-report continued-
The "outer layers" of the Book consist of a series of large halls. When they were new, these halls were reading rooms to which Keepers would bring requested records of the dead. The walls were lined with colossal shelving units, all the way up to the high ceiling. These once bore the weight of the living.
As the exponentially growing population caught up with the available space, more shelving was built, and the reading area contracted to a small island and then disappeared altogether. All this took place with a regrettable lack of planning, so it grew organically and there is now no neat rectangular grid of bookshelves. There are some straight sections that seem to go on endlessly - the scrolls and books extending as far as the eye can see into the dark, as the Book is not lit up all the time, and light only switches on where you are. You'd be a little island of light making its way in a ravine between steep cliffs of books.
Scaffolding divides up the halls horizontally, making new 'floors' connected with ladders or simple stairs. The first destination for my Guide was a corner that stored records of some lower Kador houses, and where a rodent alarm had gone off. No-one knows how rodents get into the vault that is the Book, or maybe they don't and the Book is like an island cut off from the rest of the world, where strange species will in time evolve and adapt to digest paper and parchment. Of course, the Guides have their own tales about the hidden fauna and warn about mystical flying killer rabbits. Reality is more prosaic: traps were set, using some Gallente cheese and Caldari nuts, to catch the rats.
Our next destination was a collapsed stack. Shelves have cracked and spilled their books for several floors: as the content of one shelf dropped on the one below it, it created a domino effect. I helped and sorted the books that had dropped all about while Guide Elleka Maslan replaced or repaired the shelving. The new materials that she carried along were put in place, but she is not relieved of burden, as the broken pieces cannot just be left behind but must be brought back.
-to be continued-
