In the twelfth station of the night, 
when the last decan had arisen
and Sopdet burned above the eastern waste
We set the merket down upon the line of the north
and stretched the cord according to the ways of our fathers
We sought only to number the hours
We sought only to know why the water in the vessel had ceased to agree with heaven
Why the shroud of night remained after the coming of dawn
Why one star crossed the meridian where no star had been recorded before

Three times we measured
Three times the plumb line inclined toward that which had no weight
And on the fourth reckoning, we understood
There was no star
There was a darkness among the stars around which the firmament moved
a vacancy possessing position
an absence having measured
And I commanded the scribes not to record this
but already they had written it
and having written it, had given it a place among things that are

Do not accuse us of impiety. We opened no gate
We merely counted
We only placed number beside number
until the sum demanded that something else be there
and that which was absent became aware of the place we had prepared for it

The cattle faced west until their necks bled against the tether
Children awoke speaking words their mothers had never taught them
Men dreamed of standing upon a shore
beneath an ocean suspended overhead
whose black waters contained neither fish nor moon
with shapes so distant in its depths
it seemed generations could come and go
between the passing of one shape and the next

Those who beheld them in sleep
could no longer endure enclosed rooms
They tore roofs from their houses
that nothing should stand between themselves and heaven
and then they tore out their eyes
because even heaven stood between their eyes and something greater

We shattered the tablets containing our errant equations
The equations now remained where the tablets did not
We did not know what to do
We cast the fragments into the kiln
We ground those bricks to powder and scattered the powder upon the river
and for seventeen days thereafter, the river flowed back towards its source
and every dead thing buried along its banks turned within the earth to face upstream.
We then convened in an attempt to understand.

One asked how great it was.
We could find nothing against which its measure could be taken.

Another asked how long it had existed,
but no season marked it and no change in it divided what came before from what came after

Then we asked what form it possessed. no one answered
for form is the boundary between one thing and another
and there was no other thing beside it.
I then saw the gods diminished.

Ra became a spark beneath black water, under a black sky
Osiris became less than the memory of a corpse dreaming that his death had meaning
Set became the impotent fury of an insect trapped beneath a stone
Thoth cast down his writing palette,
for there are truths that increase in falsehood by being made intelligible
and the stars we had called eternal fled this way and that through the northern sky
like cattle before a flood

Eventually, I came to believe I was near to understanding
as the cup is ruined when made to contain the sea
as the eye is ruined when made to contain the sun
so ar morttals ruined when made to conceive immensity
and there are immensities before which blindness is the last mercy granted unto man