1Rome grew. It swallowed Carthage, and Greece, and the kingdoms of Alexander's captains one after another, until the whole circle of the inner sea was Roman or soon would be. Of all those kingdoms only Egypt was left, and Egypt was like a ripe fig on a branch, waiting for a hand.
2Two hundred and fifty years had gone by since a slave boy held a cedar chest against the sea. The library at Alexandria was the wonder of the world. No one living had read a tenth part of it.
3There was a law in that city, made by the third Ptolemy, that every ship coming into the harbour was searched for books. Any book found was taken and copied. The owner was given the new copy, and the library kept the old one. So books came in with the wine and the tin and the pepper, from every coast, in every tongue. They were stored in long sheds by the water until the scribes could get to them. The tags on them said: from the ships.
4The keeper of one of those sheds was a man named Ammonios. He was a Greek of the city, patient and short-sighted, with ink in the creases of his hands. His wife had been Egyptian, and she had died. He had one child, a daughter of fourteen, whom he had named Thais.
5A girl was not supposed to work in the book sheds. But Ammonios had no son and weak eyes, and Thais had sharp eyes and a memory like a net. From the age of eight she had read the tags for him. By fourteen she knew the sheds as a shepherd knows a hill. She knew which jar held the star lists from Babylon and which held the songs of the island women. She knew where the damp got in.
6She also knew her father's private mark. Some rolls he tagged with a thread of red wool. Those were the ones for which he had searched the whole library and found no other copy. If a mouse got at a red-thread roll, the thing written in it was gone from the earth.
7"There are too many of them," he used to say, turning one in his hands. "It frightens me, Thais. A book in one place is like a man standing on one leg."
8In her fifteenth year the crowns came to Alexandria.
9The king of Egypt then was a boy, and the queen was his sister, a young woman named Cleopatra, and the two were at war with each other for the throne. Into this came the greatest general of Rome, Julius Caesar, chasing an enemy. He had only a few thousand men. He moved into the palace by the harbour as though he owned it. He took the young queen's side. The boy king's army, twenty thousand strong, closed around the palace quarter, and the Roman was caught in a trap.
10Thais understood little of it. The names of the great were like weather to her. What she understood was that there were soldiers in the streets around the harbour, that her father would not leave his shed, and so that she would not leave either.
11Caesar looked out from the palace and saw the Egyptian fleet lying in the harbour, more than seventy ships. If the boy king's men got to those ships, they could cut him off from the sea, and he was finished. He did what a soldier does. He sent men with torches down to the docks and set the fleet on fire.
12It was a clever stroke. It saved him. He gave no thought to which way the wind was blowing.
13Thais was asleep on a pile of sacking when her father shook her. The inside of the shed was orange. She thought at first it was sunrise. Then she heard it, a sound like a great cloth tearing and tearing, and she smelled pitch.
14They ran to the door. The harbour was a field of fire. The ships were burning at their moorings, masts and all, and the wind off the sea was lifting burning scraps of sail as big as doors. It carried them over the water and laid them down on the roofs of the waterfront, gently, one after another.
15The grain store next to them was already alight. The roof of the rope walk beyond it fell in as they watched.
16"The books," said Ammonios. He said it quietly. Then he turned and ran back inside, and she ran after.
17There were forty thousand rolls in the sheds along that dock, or so men said afterward. No one ever truly knew, for the lists burned with them. Two people could carry perhaps sixty.
18Thais stood in the middle of the shed with a basket in each hand. The jars went away from her into the dark in rows. The poets. The physicians. The histories of kingdoms that had left no other trace. She could not move. Whatever she reached for, her hand would be turning away from a thousand others.
19"Thais!" Her father had her by the shoulders. His weak eyes were streaming. "Listen to me. Not the best ones. Do you hear? We cannot choose the best. Take the ones that have no twin. Red thread. Only red thread. Leave everything else."
20"Homer is in the third row," she said stupidly.
21"Homer is in ten thousand houses. Homer can look after himself. Red thread!"
22That broke the spell. She did not have to weigh all the wisdom in the world against itself, which no one could do. She had only to find red wool by firelight, and that was a thing a pair of hands could do. She ran down the rows. She knew where they were. She pulled out a treatise on the tides by a man of Massalia, a list of healing plants in a script she could not read, a little worn roll of sayings from the east. She did not look at them. She looked for the thread. The baskets filled.
23They went out by the landward door with a basket on each arm. The street was full of smoke, and of soldiers.
24She never knew whose soldiers they were. They were running toward the fighting or away from it. One of them, a big man with a bloody cloth around his head, saw a girl carrying heavy baskets out of a burning building. He thought what any such man would think. He grabbed her by the hair and tore the cover off one basket and shoved his hand in for the silver.
25He came up with a fistful of paper. He stared at it. He shook the basket out on the stones, and rolls went bouncing across the street, and there was no silver under them.
26"Books," he said in bad Greek. He looked at her as if she had cheated him. Then he looked past her at the fire, and at the thin girl who had gone into it for this, and something in his face changed. Perhaps he had a daughter. He let go of her hair. He even bent, clumsily, and picked up two of the rolls, and dropped them back in her basket before he ran on.
