Spring Tide

¹⁶ The Great Sphere

Of course the city has long been famous as a place of wonders. Even in medieval times, visitors enthused about its fountains, colonnades and gilded spires. But every visitor, then and since, seems to agree that the greatest wonder of them all is the Sphere of Truth. Some six metres in diameter and with its entire surface packed tightly with images and hieroglyphs, it is recessed on a vertical axis into the face of the cliff that forms the city’s northern edge, so that one side of the sphere is in full view, while the other is hidden inside the rock.

I spent ten months over there in my youth, but I never learnt to read the inscriptions myself. Many years of study are required to master that uniquely complex ideographic script, developed specifically for the purpose of expressing abstract ideas in a highly compressed form. (So that, for instance, a single hieroglyph can represent ‘The idea that, in principle, human society is capable of improving itself indefinitely’, or ‘The belief that human beings should not necessarily be rescued from the negative consequences of their own actions’, or ‘The proposition that subjectivity, rather than material existence, is at the core of the universe’.) However, the script was beautiful and the images even more so: diagrams, symbols, scenes from stories, all beautifully inlaid with enamel so bright that it almost seemed luminous. In more peaceful circumstances, I could have spent many hours quietly examining those pictures from the tiered galleries provided for that very purpose.

But during my time in the city there was no peace in the vicinity of the Sphere. It was a scene of constant conflict. So much so that, if set down in any part of the Cliff Quarter at any time of the day or night, I could easily have found my way blindfold to the Sphere, simply by listening out for the shouting and the angry screams. Even in the early hours of the morning (when, in those days, the Sphere was only illuminated by the weak flickering glow of nearby street lights) there were people in front of it hurling abuse at one another. During the day, larger numbers gathered, and I saw stones and rotten vegetables being flung, and sometimes full-scale fights between rival groups that might each be twenty or thirty strong.

What the people of the city were arguing about, and what their forebears had argued about for centuries, was the position of the Sphere on its axis. No one disputed that the artefact was precious, or that it was a repository of the city’s wisdom, but what maddened people was that at any one time, half of that wisdom was beyond the reach of human eyes. Everyone knew that what was hidden was an alternative way of seeing the world that might challenge, or even overturn, the accepted wisdom that the Sphere now revealed.

One group favoured turning the Sphere in a clockwise direction from its present position, believing that this would expose certain much-needed truths that were now hidden in the rock. Once, quite soon after I arrived, I witnessed these Clockwisers myself as they very briefly gained the upper hand, set their shoulders against the Sphere’s enormous bulk and managed to shift it slightly. The Anticlockwisers, though, soon put a stop to this. They wanted to turn the sphere too, but in the opposite direction, believing that it was on the left-hand side of the hidden hemisphere that the really important truths were hidden.

There was intense antagonism between these two groups, but each was also internally riven. Among the Clockwisers, a faction known as the Completers believed that only a short turn of a few degrees was required in order to fully expose truths that could currently only be glimpsed in partial form along the right-hand edge, but there were also Deepers, who believed the really important material was much further back and completely hidden. Similar divisions were present among the Anticlockwisers. What is more, within both the Clockwiser and Anticlockwiser camps, there existed revolutionary factions which believed that the position of the sphere should be entirely reversed: everything hidden should be revealed; everything revealed should be hidden. The Clockwise revolutionaries were called Reversalists, the Anticlockwise ones Renewalists, and they were said to hate each other with a great passion, in spite of sharing the same ultimate goal.

In addition to the various factions of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers, though, there was a third whole group which believed that the side of the sphere currently revealed was the one that contained the really vital truths and the most beautiful images. Centuries of history, these people argued, had brought the Sphere, like the polity itself, to its perfect resting place, while the hidden side contained only flawed and outmoded ideas, which would only sow confusion if exposed to the light. This last group, known as the Achieved Perfectionists, was the largest of the three and, throughout the history of the city, had always been the dominant force. One reason for this was that the other two groups tended to cancel out each other’s efforts, both being able to call on the Achieved Perfectionists as allies if their opponents looked like gaining the upper hand. The other reason was that the Achieved Perfectionists had always had the support of the city’s elite, which, naturally enough, was suspicious of anything that might unsettle the established order.

