"Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." – Genesis 11:7
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 file is wrong. His deafness is his qualification. The city has a name for what happens to a hearing person who listens to all the blooms at once. They call it the Confusion, with a capital letter, and the word is meant exactly. A listener given one bed understands, after a long time, the language in it: the city says a thousand and one dusks. A listener who walks the aisles at dusk, unprotected, hears two thousand languages speaking new sentences at the same moment, and something in them gives way. They do not go mad. They lose their own language. They speak afterwards in a mixture that no one, including themselves, can follow, and the mixture does not fade. There are four of them in the Wit...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.