Quipu

 

 

I have heard tell, from explorers and other travellers of the city of Quipu. It lies deep in the jungle, a thousand miles from civilisation. The jungle there is wet with constant rain, the trees are loud with colourful frogs calling, and tiny bright fish swim in the puddles caught perpetually in the folds of the trees. It is even said that the great river that flows down to Mahogany has its source in that region, though I do not know whether that is true.

The region is so endlessly moist, that no paper could possibly survive. There are no books in that place, nor so much as a single piece of paper. Explorers tell how their normal clothes rotted on their backs, any metal rusted and stained, their buttons reduced to green smudges on their shirts.

Any books and notes that travellers had carried with them rotted in the hot humid atmosphere, turning to mush, like a wasps’ nest that you find in late summer in some neglected spot. But the people of Quipu are undeterred by such things and do not recognise them as an inconvenience, instead of paper, or even impressions on clay, as I have seen employed elsewhere, they rely solely on knots tied in the string they make. There are numberless varieties of knots, and the distance between knots is equally telling, in conveying meaning and nuance. Their entire civilisation is recorded on these knotted twines, they organise their accounts in this manner. Their rulers convey orders to distant subjects, lovers share fond memories.

While their civilisation appears unconventional to our eyes, it is successful by all the usual metrics, excelling in such arts and trades as we might recognise, with one great lacuna. Without the lens of the blank paper, without the rectangle of an empty page before them, they have no architecture that we could recognise as such. They have no understanding of right angles, the perpendicular or the level. They do not recognise a straight line, or the angles that it can describe.

For the people of Quipu, all is curves and possibility, there is space or there is not space. Their whole city is heaped opportunistically where there is space to put it. When the mood, or the need takes them, they will make a rough wall, piling clay woven with threads, letting the wall fall where it will enclosing what it can. The overall effect is of something natural, like bird nests clustered close together in a tree, or coral slowly tumbling across the ocean floor.

Having never seen a straight line, they think that their way of life is perfectly natural, and for the people of Quipu they truly believe that they are lacking for nothing at all in their strange city in the jungle moistness.