Si'Wren of the Patriarchs

by Roland Cheney

To my wife, Jacquelyn.

Author's Remarks

The story of Si'Wren was culled out of a veritable treasure trove of hundreds of little clay tablets which were found sealed and submerged for over 4,000 years in stone jars. The jars were brought up from their place of discovery on the floor of the Persian Gulf, where they had lain half-buried under successive layers of sediment for over four millennia, by an internationally renowned team of archaeologists, oceanographers, and professional deep sea divers.

Although few realized the true significance of the find at the time, it was to be recognized later as a momentous event on that fateful day when the very first stone jar was actually removed safely intact from the bottom of the sea by a crude, squealing, grease and rust encrusted loading crane, to be hoisted free after so many centuries and set at long-last on the heaving deck of the aging expedition ship.

Monetary funding for the expedition was so short at times that the only affordable ship permanently on duty throughout the entire venture was an extremely dilapidated and barnacle-festooned vessel of third-world registry. No doubt many of the people involved viewed it as a minor miracle that the near-constant threat of mechanical breakdown did not endanger the success of the mission proper.

But the mechanics and engineers worked more than a few miracles of their own when catastrophe loomed, as it did more than once, and their determination ultimately prevailed.

Safely deposited on dry land after having been lost and forgotten for almost all of recorded human history, the stone jars were finally opened to reveal, instead of wine or oil, the curious little clay tablets safely dry and cushioned in a packing medium of loose straw and uncombed wool. The clay tablets, finally exposed to the light of day after holding their secrets for so long, were gently removed from their stone keepers and carefully packed in crates to be secretly shipped to the back rooms of a major museum. There, it was hoped, they could be systematically catalogued, transcribed, and translated by the dedicated ministrations of a team of the foremost scholars of our time.