When the librarian from the library of Congress told me it would be at Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri, I never dreamed what we’d see when we got there…
I guess the founders of the university thought that since they wanted to build a prestigious university (or at least I suppose, that’s what they hoped people would consider it eventually, they succeeded), they needed to build something that looked and felt like the oldest schools of advanced learning of Europe, and like Oxford in particular, I think.
In my opinion, when we walked hand-in-hand up those steps into the main quadrangle, I felt like I had dozed off and woken up in the middle of the school of witchcraft and wizardry. I almost wondered if I should ask where the house elves hung out, and to be pointed to the sorting hat. My husband agreed that the place looked like an enchanted castle and we nervously went looking for the main library and the rare books and folios room to work the “magic” necessary to summon our dragons from out of hiding.
Sadly, the university’s library is not quite so charming as the rest of the place—very modern and very Bauhaus period – that is unless you have a thing for buildings that are all cold, hard angles and mirrored plate glass. I’m sure had seemed a great idea to “update things with something so “cutting edge” at the time. But I think it looked a little like someone had dropped a fish tank to confine the lizards they were dressing up as dragons in the middle of their model castle. Oh well… as I always say, whatever…
We went into the library and were quickly directed to our destination. I think my hands were shaking as we opened the book and begin to turn the pages …
What was left of Father Marquette’s great beasts was waiting for us on a page with the title “Der Piasa Felshen.” The subtitle said near Alton, Illinois. Not “in.”
HAH! So much for the locals’ blather, yet again.
Okay, sorry about the attitude, AGAIN, but the current critter that is passed off as the Piasa is just plain vile! My kids call it the abomination. (I think they picked that name up from me!) I do think the kids are right. That thing does NOT look like any Native American stuff I have EVER seen! And, yes, I have seen that uktena from the picture cave! That thing is not even close …
Well, enough whining from me and back to the story at hand…
We snapped a picture or two, and prayed that our hands were not shaking too badly in at least one of them to get a clear and crisp shot. And then, we did some more looking around. The crazy thing is that we found a second copy of the book, this time in English that had been re-printed in the sixties. It did contain a LOT of grammatical errors, but it still didn’t say the Piasa started out in Alton.
(I will give the folks down in Alton this, they did think they were rescuing the Piasa, a concept we have been able to back up to a very, very small degree since then. And, if they hadn’t even tried to do that, even though they did it badly, we would never have heard of the crazy thing! End of story, wham, bam, no thank you ma’am!!!)
All we knew now was that we had our dragons, and we could finish the paper, get it to Quint and after he had the translating finished, he could send it on its way to China.
I admit that there was still a lot of snarling and screaming between this point and that eventual send off, BUT such is part and parcel of the dubious joys of editing…sometimes I am ssssooooo not surprised that George Lucas and his wife got divorced after they finished cutting Star Wars…
Editing is such a bloody business…and you can take that almost literally…
And after that was done … I had some work to do on my own… a reconstruction that blended what we best could decipher from the testimonies of the eye witnesses and what was left in the Lewis lithograph.
It was going have to be the best thing I had ever done… I had to get very, very close…
As close as I could …
Too bad that I got it wrong…
But, I wouldn’t know that or how or why it was wrong till much, much later…
Not until long after Nanjing…
And after lots of other crazy, impossible stuff happened first…
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