At first she learned to read it intuitively, as if it was the most natural thing in the world; but before very long she lost the power to do that, and she was left unable to see all the connections and similarities that had once been so clear beneath the symbols on the dial. The loss of that power was painful. It was a consolation, though a poor thin one, to know that by diligent study she’d be able to regain some of the ability to read it; but she’d always need the books in which generations of scholars had set down their discoveries about the symbols and the links between them.