27She gathered the rest on her knees. Two had rolled into the gutter and were soaked. She took them anyway.
28They carried the baskets up the long street to the great library, which stood well back from the water, and they set them down inside the gate. A porter gaped at them. Behind them the whole waterfront was a wall of light.
29"Once more," said Ammonios.
30"Father, the roof."
31"There are forty red threads in the east shed," he said. "I tagged them myself this month. No one else knows where they are." He kissed her on the top of the head. "You are not to come. Stay with these. That is an order from your keeper, not from your father."
32He went back down the street, an oldish man with bad eyes, running toward a fire. She stood at the gate and watched his back until the smoke closed over it.
33She obeyed him for as long as it takes to count two hundred. Then she ran after him.
34She got as far as the corner of the dock. The east shed was burning from end to end. As she came in sight of it the roof went in, all at once, with a roar and a great upward rush of sparks, and the sparks were whole pages, thousands of them, flying up black and gold into the night with the writing still on them. They rose and went out.
35He did not come out. She stood there until a stranger dragged her back from the heat.
36By morning the sheds were ash. The great library itself, up the hill, was not touched that night, though you will hear it said otherwise. The books of the ships were gone, and the lists of them with them. No one can now say what was lost. That is the worst of it. We do not even know the names of the doors that closed.
37As for Caesar, he held the palace until help came. He won his war and made the young queen ruler of Egypt. He went back to Rome and was master of the world for a short while, and then some of his friends killed him with knives in the meeting hall. He had not meant to burn a single book. He set fire to seventy ships to save his life, as you or I might have done. He was the most powerful man alive, and he could not tell a spark where to land.
38Thais sat in the gate of the library for three days beside two baskets. People stepped around her. On the third day she began to take the rolls out, one by one, and count them.
39There were fifty-seven. Out of forty thousand, fifty-seven. Two were stained with gutter water and one was scorched down one edge.
40She was fifteen years old. Her father was dead and she had no trade that a girl was allowed to have. She looked at the fifty-seven rolls and she felt the full weight of the thirty-nine thousand and more that she had not carried. She thought that she would be crushed by it.
41An old scribe of the library found her there. He had known her father. He sat down beside her on the step with a grunt, and looked into the baskets, and turned over a tag or two with one finger.
42"Red thread," he said. "Ammonios and his red thread. We all laughed at him for it." He was silent a while. "Fifty-seven that were nowhere else. Do you know what you have in there, child?"
43"Not enough," she said.
44"No," said the old man. "It was never going to be enough. The fire was not yours to put out. If you sit here and count what burned, you will count for the rest of your life, and you will not bring back one line." He tapped the basket. "This was yours, and you did it. Now. Are you going to leave these standing on one leg?"
45She looked at him.
46"I need a copyist," he said. "My eyes are going, like his. I am told you have a fair hand, though no one is supposed to know it."
47So Thais became a copyist in the library of Alexandria. It was not a thing a woman did, and for some years her name was not put on the lists. She did not care about the lists.
48She copied the fifty-seven first. She made two copies of each. And she did a thing with them that the library had never done in all its years of gathering. The library had always taken books in. It had hunted them and hoarded them, as a king hoards. Thais sent them out.
49She found ship captains who would carry a sealed jar for a small fee. She sent the tides of the man of Massalia to a school in Rhodes. She sent the healing plants to Pergamum, where there were physicians. She sent the little roll of eastern sayings to a bookseller in Antioch who asked no questions. She told each one the same thing: copy it, and send a copy on.
50The other scribes thought it strange. The books were the glory of Alexandria. Why give away the glory?
51"My father ran into a fire," she said, "because forty books were in one shed and nowhere else. I would like no one to have to do that again."
52When the fifty-seven were done, she started on the rest. She went through the great halls with a ball of red wool, year after year, asking of every roll: where is your twin? When there was none, she made one, and sent it over the sea. She did this for fifty years. She trained others to do it. Most of them were girls, for she had noticed that no one watched what girls were doing.
53She could not save the library. No one could. It was too large and too famous, and it stood in the path of too many crowns. In the centuries after her it was burned at, and fought over, and starved of money, and at last there was nothing left of it but the name. If you go to that city now and ask where it stood, no one can show you a stone.
54But here is the strange thing. A great part of what we still have from those times, we do not have from Alexandria. We have it from a copy of a copy that was sent away to some small town that no army wanted. It lay in a jar in a cellar in Rhodes. It lay on a shelf in a house in the east.
55Thais never knew which of her jars arrived. Storms take ships, and booksellers die, and jars are broken for the sake of the clay. She let the jars go and did not ask after them. What happened beyond the harbour mouth belonged to the sea. What happened at her desk belonged to her. She had learned the difference between those two on one night, at the corner of a dock, and she never again spent her strength on the wrong one.
56When she was very old, a young scribe asked her whether she was not sad to have spent a whole life making copies, and never one new thing of her own.
57"I had a fire once that was in one horn only," she said. It was an old saying of her mother's people, and the girl did not know it. "Now it is in a thousand. Let the kings burn what they like."