Free The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz

azure canopy of the sea was raised to half the height of the windows, as though drawn up by some miraculous pulley. In a distant room I could hear the steps of the queen as she paced, deep in thought; sometimes I would spot her standing in the empty frame of the door, one of dozens of empty frames that playful perspective made into a grooved ornament, a row of characters in the shape of the letter pi , each enclosed in the next, each smaller than the last. Sometimes the siren of a ship sounded in the harbour.
    These quiet afternoons taught me that the chaotic heterogeneity in the letters was not brought about by habit and inertia; indeed, there was a restlessness in the script that caused its constant transformation. It was as if it were running away from itself while trying to catch up with itself; it seemed to me that it dreamed of a long-lost past or a magnificent future, of a script ages old or else an idealized one yet to come, full of perfect, resplendent letters, seeking these in endless transformation, following a great variety of mysterious clues, setting out in many different directions at once, but in the end always failing in its efforts.
    Even after this it was a long time before I was in a position to appreciate the true nature of the island’s script. Having abandoned the hypothesis that symbols from a variety of systems had been stitched together and the whole then maintained by inertia, there was a time—after I succeeded in uncovering the pictograms from which most of the island’s letters were derived—I supposed I had indeed discovered the script’s origin; how great my surprise, then, when, delving deeper in the drifts of sand in the royal palace, I discovered some documents written in a script older still! I learned that what I had assumed to be an early pictographic script had itself originated in the interpretation of puzzling symbols which represented absolutely nothing.
    It seemed that changes washed over the script in waves, and that these waves had no single direction. Apparently the pictographic script had changed many times to form more abstract symbols—by the simplification of the figures into outlines in which it was no longer possible to read the model, or else by the in-growth of tangles of lines—and many times, too, the abstract symbols turned back into pictures, once their outlines began to live and grow, the tangles of lines yielding the figures of humans and demons, animals, birds, and monsters, which till then had been present only in the shapes of the letters as distant dreams or reflected reflections—as memory and suggestion. It seemed to me that the present-day letters of the island were on the cusp of just such a transformation into a pictographic script: a few of the characters had already taken on the form of a bird or an animal. Though the majority had yet to begin forming pictures, I saw shapes trembling in the letters, preparing to break through: nascent, hitherto veiled faces of strange creatures whose cunning eyes blinked or beaks obtruded impatiently from their tangles of lines; unsettling, to say the least. I soon realized that all the letters were exuding the same sort of anxiety—as if they contained a secret message, unknown but foreshadowed; every text is a palimpsest, every letter a secret cipher.
    The transformation of pictures into abstract symbols and abstract symbols into pictures wasn’t the only way in which the script developed, however; evidently there were times, for example, when their lines frayed into ever-thinner threads, or when the lines ran into one another, forming square, solid shapes, or when the lines stretched out like the stalks of climbing plants and had to bend their tips into spirals or arch into sine curves so that they could fit into the spaces between the lines. Then there were times when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, crumbled into ever-smaller pieces until they became cloudlets of ink dust; the documents of these eras