Janet Norman Knox Reading Leaves Experiment [Description] Her habitat is a mound of oak leaves deep in a cave. The cave has one hundred mouths singing the fates. Let's do the math—that equals cacophony. [Prediction] The heap is where she sleeps—a nightly nesting like a gorilla. Or, do the leaves leave her drunk like a eucalypty koala, or maybe provide trace minerals like the panda in a slothful bamboo chew? I am skeptical. [Methods] I sit silently for—let's not count—hours, bones stiffen like Fossey jotting notes in a bound book. My eyes become accustomed to the dark. I wait for the sibyl to emerge from one passage out of a hundred. Let's do the math—one percent. Her kind is not active, prone to hibernation attributed to a leaf diet or close air. [Background] Previous studies indicate the Cumaean Sibyl reads between the veins of oak palms like a wizened gypsy. The leaves tell when arranged in fractal equations on cool Italian lime- stone. Leaves like hands to be called on, patient like Jane, inherently Good- all, signs of intelligence. [Control] Sshh, the sybil approaches out of the dromos, stalagmatic from a dripping corridor. Mesmerized in Mesozoic rock, our collective pen poised above write-in-the-rain paper. We have waited hundreds of hours [Observations] in this decimal place. She, too, holds a writing instrument. Yes, we suspected her tool use and now, clear evidence. We document the scritch of quill on dry foliole. She lays the leaf near the entrance to the cave, adjusts its position with her toe. Not right, she edits it to a far corner. The sybil disappears as a wind picks up, whirls leaves. They settle, dishevel, making order out of random. It was said that Apollo granted her one wish. She gathered a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as the grains she held. A rough estimate has her living for a thousand. [Conclusion] The hardest part, the part that tests the naturalist is not the dank stone, not the lack of light or oxygen. It's the noise. Each mouth of the cave, one hundred at last count has a voice. The whispers of the sibyl can be heard for ever. Let's do the math. That's about a hundred times aeons times scads of ricochets compounding annually comes to tons of fate, and this stuff is heavy,  in choral din. We are deafened by foresights that are, we have to say, getting old with every rebound. We have background scatter, sound and leaves. My write-in-the-rain bleeds. Now that we are deaf, we hear the singing of elephants and maybe we will listen now, resounding through rock, hundreds of miles, telling of the coming of drought or hunters.

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