Somewhere Sings About the Sky: A Tale of Lucius Hauy

Lucius had never known light in the way others claimed to know it. They said the sky was blue, that dawn was pink, that night was black. But for Lucius, the sky was a sound—soft winds across rooftops, birds cutting morning air with shrill cries, distant thunder rolling like a hand across a drum.

His fingers were his eyes, each warted knuckle and ridged fingertip speaking a language he felt rather than heard. His mother had left him at the gates of Quinze-Vingts as a baby, swaddled in thin rags that carried the scent of lavender and ash. He grew up hearing whispers of how he would be useless, another blind mouth to feed. Yet as he sat in the courtyard, letting his fingers dance along the strings of a worn violin, Lucius discovered that there was a sky inside him too—one that sang when the bow kissed the strings.

Others saw his hands as blemished, but he knew each wart like a star on a private constellation. They glowed when he pressed them to the braille pages that Monsieur Hauy had begun to create, the raised dots whispering stories of heroes, ancient temples, and kings who fell with pride heavy on their brows. When Lucius read, the dots hummed under his skin, each letter a ripple in the darkness.

He learned to taste the air before rain, to hear the world’s shapes with the tap of a cane, and to trust the pulse beneath his fingertips as a compass toward unseen places. Once, during the Feast of St. Ovid, Lucius was allowed to sit near the musicians. The violins were out of tune, the trumpets harsh, but the wind had swept over him with a song of its own, carrying the scent of roasted chestnuts and the cold metal of coins dropped into alms cups.

It was there that Monsieur Hauy found him, shaking a tin cup in the cold morning, his hands too refined for a beggar’s life. A single coin clinked, heavier than any other, and Lucius had known it was an ecu. When he tried to return it, Hauy had only laughed and invited him to the school for the blind he was building, promising to teach him the world in raised dots and whispered stories.

Under Hauy’s care, Lucius learned that stories were like music. Words became rhythms; letters became notes. He learned of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, of temples where stone walls were etched with symbols like songs waiting to be played, and how Bonaparte’s soldiers uncovered a stone—Rosetta, they called it—covered in ciphers waiting for their voices to be heard again.

One night, Lucius dreamed of sand whispering underfoot and warm winds, a temple rising from the dunes. He felt the hieroglyphs under his fingers, heard the wind across the stone, and smelled incense that spoke of prayers sent to the sky. Isis herself seemed to call him, telling him that somewhere in the sky, all songs are written, and even those who cannot see can learn to read them.

He woke with tears on his cheeks, the image of the temple clear in his mind, the raised dots on Hauy’s papers now singing to him like the breeze across his violin’s strings.

Years passed, and Lucius traveled with Monsieur Hauy to Egypt, where the desert winds told stories at dusk. Lucius pressed his hands against the Rosetta Stone, feeling the cool indentations of the ancient script. His fingers hummed as he traced the lines, hearing the stone’s memory and its unbroken connection to the sky’s song.

Champollion, the scholar who longed to crack the hieroglyphic code, stood beside Lucius, watching as the blind man’s fingers danced over the stone’s surface.

“The sky sings, even here,” Lucius whispered.

Champollion smiled, placing a hand on Lucius’s shoulder. “And your fingers hear its song.”

When the scholars deciphered the stone, Lucius felt the victory in his chest, a vibration that ran from the stone to the stars above. It was as if the sky had spoken a secret to him, and he was ready to pass it on to others.

Back in France, wars raged, kings fell, and emperors rose with dreams too large for their hands. Lucius, now a teacher at the school for the blind, taught children to read the dots Hauy had perfected, telling them stories of Isis and of songs written in the stars. He taught them that blindness was not emptiness but another way of seeing—a way of listening to the wind, of reading the world with your hands, of hearing color and tasting sound.

When Samuel Morse visited France, he met Lucius and saw the beauty in the raised-dot language, understanding its potential to become something even greater. From this meeting, the seed of Morse code grew, another song of the sky transformed into rhythm and light.

As Lucius grew older, he felt the weight of time pressing against him. His fingers, once nimble, began to slow, but the song never left him. Each night, as he lay under the quiet darkness, he pressed his fingertips together and felt the world’s pulse.

On his last evening, a raven perched on his windowsill, cawing as if to remind him that the sky still sang for him. Lucius smiled, reaching out a trembling hand, the rough pads of his fingers brushing against the air, as if reading a message only he could understand.

“Code,” he whispered, his last breath a prayer, “is life’s memory, and the sky is its slate.”

The children he had taught gathered to honor him, pressing their fingers to the commemorative coin minted in his memory, its raised image of his hands held open to the sky. They felt the warmth of the metal, and for a moment, they heard it too—the somewhere song that the sky was always singing.

Because even without sight, Lucius had taught them to see. Even in silence, he had taught them to hear.

And somewhere, beyond the reach of clouds, the sky still sings about those who dare to listen.