In symbolism of their central dogma of agraphicism, the priests maintained a library of one-hundred-and-eleven blank-paged books, which were brought forth in rotation to be laid on hypaethral lecterns of rough-carved sandstone and leafed by the vagrant winds of the desert; then returned a day later to their hermetic narthices. The books had been created by the founders of the sect three centuries before, and would, it was said, miraculously divulge their hidden texts at the monastery’s ineluctable dissolution. Till then the priests pursued their devotional labors in interim of meditation and prayer, gravest amongst them the raising of water from the well of the Unwritten God. The monastery had been established at the heart of the great northern desert, whereon rain fell more rarely than centennially, and the well was delved deeper below the desert-plain than the monastery was raised on its mesa above it.
Two stairs spiraled the shaft of the well, one for priests descending with empty hydria balanced atop their heads, one for priests ascending with full thereon; and the passage down, and more especially up, was a devotion in itself, for the treads were narrow and no rail was offered for the hand, so that the greatest concentration and confidence were needed, lest balance be lost in the humidifying or unhumidifying gloom and hydrion or hydrion-with-carrier plummet to destruction. From the depths of the well, stars could be seen even by day within the annulet of sky that marked its entrance, and many a neophyte had sworn eternal service to the daemones thereof, when he descended safe for the first time and lifted dark-sharpened eye up the well-shaft.
Then, having filled his hydria from the pool that had awaited him, wherein blind fish and shrimp were said to lurk uncatchably, he would set off on the return, to bless the stars again when he eterred safe those many uncertain treads above; or not, as the case might be. But no neophyte could enter the well till he had shown himself capable of the concentration and was thoroughly practised on the sky-lit stairs by which the monastery was visited or departed; and fewer than five prayer-screams of death-fall rose from the well-mouth per annum. The subsequent corpses would be dissected in situ, having been exsanguinated to the ultimate drop into hydria, and carried up and out for burial in the sands below the mesa, whence they be disinarenated by no prowling jackal or hyæna, for the desert around the monastery was too arid for any but the lowliest and hardiest life to enjoy any but the rarest and briefest efflorescence.
On those less-than-centennial rainfalls, to wit, shrimp would hatch from long-dormant eggs and swarm scarlet and green in temporary rock-pools, to be consumed by the larvæ of jewel-eyed toads hopping hither from moisture-unsealed sand-chambers through transient meads of golden and purple eremanths; but the priests of the Unwritten God did not pray for rain and scanned the sky hourly by day and night against its arrival, lest books of their scriptless library be caught beneath it and ruined. Yet water, when it returned finally and irrevocably to the monastery, came first in no lightning-whipped, thunder-bullied skyfall but in the form of a creeping fog, which was seen advancing across the desert two days before its arrival, whereat it wrapped the monastery in a chill and swirling cloak defeating the eye and deadening the ear, and swiftly ripening phthitic complaints formerly most alien to the site.
The out-rotated books of the monastery library lay motionless on their lecterns now, unleafed by the winds, and when sneezing neophytes came to them on the morning of the fog’s arrival, meaning to return them to their narthices at order of the archibibliothecarian, they fled back with news that the hidden texts were at last appearing in many-hued fungi where they had long and patiently waited, scripted by the sugar-charged styli of the monastery’s founding priests.