Glossolaria is a city grown around a glasshouse. When a language loses its last speaker, its last sentence falls as a seed and drifts here, sealed in glass, on the morning tide; planted in the Conservatory of Forgotten Phonemes, it blooms once every dusk and says something no one has ever said in it before. A deaf gardener tends two thousand beds he cannot hear. Every successful graft of two languages raises the Conservatory's spire by a storey, and the Concordance means to graft them all back into the one tongue spoken before Babel, while smugglers carry seeds out into living mouths, and an old woman whose language is still alive sits beside the bed that is waiting for it.
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh, Acoustic Surveyor, Second Grade SHARD: THE ARCHITECTURE OF BABEL (city of Glossolaria) REPORT 1 OF 14 STATUS: Arrived; assigned one bed I was told to arrive before dusk and I arrived after it, which is the first mistake everyon...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 2 OF 14 SUBJECT: Arrivals The seeds come in on the tide. I had read it in the file and had assumed it was poetry. On the ninth morning of my posting the bell on the Wardian Wharf rang once, at the ebb, and I went down wit...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 3 OF 14 SUBJECT: How a language lives here, and how it ends The Glass is governed by a document of eleven articles called the Charter of Keeping, written on vellum and kept in a case in the Archive of Silence, where nobod...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 4 OF 14 SUBJECT: Why the Head Gardener cannot hear The office of Head Gardener has always been held by the deaf. The Bureau's file treats Ibrahim Al-Khatib's deafness as a medical incident and recommends an inquiry. The f...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 5 OF 14 SUBJECT: A graft, witnessed The seventh article of the Charter permits grafting under conditions so numerous that, read aloud, they take eleven minutes. The conditions are met about twice a year. I was lucky: the ...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 6 OF 14 SUBJECT: The economy of Glossolaria The Bureau asked me to establish what the city lives on. It lives on sentences. Every evening at dusk two thousand blooms each say one sentence that has never been said before,...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 7 OF 14 SUBJECT: The Concordance, and what it is building CLASSIFICATION: Observer's opinion included The Concordance is the oldest society in Glossolaria, older than the Charter. Its library in the Etymologist's Quarter ...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 8 OF 14 SUBJECT: The origins of Glossolaria, and the Root Galleries The Bureau's file lists three hypotheses for the origin of this Shard and asked me to test them. I have tested them. The Bureau will not like the result....
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 9 OF 14 SUBJECT: The voices of the speakers The Glass keeps the languages. Hedda Lorentzen keeps the people. The Wax Room is a long panelled room in the Archive quarter, kept cool for the wax, with shelves of cardboard t...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 10 OF 14 SUBJECT: Seed running CLASSIFICATION: Restricted to the Desk The first article of the Charter forbids anything that has entered the Glass to leave it. Oleander Frost has broken it nineteen times. I did not disco...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 11 OF 14 SUBJECT: The parasitic dialect; incursions into neighbouring Shards CLASSIFICATION: Restricted to the Desk Twenty-two years ago a graft went wrong. Every graft before it, and every graft since, has added: a hybr...
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 12 OF 14 SUBJECT: What the Glass cannot hold On the island of Martha's Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, deafness ran in a few families for two hundred years, and the whole island, hearing and deaf alike, spoke a ...