Secrets of the Vaulted Sky Astrology and the Art of Prediction

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, I wanted to see into the future, and if the future was blank and inscrutable, the past would have to do. For my kind of time travel, books are more revealing than stars. That morning I trudged down the banks of the Seine to visit the BibliothÈque Nationale, the great national library of France. The thing is like a Babylonian ziggurat, four glass and steel towers rising somberly from a plinth almost a city block in area. Access is by means of a wide but very steep series of polished wooden steps. There are no banisters or rails and when the stairs are wet, purchase is difficult. Elderly scholars very often lose their footing and fall badly. If the library is a monument to poor design and clumsy architecture, it is also a link in the unbroken chain of libraries that extends from the ancient world to the twenty-first century. The collection that it contains is matchless, one of the glories of French culture. But whatever those glories, I had a cold. It was that time of year. Everyone in Paris was sniffling. The mÉtro had been chilly and full of hoarse honkers, all of them looking peevish and indignant. The library was at least warm and comfortable, a kind of pastel glow suffusing all the reading rooms and the long echoing corridors. There was no one waiting in the rare books and manuscripts division. The seats at the central table were unoccupied, and the computers arranged in rows like so many squat and waiting penguins were all blank, their open eyes sightless. The librarian was a tall, elegant woman. She knew and understood the manuscript collection, but like everyone working at the BibliothÈque, she had come to regard visitors as a considerable inconvenience. I had asked permission to see the library's copy of Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson's The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia. Rawlinson was one of the great soldier-scholars of the nineteenth century, a man whose fine intelligence and wide-ranging curiosity had elephant-walked over the entire Near East. I was interested in volume III of his four-volume work-A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria. The folio edition is the very key to ancient astrology; it marks the place where every path led somewhere new. The librarian was dubious. Special permission was needed even to look at the thing. I spread out the stamped letter of authorization that the chief librarian provided me. I placed my carte de sÉjour, my birth certificate, and a recent telephone bill on top of it. The librarian studied each document with great deliberation. Everything was in order. She filled out a yellow special request form and passed it to her assistant, a young man with red eyes and a wet nose. He counter-signed the librarian's form and briskly disappeared into the forbidden stacks, returning after five minutes with Rawlinson's folio underneath his arm. Very carefully, he placed the volume on the counter. I could not touch it. The librarians would open the cover and turn the pages. I could see the point of their concern. The book was a large folio edition, perhaps three feet tall and one and one-half feet wide. The paper was thick and gray with age. The book contains the first printed edition of documents that are more than twenty-five hundred years old. The stone-cut originals are in fine shape at the British Museum. They may well last another ten thousand years. The book reproducing them is falling apart. The binding is cracked, and pages torn; there are water marks on almost every page, and a shapeless gray stain on the cover. Directly after I looked at the book, I was informed, it would be sent to the department of conservation and preservation for special treatment. It seemed a little late to me. I asked the librarian to open the book for me. After smoothing her hair behind her ears, she pulled on a pair of pink surgeon's gloves and began slowly turning the pages.Berlinski, David is the author of 'Secrets of the Vaulted Sky Astrology and the Art of Prediction', published 2003 under ISBN 9780151005277 and ISBN 0151005273.