Short story - The Blind Scholars and the Elephant

A short story on Voynich themes.

 

(For those unfamiliar with the genre, it's satire.)

What we have here, Constable Currier was thinking to himself, is a case of the blind scholars and the elephant.

The elephant was plain to see. It was huge. It was occupying almost the entire room. 

His first thought was: Do they have a permit for this?

Beside it there, in stasis, and now at a delicate truce, were three blind scholars, with their testimonies conflicting. 

Convinced of the notion that what they had before them was some text inscribed in braille, they had been feeling over the hide of the paciderm for an undetermined length of time, but had all reached different conclusions. 

This is what had occasioned the ruckus. There had been loud voices and death threats. The neighbors complained.

“So,” said the Constable, upon arrival. “What seems to be the problem?”

His standard opener.

“The problem,” the more forward of the blindmen began, “is that what we have before us is quite clearly some manner of encryption. I’ve never felt braille like that before in my life! It can’t be a natural language. But my colleagues here…” He motioned his head, with some contempt, to the other blindmen, “...won’t concede the point!”

“You slippery sonofabitch!” one of the other scholars immediately rejoined. “We’ve been through this a hundred times. If it’s an encryption, show us the code!”

Constable Currier decided to take out his notepad and pencil. 

The elephant was generally motionless, other than some gentle swaying, and seemed content to stand there munching its cud, oblivious to the altercation. 

It was chewing, the Constable noted astutely, a big ball of sugarcane fibre, and from its placid dreamy eyes he suspected it was in some sort of mild glucose-induced coma. 

In any case, it had been happy to let the three scholars read the bumps and contours of its skin to their heart’s content. They had devoted themselves to its study with an obsessive passion for a ridiculous amount of time. 

“It is a natural language, abbreviated,” the third of the blindmen announced at this point. “It’s about one man’s journey into the heart of Africa, and my guess is that it’s French, with Zimbutu loan words. And there’s a map!”

“You’re full of shit,” said the encryption man.

Things, the Constable noted, had become personal. 

As for what the room was full of, there was a pile of it at the rump end of the elephant, but all three of the scholars agreed the text didn’t extend that far into marginalia. 

The officer decided to immediately cut to the chase.

“Does no one here see the elephant?” he asked, as his opening volley.

It was an insensitive question. You do not ask the sight-impaired what they can and cannot see. 

“Oh! The elephant theory!” said blindman number two. “We’ve been through that. That was discredited long ago!”

“I see,” said the Constable. Another insensitive remark. 

He looked at the elephant, and then at the scholars, and felt obliged to say, “Perhaps it’s a theory worth revisiting?”

The first scholar looked offended by the suggestion. 

“You stick to your field, Officer, and we’ll stick to ours. You’re not a textual analyst.” 

Things had become heated when blind man number two claimed that he could generate a very similar text just by rubbing sandpaper over sheets of old leather, and that it must therefore be a hoax. 

“No known text in braille feels quite like that,” he had declared. “It lacks all lexical and semantic coherence.”

The others insisted the text was full of what they described as “strangely organic patterns.”

At one stage, someone suggested it could be Chinese. 

Or Sanskrit.

They were at loggerheads, anyway, and their points of difference were so profound they could barely stand being in the same room together, never mind a room almost entirely occupied by a gigantic quadraped. 

“I found a long narrow piece of text with some very, very unusual braille,” one of them said, as if it had been a shocking discovery.

The Constable looked at the elephant again. It didn’t mind. It was standing as still as a wall covered in braille inscriptions. 

“All the same,” said Currier, “this matter seems to be disturbing the peace…”

Ignoring this plea, the scholars were more intent on convincing the officer of the merits of their respective positions. All attempts to convince each other had only ended in strife and acrimony. The minute Currier arrived, he became the focus of validation. 

“According to my hypothesis,” the first blindman said, “you have to feel it backwards.  That’s the secret." 

“You’re backwards,” sniped one of the others, not missing the chance for a cheap insult.

They were as cantankerous as three arrogant know-it-alls who can’t see the elephant in the room, as the saying goes. 

To make matters worse, blindman number three was Belgian. Hence the French-with-Zimbutu loanwords hypothesis.

They were giddy with confirmation bias, all three of them. One man’s jot was another man’s tittle. 

“My fingertips don’t deceive me!” was their common defense. 

Given the impasse, the Constable made a more stragetic suggestion. 

