The package is, to all appearances, just that - a package, albeit one plastered with lurid labels warning everyone within fifty feet that the contents are WARNING: FRAGILE. Inside, resting on top of swathes of tissue paper, bubble wrap, and styrofoam padding, a note.
Aziraphael -
I imagine you remember the museum looting out here in '03. I doubt you'd forget - every time they did a spot on it on the news, you looked like you were going to lose six thousand years' worth of lunches. And that's a lot of lunches. I should know, considering how many I bought. Anyway, turns out one of my lads wasn't sitting around with his thumb up his arse. He had to get take a sudden extended leave of absence on Monday, and... well, it's amazing what you can come across when you're hiding clearing out people's storage.
Most of it's on its way to various undisclosed locations (that are none of your business), but I saw one or two things I thought you'd maybe appreciate, if only for the relative rarity (I'd never seen a whole one written in the Diwani before; far as I knew, they mosty used Naskh). I thought about holding onto them, giving them to you in July, but you've seen how things are out here. I'm hardly in a position to be able to take proper care of them. Not that they were in great condition anyway, so I figured I might as well get them to you ASAP.
- Crowley
Below the letter, bundled painstakingly in padding materials, two books; a crumbling, handwritten manuscript which, upon inspection of the dense, beautiful calligraphy, turns out to be a copy of the Qur'an, written in the Diwani script. Interspersed loosely throughout the pages, a number of thinner, frailer sheets bearing annotations in a different, spidery hand.
Under that again, separated by a number of layers of tissue and bubble wrap, an equally frail copy of Ibn Khaldun's Muqqadima, the first two volumes. The script in this one is not nearly so impressive, but somebody, once upon a time, went to a lot of trouble to bind it within a rather glorious cover.