The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice has procured a photographic record of the marking on the sluice wall. By what means is not, on present information, established. The marking is the one first reported here on the seventeenth of last month, since noted under miscellaneous observations at the four Reed-Bed Subcommittee sessions that followed. Word of the photograph came on Friday morning, and the courtesy of an inspection was asked and granted. The Deputy, in the manner that has come to mark her dealings with the Sluice desk, said she would gladly show it on the understanding that it would not, on this occasion, be reproduced.
The condition was accepted. The reproduction of photographs is not, the editor wishes it noted, within the gazette’s present means. What follows is given by the Deputy’s courtesy, with her agreement as to its essential particulars.
The photograph was shown at the sluice gate on Friday afternoon. It takes in a section of the western interior wall of the sluice channel, from a distance of about a wing-length and a quarter. The wall, in its lower portion, is partly covered by moss of a kind readers who know the sluice in the warmer months will recognise. In the upper portion of the field the moss has been cleared. The Deputy confirmed she had cleared it, on the morning of the photograph, with a small implement she did not produce for inspection. In the cleared area the marking shows.
It is three short parallel lines, each about half a wing-tip in length, set vertically against the wall and divided by gaps that are, to the eye, roughly equal. A fourth line stands to the left of the three. It is fainter than the other three, the Deputy concurring, and shorter than they are by perhaps a quarter of their length, and set off from them at about the distance the three keep from one another. Whether the fourth line belongs to the same marking or is a separate marking of its own origin, the photograph does not resolve. Asked, the Deputy gave her view. It was, she replied, “a question worth holding open.”
The photograph, the Deputy went on, confirms the description she filed in her conditions report of the second of this month and the one first set down in the dispatch of the seventeenth of last month. It allows one further reading, in her view: the lines were cut into the wall to a depth the image does not reproduce clearly. The photograph will be appended to her next conditions report.
The long-resident frog of the southern waters was shown the photograph on Friday afternoon, at a respectful remove from the water’s edge. He studied it for an interval of about thirty breaths. He then confirmed in a croak that the remark might be reproduced, and gave it:
The marking, in the form in which the photograph presents it, resembles tallies older residents will recognise; whether they will recognise them as having been made by what they recognise them as, is, on the present evidence, a matter requiring further inquiry.
He then submerged. The gazette let him go.
The Warden of the Sluice has not, as this dispatch is filed, seen the photograph. The Deputy said she had not brought it to him. Nothing had prevented her, she added, but her own judgment of whether the approach would be productive.
What the lines record, and whether the fourth belongs with them, the photograph does not settle. The wall, for the record, was sound at the time of the inspection.