There was no point in going on like this, he realised, so he turned his attention to the text. Although the history of writing was never his area of specialisation he did remember from his earlier studies how Champollion succeeded in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, Grotefend the runes on Ancient Persian stones, and how someone recently managed to decrypt the inscriptions of the Maya and the wooden boards of the Easter Islanders. In all these cases the scholars were dealing with items in two or three languages or scripts like the Rosetta Stone or the trove at Persepolis, sometimes with the advantage of earlier, possibly somewhat puzzling, superscriptions that might, however, be deciphered, given enough patience, hard work and a bit of luck. The procedure was much the same in most cases: it was to assume that certain signs or group of signs approximated to certain words, names, or known combinations of sounds, then to look for clusters of such and substitute the assumed meanings until the meanings of others could be inferred to the point that the whole was rendered readable. And yet, even with the aid of the most up-to-date equipment, how many had failed and how often! Furthermore, those who did succeed might have shed decades of bitter tears in the effort. And nowadays of course there were fabulously powerful computers to facilitate the analysis of mountains of data.
What was he to do then, stuck without any help, all by himself, faced with the unfamiliar script of an unfamiliar language? What assumptions could he make, what range of data should he match up with another when he had nothing to go on, at least nothing so far, and was able to associate neither this or that group of characters with a particular word nor any particular word with any meaning? What set of characters could he try replacing with what? Despite all this he set about writing down all the different characters he could find in the telephone directory, the last page of which happened to be blank. Here he copied them one after the other, as many different ones as he could find in the text. This quiet activity, the rhythm of which resembled that of his normal scholarly process at research stage, had the effect of slowly calming him, restoring his temper, and, for a while, entirely reconciling him to his situation, so that once he had focused his attention on a restricted range of data and the nature of his problem was better defined, he had almost forgotten where he was and how he had got here. He had had such a full meal at the buffet that he never touched the remnant of food on the windowsill though he did uncork his second bottle of wine.
Once again he concentrated and began to speculate on what kind of alphabet it might be. The characters were extremely simple, consisting of two or three strokes at most, a little like Old Germanic runes or Ancient Sumerian cuneiform, though it seemed odd and rather ridiculous to compare what he was now looking at with those two long-dead scripts. He also noticed a conspicuous lack of diacritics, that there was no distinction between upper- and lower-case letters, at least none in this book, all letters here being of the same typeface and point size. He soon realised that he had noted over one hundred characters and that he was still discovering more. Sipping at the red wine he wondered what that meant and where the information would lead him? Could it be after all that each character was a word, each word a new character and that was why there were so many of them? Or maybe the characters stood for syllables as in ancient Crete and Cyprus? Or perhaps it was a complex system, like the Ancient Egyptian, comprising various elements: words, shorter phonetic clusters and individual phonetic signs in hieroglyphic form? It occurred to him that it might even be a series of combined phonetic symbols, the kind linguists worked with in order to differentiate between subtle levels of meaning and pronunciation. Or perhaps they simply employed a system that represented this particularly wide range of sounds? Questions, questions, nothing but questions! In the meantime, without noticing it, he had drunk the rest of the bottle. He couldn’t remember the next morning when and how he fell asleep.
He woke to the same even, grey light as on the previous morning. His head was muzzy and confused: he felt claustrophobic, full of guilt for drinking too much. He was angry with himself for having set himself a difficult task and failed. He did not dare think back over the last two days since the whole period seemed to be one of muddle and guilt and the feeling that he couldn’t go on like this. That, in fact, was the one thing he could see with absolute, blinding clarity. He turned on the cold tap in the shower and was soon shuddering and sniffling under the jet of water. This was all a nightmare, nothing but madness and bedlam and he had to wake from it because it couldn’t go on, it simply couldn’t go on!
He dressed, made a sandwich out of what remained from the day before and by the time he had eaten it had a plan of action: he was only amazed that he hadn’t thought of something so simple, so stupid much earlier. If all the hotel employees were idiots with whom one couldn’t exchange a solitary word, if there was no information desk or if it was located in such an obscure place that it couldn’t be found, then he had to find somewhere where there were bound to be foreigners: a tourist or information bureau. A railway station, for example, a long-distance bus terminal, an airport, an airline office, or a harbour or dock if there happened to be one. All he had to do was to find a taxi and somehow explain to the driver where he wanted to go. The rest was up to the driver and once they had arrived, surely there would be someone who could advise him. This appeared so obvious now that he was on the point of packing his bags and never again returning to his room but decided against it since he not only had a bill to settle but they had his passport too and he couldn’t go anywhere without that. He could always throw everything into his bag at short notice.
The blonde in the blue uniform was working the lift again and in his distraction Budai allowed his glance to linger on her. Once again he noticed how lithe and slim she was, how delicately boned and how refined was the structure of her long face. She wasn’t reading this time but staring straight ahead of her with a tired, blank expression. How many times had she made this same up-and-down journey? It was only once they reached the ground floor and the door opened that he detected the merest flash of recognition in her eye. Budai gave her a faint nod and smiled as he stepped out: he was unlikely ever to meet her again. He couldn’t help admitting to himself that he was a mite sorry about that: she was the only thing in the city he would be sorry to leave.