After careful and intensive study, the story was derived and adapted -by express and exclusive museum permission- by the author, who poured himself out in an exhaustive work upon this unspeakably priceless literary treasure, to such an extent that a state of chronic ill-health and increasingly strained and weakened eyesight had begun to set in toward the end of the project. Every effort was taken to achieve the highest possible standard of accuracy, integrity, and authenticity in highlighting every nuance of meaning from so obscure an original tongue.
The author has since recovered, and the story of Si'Wren is therefore presented now in modern literary form, which -it is hoped- will be found to have suffered but little from the inevitable abuses of such a distant cultural disparity and linguistically disjointed translation. The rigorous demand of a simple, honest, and straightforward retelling of the story of Si'Wren owes it's true success, not so much to the tireless and unstinting efforts of the author, working with a bank of modern university supercomputers, but rather to the remarkable purity of Si'Wren herself, and the crude directness and honesty of the original telling.
Here, then, is the final result of so much work, such danger and heartbreak on the high seas, unrelenting secrecy, and endless scrutiny, the goal, the prize, priceless beyond all calculation, the translation of those ancient hieroglyphs so painstakingly stick-marked upon the unimpressive-looking little tablets; a story written in the softness of clay, and hardened to the rock of ages. It is a brittle, harsh tale of a tormented adolescent girl who lived out her tragically short life in a time of the greatest moral evil and physical beauty that the world has ever known, a story from the dawn of human history.
PRELUDE
She never knew Jesus, the Christ, the only begotten Son of God, by name, although He most assuredly knew her when He formed her in her mother's womb. His time was not yet come.
She was never to hear of the Tower of Babel, or of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, and of Egypt and Moses, of Babylon or the Jews, the Roman
Empire, the Cross, or any of the modern religions of the world. They
were not yet.
She lived out her short life, and eventually died, about the time when mocking rumors were being widely spread abroad of a foolish old man called Noah, a wise old Patriarch who was rumored to have been directly commanded by no less a personage than the Almighty Himself to build an ark, a great wooden ship. This man, Noah, was given Divine instructions that he must waste no time, but work diligently to prepare a safe haven for his family and himself against a terrible day of judgement to be rained down upon a sinful world, a day when a wrathful God would bring forth a watery flood so deep as to utterly wipe out the unspeakable evils of an accursed race.
Many were amused at the rumors of Noah and his strange Invisible God. Whether the rumors of impending doom were true or not none could say, although there was none who would not readily agree that it was a world worthy enough of such punishment. It was a cruel, backward world, where "…every man did what was right in his own eyes…", sometimes for the better, but more often, for the worse. Much worse.
It was into such a world that the little slave girl, Si'Wren, was born…