The Lost Island

25

Brock entered the EES lab, pausing in the doorway. It was seven AM, and these early-morning calls were getting more than irritating. Glinn’s attitude seemed to be, If I don’t sleep, why should you?

Two technicians and Garza were bent over a large, obscure machine, cabled to a flat panel that displayed digital photographic strips covered with fuzzy lines. Glinn was behind them, half in shadow, silently observing the proceedings from his wheelchair.

“Thank you for coming, Dr. Brock,” said Glinn, turning. To Brock’s surprise, he looked almost flustered, unusual for a man of preternatural coolness.

Brock nodded.

“Please,” said Glinn, recovering. “Sit down. Coffee?”

“Thank you. Black, no sugar.”

Brock took a chair in the little conference area of the lab. Garza and the two scientists paused in their work and swiveled their chairs around to join the meeting.

“So,” said Brock, “did you figure out what animal it came from?”

“That’s a difficult problem,” said Garza. “To be sure, we need to do a DNA analysis. But first, some questions have arisen about the making of vellum that we hope you can answer. It’s our understanding that three types of animal skins were normally used in fashioning vellum — sheep, calf, and goat. What about other animals?”

“Well,” said Brock, always happy to deliver a lecture, “in the Levant, many Persian and Arabic manuscripts used a type of vellum made from camel skin.”

“Interesting. Anything else?”

“Very rarely, the skin of pig, deer, horse, or donkey was used. There are instances where cat skin was used in repairs.”

“No others?” Garza asked.

“Not that we know of.”

There was a pause.

“By the way,” Brock said with a sniff, turning to Glinn, “I must say that this idea of yours strikes me as a dead end. I don’t see how the vellum itself could be the answer to the riddle.”

“Consider the quotation, Doctor. Respondeo ad quaestionem, ipsa pergamena. ‘I respond to the question, the page itself.’ You pointed out that pergamena also meant ‘parchment’ or ‘vellum.’” His eyes flickered as he said this. “Think of the sentence another way: the parchment itself is the response, the answer, to the riddle.”

“We’ve run Eli’s conjecture through the language analysis routines of our computer,” Garza said. “They predict the likelihood of it being correct at over ninety percent.”

That a computer program could interpret medieval Latin struck Brock as preposterous, but he let it pass. “How could the vellum itself possibly be the answer to the riddle of this map?”

“To know that, we need to discover what kind of animal it came from.” Glinn turned to the technicians. “What next?”

Weaver — the lead DNA technician — spoke up. “The only way to solve this question is through DNA analysis. To do that we have to find a clean source of genetic material — ideally from inside a hair follicle. The trouble is, the parchment has been thoroughly scraped and washed.”

Brock sighed. “If hair is what you’re after, may I make a suggestion?”

“Of course,” said Garza.

“You know that all pieces of vellum have two sides, a ‘flesh’ side and a ‘hair’ side. The hair side is darker and coarser, with occasional traces of hair follicles. The follicles themselves, of course, will have been destroyed during the initial preparation. However, you might take a close look at the binding edge of the page. The margins of the skins were sometimes less scraped and cleaned than the rest, and often they left a little extra thickness there to hold the binding. You may find an intact hair follicle in that area.”

“Excellent,” Glinn said. “Thank you, Dr. Brock. You are certainly worth your keep.”

Brock flushed at the compliment despite himself.