Work Text:
The sixteen stories that make up the Loom of Hours occupy a unique place in world literature. Though their respective foci may appear familiar to the reader, the alienating reality of the societies depicted therein inevitably comes to the fore, providing a window into Illapartian perspectives on the myriad cultures which the civilization of the Hours encountered.
The Loom of Hours did not start out as a literary tradition, but as an oral one. What may seem on the surface to be children’s tales of kings and prophets were originally fables told by a griot, a bard-like elder who would provide advice to their ruler through ballad or song. Instead of providing a dualist moral ‘solution’ to a problem, each fable would instead touch on predetermined aspects of a certain Hour, leaving the story open to richer and less straightforward interpretations. Over time, as writing would come to dominate larger tracts of society, griots would become replaced by encyclopedic collections of stories, with hundreds of finely nuanced variations corresponding to a single Hour. While several entries of the more popular Hours remain extant today, many of the Hours are represented by only a single story in the sole surviving Loom cycle, assembled in the Late Kingdom era by a courtier named Runao, as a gift for the new king. This “Splendid Cycle”, famously translated by Richard Burton in 1888, is what most readers are familiar with today when talking about the Loom of Hours. It is much debated according to what scheme Runao chose the different stories of the Splendid Cycle, or even if he understood their subtleties at all - perhaps he was looking for entries that would play up certain virtues of his, or perhaps he sincerely did not view them as anything more than children’s tales. Whatever the case, each story highlights its specific Hourly aspects with aplomb, and is capped with a short commentary by Runao identifying what he believes are the most crucial lessons to be learned therefrom.
That the Hours captivated the Western literary imagination when they did is no coincidence: it was, after all, thanks to the French Revolution, and the Enlightenment ideas that spawned it, that the Hours came to European attention in the first place. When Napoleon entered Egypt in 1798 with the aim of securing French trading interests, he brought with him a veritable legion of scholars, surveyors, and artists to explore and shine the light of science on the desert ruins of legend. The excavations, diagrams, and catalogues of Egyptian marvels would have been reward enough; news of these discoveries was certainly sufficient to spur decades of European ‘Egyptomania’. However, destiny had other plans in store: in May 1799, a party of expeditioneers led by Lieutenant Milo Saint-Denis lost its way in the Sudanese cataracts, stumbling upon an
“odd route, flanked by sandstone cliffs [...] through which the sun shone at untypical angles, and the air [bore] a fragrance and potency not suited to the region. Upon following this path, we came upon an escarpment of the same stone, so high above the clouds as if we had reached it by cannon-fire, and beneath us an immense valley of lush greenery and streams, broken only by an impossibly broad and jagged tower of deep-blue, pink-veined stone, about the width of a modest town by my estimate and reaching as high as the ledge [where] we were standing [...] and from whose crown water poured below.”
This is the first modern record of the passage now known as the Alodia Gullet, and marks arguably the single most important cultural and military find in modern history since Columbus landed in the New World: the discovery of Terre-des-Heures, the ana-geographic region commonly known today as Illapars - Latin for ‘that other part/land’. Saint-Denis, a trained mineralogist as well as soldier, was immediately aware of the geologic incongruity of this area with the Sudan, and ordered his men to take copious notes and measurements, including of the vegetation, weather and time of day, and recollections about the period immediately preceding the ‘transition’ into the strange land. It is thanks to these notes that a second party managed, a week later, to convoke the precise factors needed to cross into Illapars; the method they used would eventually become standardized as the Denisian traversal protocol.
Upon learning of this discovery, Napoleon was determined to map out as much of the land as possible, if only to ascertain whether similar routes could be found to other parts of Egypt. Napoleon was involved in a costly war with the local Mamluks, and was eager to find any strategy or device that would give him the upper hand. This round of exploration uncovered the passes of the Faiyum and the Sinai, the time-dilated Lake Merveilleuse, and the ruined ancient cities of Ukkabal and Vimvi - although, crucially, no living human settlements whatsoever. Among the treasures unearthed at this time was the so-called ‘“second” Rosetta stone’, the Ukkabal stela, which not only allowed linguists to translate Illapartian, but fueled decades of speculation about the spread of the Illapartian empires, as several familiar and historical languages were found among the inscriptions. While this expedition was a success from the archaeologist’s perspective, the strategic value of the discovered passes was negated by the low traversability of the Illapartian wilderness. Despite scattered victories, Napoleon withdrew from Egypt mere months afterward, soon followed by the bulk of the French army [...]
