgeoning science of paleontology, not even to the numerous “real” fossils alsofound on his mountain. But instead of alerting him to possible fraud, these differences only fueled Beringer’s hopes for fame. He made many observations that should have clued him in (even by standards of his own time) to the artificial carving of his fossils: why were they nearly always complete, and not usually fragmentary like most other finds; why did each object seem to fit so snugly and firmly on the enclosing rock; why did only the top sides protrude, while the lower parts merged with the underlying rock; why had letters and sunbeams not been found before; why did nearly all fossils appear in the same orientation, splayed out and viewed from the top, never from the side or bottom? Beringer’s own words almost shout out the obvious and correct conclusion that he couldn’t abide or even discern: “The figures expressed on these stones, especially those of insects, are so exactly fitted to the dimensions of the stones, that one would swear that they are the work of a very meticulous sculptor.”
    Beringer’s arrogance brought him down in a much more direct manner as well. When Eckhart and Roderick learned that Beringer planned to publish his work, they realized that they had gone too far and became frightened. They tried to warn Beringer, by hints at first but later quite directly as their anxiety increased. Roderick even delivered some stones to Beringer and later showed his rival how they had been carved—hoping that Beringer would then draw an obvious inference about the rest of his identical collection.
    Beringer, however, was now committed and would not be derailed. He replied with the argument of all true believers, the unshakable faith that resists all reason and evidence: yes, you have proven that these psychics are frauds, but my psychics are the real McCoy, and I must defend them even more strongly now that you have heaped unfair calumnies upon the entire