The Voice of the Xenolith Read Online Free PDF Page A

section, saying what is inside each compartment. That way things don’t get mixed up and don’t get lost, and you always know where to find something.
    I even love those Russian dolls made of painted wood, those matryoshka nesting dolls, which fit one inside the other, because even though they are not strictly speaking boxes, by which I mean they are not shaped like a cube or rectangle, they still contain things, in order of size, and when the one fits inside the next you know you have got them in their right order, each one fitting perfectly in its place.
    So maybe when I talk about how I love boxes, what I really mean is, I like to be able to sort things into their places and categories, and to label them. But the box itself is also important: it has to be well-made, either of wood or high-quality plastic, and if it is made of wood, I like it to be wood which has been beautifully polished or decorated. It is what I call The Perfection of Spaces : each thing is in its own place and you know where to find things, and the container itself is as lovely as what is inside.
    I have one box which I use to keep my collection of fossilized sharks’ teeth. It is from Egypt, made of sandalwood, with a hinged lid. The box and the lid are inlaid with hundreds of tiny pieces of shell. The design is made up of perfect, tiny triangles, set in a pattern which is repeated over and over, and is called arabesque.
    My uncle once bought an antique desk and at the back of the top drawer he found a false panel and in the little space behind it were some receipts that had been written when the desk was made, over a hundred years ago. They were the actual receipts for the making of the desk, signed by the carpenter who made it. I suppose the person who bought the desk put them there, maybe to remember how much he paid, or to remember the person who had made such a beautiful desk. Or perhaps the carpenter himself put them there.
    It’s not the false panel that I am interested in, because Anne Frank and her family had to hide behind a false panel in a wall, and that makes me feel sick, because of what happened to them in the end, and because of how it must feel to be suffocated behind a false panel. When I think of what happened to those people, I can’t breathe.
    It is the use of small containers to hide precious things, not people, that I am interested in. The Perfection of Spaces helps you to see more clearly, to find what you need to see. There is nothing confusing, nothing mixed up with anything else. Each thing is labeled and kept safe, perfectly in its place, and it can be found whenever you want to look at it.
    But it is also about finding out something we didn’t know, like finding out who made that antique desk, even though that person must have died over a hundred years ago. The receipt, signed with someone’s actual name, put my uncle in touch with that carpenter; he could get to know him in some way.
    When my dad told me about the desk and how my uncle found the hidden receipt, at first I wondered why anyone would want to hide a receipt. It isn’t something that you would normally keep secret, and it isn’t something particularly precious, in itself. But now I think I do understand what that person was doing when he or she hid it: perhaps it was the idea that one day, someone like my uncle, or even me, would find it and know who made the desk and how much it cost to make. It would be a way for that person, from years and years ago, to talk to someone living today. Things from the past can sometimes talk to you and you don’t need words for that kind of talk, and you don’t need to use your voice or have anyone listening to you talking aloud. It is a kind of silent message.
    That is what I like about archaeology, and also about finding fossils which no human person has ever seen until you, the finder, dig them up: you can find things from long ago and recover them, and you receive a silent message that perhaps nobody else knows