Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

Robin couldn’t help himself. He reached eagerly for the Oriental language Grammaticas and began thumbing through the front material. Written on the cover page of each volume in very neat, tiny handwriting were the names of those scholars who had produced the first edition of each Grammatica. Nathaniel Halhed had written the Bengali Grammatica, Sir William Jones the Sanskrit Grammatica. This was a pattern, Robin noticed – the initial authors all tended to be white British men rather than native speakers of those languages.

‘It’s only recently that we’ve done much in Oriental languages at all,’ said Anthony. ‘We were lagging behind the French there for quite a while. Sir William Jones made some headway introducing Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian to the courses lists when he was a fellow here – he started the Persian Grammatica in 1771 – but he was the only one doing any serious work in those languages until 1803.’

‘What happened then?’ asked Robin.

‘Then Richard Lovell joined the faculty,’ said Anthony. ‘I hear he’s something like a genius with Far Eastern languages. He’s contributed two volumes to the Chinese Grammatica alone.’

Reverently, Robin reached out and pulled the first volume of the Chinese Grammatica towards him. The tome felt inordinately heavy, each page weighted down by ink. He recognized Professor Lovell’s cramped, neat handwriting on each page. It covered an astonishing breadth of research. He put the volume down, struck with the unsettling realization that Professor Lovell – a foreigner – knew more about his mother tongue than he did.

‘Why are these under display cases?’ asked Victoire. ‘Seems rather difficult to take them out.’

‘Because these are the only editions in Oxford,’ said Anthony. ‘There are backups at Cambridge, Edinburgh, and the Foreign Offices in London. Those are updated annually to account for new findings. But these are the only comprehensive, authoritative collections of knowledge of every language that exist. New work is added by hand, you’ll notice – it costs too much to reprint every time new additions are made, and besides, our printing presses can’t handle that many foreign scripts.’

‘So if a fire tore through Babel, we could lose a full year of research?’ asked Ramy.

‘A year? Try decades. But that’ll never happen.’ Anthony tapped the table, which Robin noticed was inlaid with dozens of slim silver bars. ‘The Grammaticas are better protected than the Princess Victoria. These books are impervious to fire, flood, and attempted removal by anyone who isn’t in the Institute register. If anyone tried to steal or damage one of these, they’d be struck by an unseen force so powerful they’d lose all sense of self and purpose until the police arrived.’

‘The bars can do that?’ Robin asked, alarmed.

‘Well, something close,’ Anthony said. ‘I’m just guessing. Professor Playfair does the protective wards, and he likes to be mysterious about them. But yes, the security of this tower would astound you. It looks like your standard Oxford building, but if anyone ever tried to break in, they’d find themselves bleeding out on the street. I’ve seen it happen.’

‘That’s a lot of protection for a research building,’ said Robin. His palms felt suddenly clammy; he wiped them on his gown.

‘Well, of course,’ said Anthony. ‘There’s more silver in these walls than in the vaults of the Bank of England.’

‘Truly?’ Letty asked.

‘Of course,’ said Anthony. ‘Babel is one of the richest places in the entire country. Would you like to see why?’

They nodded. Anthony snapped his fingers and beckoned for them to follow him up the stairs.

The eighth floor was the only part of Babel that lay hidden behind doors and walls. The other seven were designed following an open floor plan, with no barriers surrounding the staircase, but the stairs to the eighth floor led to a brick hallway which in turn led to a heavy wooden door.

‘Fire barrier,’ Anthony explained. ‘In case of accidents. Seals off the rest of the building so that the Grammaticas don’t get burnt if something up here explodes.’ He leaned his weight against the door and pushed.

The eighth floor looked more like a workshop than a research library. Scholars stood bent around worktables like mechanics, holding assortments of engraving tools to silver bars of all shapes and sizes. Whirring, humming, drilling sounds filled the air. Something exploded near the window, causing a shower of sparks followed by a round of cursing, but no one so much as glanced up.

A portly, grey-haired white man stood waiting for them in front of the workstations. He had a broad, smile-wrinkled face and the sort of twinkling eyes that could have placed him anywhere between forty and sixty. His black master’s gowns were coated with so much silver dust that he shimmered whenever he moved. His eyebrows were thick, dark, and extraordinarily expressive; they seemed ready to leap off his face with enthusiasm whenever he spoke.