February 1987

It seems like yesterday. A picture taken on very the eve of my departure from Chicagoland. An epoch that still seems real, though it is but sparsely documented!

A journey to many unsuspected destinations: to La Porte des Morts, and from there to Sunny Southern California ("where their worm never dies, and the fire is not put out"); to the Golden Triangle, to steamy summer evenings in Myanmar and dreams of a midnight audience with the General, to the crypts beneath Buenos Aires, to the libraries of Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan, and the secret manuscript repositories of Zemo Svaneti; with hopes of someday gaining access to the Chechen Седа-Жайна, the Pahlavi library of the Surenas, perhaps even the lost Thesaurus of Antiochus!

BELTRANO

Now there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi — in the iron-bound, melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the Earth, and of the mighty sea — and of the Genii that over-ruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There was much lore too in the sayings which were said by the Sybils; and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona — but, as Allah liveth, that fable which the demon told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all! And as the Demon made an end of his story, he fell back within the cavity of the tomb and laughed. And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh. And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face. 

Edgar Allen Poe, "Silence - a Fable" (1838)