*
[...] With the support of the illustrious polymath and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt, Malbrook successfully entreatied the French government for entry into the colonized areas of Illapars, and in August 1824, arrived in the colonial town of Finisterre, near Vimvi. Malbrook’s achievements while in Illapars were manifold: he not only measured the height of the Ukkabali mountain ranges, he was the first Westerner to traverse and map out Lake Merveilleuse, and he even helped disband a smuggling ring during his time in Finisterre. Of greatest relevance to us, however, is his rediscovery of the Loom of Hours - both in its standardized “Splendid Cycle” form, and the written variations scattered throughout the various library ruins. Malbrook not only took extensive tracings and copies of the book, but was able to show the cultural significance of the stories by reconstructing the entire table of Hours from work logs and records of priestly rituals.
For almost all Illapartian cultures, the day was subdivided into sixteen hours - ten daytime hours and six nighttime hours, with the nighttime hours being longer than the daytime ones. The daytime hours were further split into five morning hours (Glass, Brick, Wheel, Cloth, Tin) and five afternoon hours (Iron, Scribe, Scythe, Ash, Water); later hours corresponded roughly with maturity and authority, while earlier ones were matched with youthfulness and individuality. The clearest example of this is the split between the two noon hours, Tin and Iron: an essential aspect of Tin stories is personhood within society; usually the individual’s hubris is punished, or their glorified sacrifice is shown to be their destiny, similar to how malleable tin can be shaped and cast into a mold. Iron aspects, meanwhile, are much “harder” and authority-focused: vengeful justice, royal presence, and protection from invasion are all common tropes in these stories. Further, Tin is astrologically the most mature of the morning Hours, reflected in the individual’s tendency to adapt to society; Iron, being the most immature of the afternoon Hours, dispenses violence without regard for its social impact. What this says about Illapartian concepts of maturity is beyond the scope of this foreword - however it does provide a glimpse into the values which those societies held dear.
Keen-eyed readers will note the astrological focus on tin instead of the stronger alloy formed with copper, i.e. bronze. Generations of anthropologists have speculated on the significance of this detail [...]
*
[...] While it is tempting to think of Nietzsche’s famous “God is dead” line as referring to this incident, there is no evidence to suggest that Nietzsche was even aware of the existence of buried gods. The idea of living deities would not enter public awareness until World War One, although isolated politicians, thinkers, and scientists knew about them for the few decades between then and their discovery. It is not an exaggeration to say that living gods affected modern thought to the same extent that the atom bomb would thirty years later - the industrialized world had to contend with a new wave of existential dread at the revelation that mankind as a species was no longer at the top of the totem pole, if it had been at all. In addition, the introduction by the French of militarized Illapartian artifacts, such as grenade shrapnel that could never be precisely counted, which would vanish and reappear at random in a victim’s body, or the ‘lithofax’ device that would either partially or completely convert a target’s body to stone, provoked outrage among both victors and losers of the war, and would lead to the Great Powers adopting wartime restrictions and treaties such as the Geneva conventions, forbidding the use of such weapons. The disorienting and illogical nature of these also rippled through the sciences: in their struggle to find a framework to explain what Albert Einstein referred to as “spooky actions”, physicists and chemists developed an entire new branch of physics - that is, quantum physics - and poured thousands of man-hours into research that would eventually culminate in the atom bomb and the fusion reactor. The general attitude of the time is perhaps summarized best by Modernist poet W. B. Yeats, who in the poem, “The Second Coming” - composed in the aftermath of World War One (and certainly in reaction to Illapars-related reports) - wrote:
Now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Today, it is difficult to imagine a world where the Land of Hours had never been discovered, so ubiquitous are the every-day innovations we use based on their technology. What would our microchips look like without the hundreds of miniaturized summoning, banishing, and transforming sigils etched into them? How would we rapidly heat our coffee or tea without the eyelashes of the Fire-God in our thermo-emitters? Would we be able to communicate effectively over long distances without the distance-closing porphyrous crystals of the Colorful Tower? We invite the reader to consider these questions by meditating on the stories in this anthology, which by virtue of their uncanniness and distance, may be our only common point of contact with a world not our own.