The Wax Room
sound archive
The voices of the people themselves. A long panelled room with shelves of brown and black phonograph cylinders in labelled tubes, four thousand of them, copied from every field recording made since 19...
sound archive
The voices of the people themselves. A long panelled room with shelves of brown and black phonograph cylinders in labelled tubes, four thousand of them, copied from every field recording made since 19...
marketplace
An iron-and-glass market hall where sentences are bought and sold. Each stall trades in what a bloom has said: transcribed, pressed between glass and sealed with the bed's number and the date. A sente...
residence
Ibrahim's house at the back of the Gardens, a plain brick cottage with a workshop and a long potting shed, where no one speaks aloud. The house is lit for eyes, not ears: a lamp by every door, mirrors...
harbour
The tide brings the seeds. About once a fortnight, at the morning ebb, a Wardian case is found on the Wharf's slipway: a small sealed box of glass and wood, its seed dry inside, sometimes crusted with...
observatory
A slim brass-and-stone tower at the edge of the Gardens, older than the Conservatory's own spire and now overtopped by it. Its top chamber holds twelve great brass listening horns, each turned on a si...
lodge
A bed in the Conservatory's northern aisle that is raked, labelled and watered once a week and in which nothing grows: it is waiting for Skerran, whose last speaker is still alive. Beside it, through ...
herbarium
Where the blooms go when they stop speaking. A long stone building half underground, its upper hall lined with tall cabinets of herbarium folios, each sheet a pressed flower with its label, its last r...
seed vault
Every seed that reaches Glossolaria is entered here before it is planted, and a duplicate is kept here for ever. The Granary is a cold stone storehouse cut into the hill, lined from floor to vault wit...
survey office
The cellars, drains and cisterns under the Conservatory, where its roots go where they please. A survey office at the top of the stairs holds Echo's tracings, pinned in layers to every wall; below it,...
workshop
Where the tower's glass is made. A yard of brick furnaces and long sheds beside the Conservatory where the glaziers sleep in their boots, because a storey is never announced in advance: when the bell ...
greenhouse
The heart of Glossolaria and the reason it exists: a vast glasshouse of cast iron and thin old glass, Victorian at the base and rising, in the middle, into a spiral spire of forty-one storeys, each ad...
laboratory
A circular anatomy theatre of green-patinated copper and clouded glass, built by the Concordance two centuries ago, where languages are grafted before an audience. Steep wooden tiers rise around a mar...
tavern
A low tavern of dark wood and amber glass where the city argues after dusk. Dried language-flowers hang from the beams, labelled; they no longer speak, but people swear they rustle when someone mispro...
hospice
Where languages are attended at their end. A long brick hospice divided into sealed glass chambers, each holding a single failing bloom in the soil, the air and the light of the country it came from: ...