The Sand-Reckoner

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The box was full of sand. It was fine, glassy sand, almost white; it was moist, and had been flattened, then scraped smooth to produce a surface as level and firm as the finest parchment. But the sunlight, falling obliquely with the afternoon, glinted here and there on the edges of individual grains, catching on facets too small for the eye to distinguish. Innumerable facets, one would say- only each made a distinct point of brightness, and the young man looking at them suddenly found himself wondering if he could number them.

It was an old box. The olive-wood frame was scarred and battered, the dull bronze which bound the corners scratched here and there into new brightness. The young man set his hand against one of those scratched corners, calculating: the box was four finger-breadths high, but there was a groove for the lid, and the sand only filled it halfway. He did not need to measure the length and width: he had long before marked the rim with notches a finger-breadth apart, twenty-four down one side and sixteen down the other. He crouched over the box, which he had carefully placed in the quietest part of the ship's stern deck, out of the way of the sailors. Using one leg of the set of compasses he was holding, he began to scratch calculations in the sand. Say that ten grains of sand could fit in a poppy seed, and twenty-five poppy seeds could sit upon the breadth of a finger. There would then be six thousand by four thousand by five hundred grains of sand in the box. Six thousand by four thousand was two thousand four hundred myriads; multiply that by five hundred…

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