SiWren of the Patriarchs

Si'Wren of the Patriarchs, by Roland Cheney

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Copyright (C) 1998 by Roland Cheney
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Title: Si'Wren of the Patriarchs
Author: Roland Cheney
Release Date: September, 2004 [EBook #6592] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on December 29, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, SI'WREN OF THE PATRIARCHS ***

Copyright (C) 1998 by Roland J. Cheney
Si'Wren of the Patriarchs
by Roland Cheney
To my wife, Jacquelyn.
Author's Remarks
The story of Si'Wren was culled out of a veritable treasure trove of hundreds of little clay tablets which were found sealed and submerged for over 4,000 years in stone jars. The jars were brought up from their place of discovery on the floor of the Persian Gulf, where they had lain half-buried under successive layers of sediment for over four millennia, by an internationally renowned team of archaeologists, oceanographers, and professional deep sea divers.
Although few realized the true significance of the find at the time, it was to be recognized later as a momentous event on that fateful day when the very first stone jar was actually removed safely intact from the bottom of the sea by a crude, squealing, grease and rust encrusted loading crane, to be hoisted free after so many centuries and set at long-last on the heaving deck of the aging expedition ship.
Monetary funding for the expedition was so short at times that the only affordable ship permanently on duty throughout the entire venture was an extremely dilapidated and barnacle-festooned vessel of third-world registry. No doubt many of the people involved viewed it as a minor miracle that the near-constant threat of mechanical breakdown did not endanger the success of the mission proper.
But the mechanics and engineers worked more than a few miracles of their own when catastrophe loomed, as it did more than once, and their determination ultimately prevailed.
Safely deposited on dry land after having been lost and forgotten for almost all of recorded human history, the stone jars were finally opened to reveal, instead of wine or oil, the curious little clay tablets safely dry and cushioned in a packing medium of loose straw and uncombed wool. The clay tablets, finally exposed to the light of day after holding their secrets for so long, were gently removed from their stone keepers and carefully packed in crates to be secretly shipped to the back rooms of a major museum. There, it was hoped, they could be systematically catalogued, transcribed, and translated by the dedicated ministrations of a team of the foremost scholars of our time.
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