Jim's Story
This, as you might have guessed, is Jim's story.
All right, so his name wasn't Jim. It was the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Jim. When pronounced, his name in ancient Egyptian sounded a lot like Shrek2, but, due to copyright issues and the merchandising based around a similar name, he was unable to go by Shrek2, He was pretty happy settling for Jim.
After all, he was dead. He wasn't one of these immortal Egyptians you hear about, running around for thousands and hundreds of years. Or maybe you hadn't heard of those, come to think of it. Mostly they were fictional.
By Jim, well, he died. At the ripe old age of, well, no one's sure. Actually, he could still be alive, for all we know. But that's all beside the point.
He was the custodian of the Library of Alexandria.
As custodian of the library, you mightn't think he was terribly busy, having plenty of time to peruse the shelves in between telling Egyptian kids to shush and pushing around a cart of books looking up and down the shelves for the 'S' row. In fact, towards the end, with the rate of scholars arriving to take up residence in the world famous library rising faster, a lot faster than the number leaving, Jim was left to catalogue the lot of them, the vast majority of whom, being academics, abhorred both vacuums and filling in the proper forms.
This was in the heady days of AD 10, when the beaches were filled with tourists and the ocean full of stuff. He was afraid of the water, to be honest, and all the things it harboured, so he didn't want to think to about what was lurking in the ocean too much, thank you very much.
He was busy trying to track down the remaining Druid of a group of them that had come over from some place called Oxford, England. He caught them last week, building little megalithic-like structures out of books in the 'P' row. He stopped them just as they were dropping Plato's now lost book Chocolat across the top of Pygmalion's work on statues and Persephone's treatise on Nature. Chocolat was about a hyperadvanced civilisation that had built entire cities out of chocolate, only to be destroyed by their own pride (and partly a really bad case of tooth decay) and the island they lived on sank, muddying the waters chocolate brown for ages. Legend had it that the book, read closely enough, revealed the location of this magical chocolate waters place. Jim had snatched the book from the lead Druid's hands and had asked them, politely, to head back to the main hall, where he could book them a proper cubby or two to store their belongings and place to sleep, as the 'Q' row, as sparsely populated as it was, was not, indeed, to be used for sleeping and Druidic rituals.
And he found him, eventually. But he did not like what he found...
In fact, he almost wished he hadn't found him at all.
disclaimer:
A bit tired this week. The staff spent the weekend in Las Vegas amongst the bright lights and really, stunningly long sidewalks. Stretching for miles and miles!
We lost a few to dehydration and exhaustion, but, for the most part, returned with everyone intact and raring to go this Monday morning. Which is to say none of us felt like doing much of anything at all. Except maybe sitting around.
Soooo... that's the disclaimer. Watch out for ducks.