“But surely in Russia—” David began, and checked himself. Thereafter he seemed to admit the possibility that I was not dissembling, and to consider me as a bona fide traveler from some interior Russian province.
“Our writing is syllabic,” he said. “We have gone the round of the circle and now make the syllable the unit instead of the letter, as the Assyrians did, and the Chinese.”
“And what is the purpose of this blue paint on the buildings?” I asked, shielding my eyes from the dazzling, blue-white luster.
“Blue?” repeated David in surprise.
“There—and there.”
“Why, that is glow, of course,” he answered. “Surely you are not color-blind, Arnold? Or can it be that in—where you came from they have only the old seven colors in the spectrum?”
“From red to violet.”
He shook his head and looked at me whimsically. “We have had nine for at least twenty years,” he said. “Mull, below red, and glow, above violet; what our ancestors called ultra-violet and believed to be invisible, though it was staring them in the face everywhere all the time. There used to be a theory that the color sense has developed with civilization. Don’t make any reference to that color-blindness of yours, Arnold,” he continued, after a brief pause.
It occurred to me that he had not explained the choice of this color, though he had named it.
“Here is the Bureau of Statistics,” he went on, as we traveled past another of the interminable buildings. “This is the Bureau of Prints and Indexes; there are more than a thousand million records within. This is the Bureau of Economics; this of Pedigrees and Relationships; this of Defective Germ-Plasm; and this is our Sixth District School.”