Trafalgar Read Online Free PDF Page B

sleep.”
    “And dance,” said Flynn.
    “And dance. Until one time Lundgren and Dalmas, who sometimes worked together, found something. Do you know what they found? A book, that’s what they found.”
    “I know,” said the Albino, “the Memoirs of a Russian Princess. ”
    “What an imagination you have, man. No. Something very different, although of course it wasn’t a book, either.”
    “So what was it?” said Flynn, who I already told you is cultured but who is also impatient.
    “Something like a book. Some very thin leaves, almost transparent, of a metal that looked like shiny aluminum, perforated on one of the longer sides, the left, and bound there with rings of the same material but thick, filiform and soldered no one knew how, or possibly cut from a single piece. And covered with something that anyone could see was writing. They found it while digging at the foot of a hill. They turned things over all around looking for something more but there was nothing. And then it occurred to Lundgren, and he does have imagination because otherwise he would not have been able to learn the three versions of sintu and even beat me in a combative match, the big cretin—and I still wonder how he did it because in sintu there are no coincidences—to dig directly into the hill. All of them practically died: they weren’t hills, they were ruins. Covered for thousands and thousands of years by the hard mud of Anandaha-A. Busy taking things out, they didn’t even have time to celebrate. Every hill was a house or, better put, a complex of various houses that were connected. There were not only utensils but equipment, machines, furniture, more books, dishes, vehicles, decorations. Everything quite past its prime but recognizable although not identifiable. They really went to town, especially Marina Solim and that precious Halabi. Dalmas and the mechanical engineers racked their brains studying the machines and the artifacts but they couldn’t make sense of anything. They classified everything and they prepared it all to be brought back and Marina began to reconstruct, as she said, a prodigious civilization and the only one who was still stymied was Veri Halabi who, expert in comparative linguistics as she might be, did not understand a thing. She worked morning, noon, and night and she got into a bad mood and Simónides gave her little pats on the back, literally and figuratively. She was only able to decipher the alphabet—the alphabets, because there were five although all of the books (according to Fineschi, who applied the I-don’t-know-who reaction to them) were from the same period. I warn you that this from the same period for them meant four or five centuries. Finally, they stopped digging around in the hills except to take out the books Veri Halabi said she needed, because things were repeated more or less in all of them and they couldn’t carry any more. The girl kept working, the others did what they could or what they felt like, and then I arrived.”
    He seemed to remember the coffee and he offered it to the others but the only one who accepted was the Albino because Flynn had a glass of whiskey and Cirito drinks little.
    “In all this, Marina divided her attention between the prodigious civilization and the skinny monkeys who danced. The day they heard the music for the first time, they almost had heart attacks because they didn’t expect it and they went to see what was happening. Armed, just in case. All but Veri Halabi, who from the outset had felt an aversion toward them and who said the music was irritating. And every time she heard it, she shut everything and stayed inside and if she thought she heard something, she covered her ears. Simónides told me that later. By the time I arrived, they were used to the music and the dance and they liked it. Marina told me that now and then, not every day but once in a while and at irregular intervals, without there being any sign or anything happening, they took