“What if,” he said, “some of you study one side of the elephant, and the others can go around and study the other side.”

“Yes, yes,” said blindman number two. “We’ve already established that there’s Text A and Text B.” 

The others nodded. True. There are, in fact, two texts, A and B. 

“I see,” said Currier again, another faux pas. 

He was, however, curious.

“But,” he said, “none of you have actually translated any of this text, have you? A or B?”

The scholars looked sheepish. There was a long pause. Very long. 

“Not a word, have you?” he added. “How long have you been doing this and you haven’t translated a single word?” 

He was fairly confident this would be the case because… he could see the elephant.

“Well, no. Not yet,” the Belgian admitted. “But I do have a list of what are possibly nouns. Or subjunctives. Can’t be sure.”

“Listen to him!” said Blindman number two. “His only publications are in post-colonial historiography. What would he know?” 

“He only thinks its French because he’s French!” said number one. 

These, of course, were fighting words to a Belgian. He leapt to his feet and reverted to profanities in his native dialect. 

Constable Currier had to step in and confiscate his walking stick.

“I still think,” Currier said, after restoring calm, “That the problem here is that you can’t see the elephant.”

The elephant seemed to turn its head slightly and look sideways when he said this as if to say, “Yeah!”

“Those sort of theories might appeal to the popular imagination, which is easily swayed by mere plausibility” said the first scholar, the cryptologist, “but, please, Officer, don’t treat us as gullible.”

“Right,” said the Officer, suitably chastized.

He was getting a good sense of the situation.

There was no obvious resolution. There were too many entrenched positions. The impasse could continue for some time. 

He wondered if elephants sleep standing up, or whether there would come a point where the elephant would have to lay down? 

It might not matter to the blindmen. 

The Belgian then launched into his account of why he thinks the text is French – not standard French, of course, but a unique type of French only spoken in parts of Chad. 

The others scoffed and went ad hominen in turns.

“What about King Leopold in the Congo?” said scholar number one, totally off topic. 

He resented the African hypothesis as an ignorant diversion. In his view, the encryption had been made by someone of possible Turkish ancestry. There were diplomatic codes in Istanbul from as far back as the 17^th C. of equal complexity. 

He was no slouch when it came to the history of ciphers.

Constable Currier knew he had to do something. 

At this juncture, he noticed a large green canvas over-sheet folded in the corner, and – astute once more – realized that it was a blanket for the beast. There were some elephant accoutrements, unnoticed by the blindmen. 

They also didn’t notice when he unfolded the sheet of canvas and hoisted it across the elephant’s back, draping it down the sides, covering over the crumpled hide that was causing such consternation. They were too busy bickering. 

In what known language – name one text in braille – where you get such long strings of what are ostensibly vowels or at least semi-vowels? 

It could be a type of shorthand!

As Currier covered the elephant up, he gave his customary community patter. 

“I don’t care what you gentlemen are disagreeing about, you’re disturbing the neighbours. I must ask you to conduct yourselves in a quiet and civil manner from now on. Keep it down!”

Number two referred to number one: “He threatened to garrotte me if I said it was all a hoax one more time. But I’m telling you you can get pretty much the same text just by rubbing sandpaper on old leather.”

“You prick!” spat number one, reaching for his walking stick.

As everybody knows, cryptologists are quick to see red. 

Currier took control.

“I’m confiscating all the walking sticks, and there’ll be no more death threats. Is that clear?”

He raised his voice to an authoritative pitch.

The three blind scholars eventually agreed. 

“Good,” said Currier. That was the best outcome he could hope for. 

The truce was unlikely to hold, though. There was an elephant in the room, plus three blind scholastic egos with something to prove. It was never going to go well. 

Currier decided to leave the question of the permit for another day. The elephant was content. And warm. It was now clad in its big green blanket. As it munched and drooled on its ball of sugarcane fibre it seemed serenely indifferent to everything but the sweet juices of life. 

The Constable, turning jolly, wished the bickering threesome a good evening as he left, and urged upon them consideration of others.

One day, he thought, that elephant was going to let out an almighty trumpet, ending the whole charade, and all their theories would come crashing down.

After this interlude, the quest among the blind scholars resumed.

The elephant only shuffled slightly, shifting its weight, but otherwise stood there solid, chewing in its big-eared reverie. 

“Right,” said the first blind scholar, the most forward of them, turning again to the elephant. “Back to the text!”

R.B.