The Broken Ring

That night the broken ring showed up twice: once halfway along the rewritten guide lightbox, set in among the hieroglyphs; once on the lid of the sarcophagus.

It is a circle with a gap—the gap falling between three and four on a clock face, the position fixed, the angle of offset fixed, the line heavier than an ordinary handwritten stroke. No known civilization has it anywhere in its sign systems: not in the hieroglyphic plates, not in the cuneiform sign lists, not in the indexes of bronze inscriptions.

It is also not a shape that can be produced offhand. Someone spent a whole day on the comparison: change the pen, and the ring on the paper does not move; shift the gap round to the 12 o'clock position, it does not move; close it into a full circle, it does not move; write a figure 8 instead, which has circles of its own, still nothing. Only with all four conditions met does it start to travel—counterclockwise, turning around its own gap, each step about 1/24 of the circumference. Slow, it covers 1/24 in 35 minutes; fast, it covers the same distance in 16. Accumulating to 24/24, it comes back to its starting point and stops, like a thing that has been finished.

The rings that were covered over are still there too. On the Wankou riverbank there is a 3-meter stretch of low concrete wall; the segments before and after it are the original grey, and this one alone has been given a coat of white paint, finished untidily at the seams, a few white specks left past the boundary. Scrape the right angle down by the ground with a fingernail and under the white flakes comes a 2-centimeter length of dark arc, the curvature and the line weight both matching.

In this trade the sign is one of the last things you want to see. An old hand will give you one rule: if you see this broken ring start turning on its own, do not study it, leave at once.

As for why it should be on the lid of a Nineteenth-Dynasty sarcophagus—nobody is willing to finish the sentence.