There had been times indeed, and not so long before my stay there, when the Achieved Perfectionists had used their political power to proscribe the activities of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers, surrounding the Sphere with armed guards to prevent anyone from touching it (and so allowing visitors to examine it in peace, I couldn’t help wistfully reflecting). This was no longer the case in my time – the law now protected the right of the various groups and factions to hold and express their views – but in practical terms the Achieved Perfectionists did still dominate. Over the ten months I spent in the city, I visited the artefact many times and, though I occasionally witnessed it being shifted a centimetre or two this way or that, a move in one direction was invariably followed by a move in the other. The image that was at the centre of the hemisphere when I first saw it was a group of male and female figures in brightly coloured robes, and it was in the exact same place, as far as I could tell, when I paid a final visit to the Sphere on the day I left the city.

Pictures of the Sphere were still strictly forbidden during my time there. Both making and possessing such images were very serious offences that attracted lengthy prison terms and it had only been comparatively recently – a matter of decades – that the penalty for both crimes had ceased to be death. Nevertheless, after leaving the city and returning home, I managed to find quite a number of pictures that had been made over the centuries in secret by more intrepid visitors than myself, and I discovered that, in spite of the dominance of the Achieved Perfectionists, the Sphere did shift over time. A century and a half previously, for instance, a Swiss traveller named Anton Gustave Meuli had managed to disguise himself as a local trader and his bulky camera as a chestnut stall, and had risked the garrotte to take a blotchy daguerreotype which shows that group of robed figures in a position very definitely to the left of the central point. Three centuries earlier, the sixteenth-century Florentine painter Guiseppe Merccini produced an astonishingly detailed reproduction by memorising small sections of the Sphere’s surface, one at a time, and running back and forth between it and his studio. He was eventually caught and duly executed – in fact, he was dismembered between four oxen in the city’s main square – but luckily for us, his painting was smuggled out, and it clearly shows that group of robed figures some way over on the right-hand edge of the visible hemisphere, while the most prominent image in view is a strikingly large and complex flower-like design on the leftward side which was completely invisible in my time, though still spoken of longingly by the members of an Anticlockwiser faction who called themselves the Lotus People. Yet, interestingly, in Merccini’s day, just as in mine and Meuli’s, the Achieved Perfectionists were the dominant group, insisting that what was currently revealed of the Sphere contained its truest and most vital messages, and that what was hidden deserved to remain unseen.

My stay in the city was more than a quarter of a century ago, though, and the city has since then become part of the modern world. After a long period of negotiation, a reforming administration has installed a powerful electric motor which slowly turns the sphere so that it completes an entire revolution in a week. (In the deal struck between the various factions, it was agreed that it would turn clockwise in even years and anticlockwise in odd ones). Nothing is concealed any more, and only moderate persistence is required on the part of the visitor to view every part of the Sphere.

What is more, the ban on reproductions of the Sphere has also been lifted. Photography is still prohibited for copyright reasons, but it has now become possible to view every image and hieroglyph, simply by buying guidebooks or DVDs. Also available for sale these days, as I hardly need tell you, are those now ubiquitous revolving globes which can be found on so many mantelpieces, alongside Eiffel Towers, Big Bens and Spanish bulls. My great-aunt spent a weekend in the city with her friend Gill only last year, and acquired a large and rather expensive one with an interior light and its own electric motor.

Not surprisingly, since there is no longer any part of the Sphere that is lost or hidden, all the various factions of Clockwisers and Anticlockwisers have pretty much faded away, having lost the reason for their existence, while the modern heirs of the Achieved Perfectionists claim to have finally achieved a truly permanent settlement which accommodates everyone and excludes no one at all.

Curiously enough, though, the resolution of this ancient quarrel has led to a general loss of interest in the Sphere itself. I’m told that the only citizens of the city ever to be seen in front of it these days are tourist guides and souvenir sellers, and that, among the younger generation, the ability to read those strange and intricate hieroglyphs has now almost completely died out.