Tine's Rosetta Stone

"A day is quite a remarkable piece of work," Tine thought as she lay in her bed tonight, listening to the rain pattering on the rooftop. She held her own day before her in her mind as if she were holding a tablet of stone in her hands, reading the script that had been carved into it.

"It holds the key to past and present," she thought about her tablet. "But the script changes so quickly that it's hard to decipher."

"'Protean,'" she thought, recalling her walk with Rubob today.

"But certain words, certain signs, stand out more than others in the stone tablet -- like the signpost leading to the canal she and Rubob had found. With these signs deciphered, all the previous tablets and all the next ones would have more meaning.

On Tine's tablet, "Ulysses" was constantly cropping up because of Rubob, of course -- but that hieroglyph would never be understood, even with all of Rubob's explanations and guidebooks.

And then there was the canal. That had been leaving its mark on Tine's stone tablets these days. It even cropped up on a sign at a shopping center today, Tine thought, right there, plain as day, in the world at large.



"What was the meaning of it? Where are the canal and its aqueduct ("the waterway over the waterway," as Rubob put it) leading me?" Tine wondered sleepily. "And why a duck?" she asked, thinking of the sign at the shopping center. "Why a no chicken?"