"You stay, I go." – the farewell Ishi, the last of the Yahi, is remembered as saying to his friends in San Francisco, 1916
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 tubes from floor to ceiling, and in the tubes four thousand phonograph cylinders, brown and black, and their descendants on disc and tape. They are copies, made over a century, of the field recordings of people speaking languages that would not outlive them. Carl Stumpf founded the Phonogram Archive in Berlin in 1900 for the same purpose and with the same machines; Hedda spent eight years digitising its cylinders before she came here. At the end of the room, under a green lamp, is her bench: three Edison phonographs with great brass horns, a lathe, and a jar of liquorice for the apprentices. She is thirty-eight, Norwegian, freckled, cheerful, and she swears at her machines in four languages....
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.