The dying words of seven men, all unrelated except for expiring at the same time on the same day in the same year and in villages seven miles apart, turned out to be inexplicably the same.
When the doctors took note of this fact, they called a conference in the pleasant harbor town where one of the men, or ‘cases’ as they had become known by now, had spent most his life as an undistinguished civil servant and a ranking mason. Professores and Weltweisheitlehrer from the furthest reaches of the continent debated the seven sets of identical last words for seven days, first trying to establish wether the fact of their being identical necessitated a conclusion that they were, in fact, the same. Then they reviewed the matter of whether their utterers, the ‘cases’ so to speak, were, in fact, the same, despite being factually non-identical.
Plenary meetings crashed like mighty waves upon the rocky shores of working groups, flowing out limply on the sandy beaches of many late night gatherings in smokey sailors’ bars. A good time was, in fact, had by all.
Yet, what this Ebsû was the ‘cases’ warned for with their final aspiration was never satisfactorily resolved, even as, on the morning of the eight day, its mud-stained horns broke the surface of the ocean.
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