The lost Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd’s journey to a utopian city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E.

The second:

We know from a ninth-century Byzantine summary of the book that it opened with a short prologue in which Diogenes addressed an ailing niece and declared that he had not invented the comical story which followed, but instead discovered it in a tomb in the ancient city of Tyre.

The third:

The tomb, Diogenes wrote to his niece, was marked Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow. Inside, Diogenes claimed to have discovered a wooden chest bearing the inscription, Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you. When he opened the chest, he found twenty-four cypress-wood tablets upon which were written Aethon’s story.

Konstance shuts her eyes, sees the writer descend into the dark of the tombs. Sees him study the strange chest in the torchlight. The diodes in the ceiling dim and the walls soften from white to amber and Sybil says, It will be NoLight soon, Konstance.

She picks her way through the scraps on the floor and retrieves what’s left of an empty sack from beneath her cot. Using her teeth and fingers, she tears away a blank rectangle. She places a little scoop of Nourish powder into the food printer, pushes buttons, and the device spits an ounce of dark liquid into its bowl. Then she takes a length of polyethylene tubing, the tip of which she has carved into a nib, dips her makeshift pen into the makeshift ink, leans over the blank scrap, and draws a cloud.

She dips again.

Atop the cloud she draws the towers of a city, then little dots of birds soaring around the turrets. The room darkens further. Sybil flickers. Konstance, I must insist that you eat.

“I’m not hungry, thank you, Sybil.”

She picks up a rectangle inscribed with a date—February 20, 2020—and sets it beside another that reads, Folio A. Then she places her drawing of a cloud city on the left. For a breath, in the dying light, the three scraps seem almost to rise up and glow.

Konstance sits back on her heels. She has not left this room for almost a year.

ONE

STRANGER, WHOEVER YOU ARE, OPEN THIS TO LEARN WHAT WILL AMAZE YOU

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio A

The Diognes codex measures 30 cm x 22 cm. Holed by worms and significantly effaced by mold, only twenty-four folios, labeled here from A to Ω, were recovered. All were damaged to some degree. The hand is tidy and leftward sloping. From the 2020 translation by Zeno Ninis.