A friend's first and last trip to the National Library is the only memory of it. Mine dated back to a secondary school field trip there, on an assignment to check out the newspaper archives on the day we were born. I half expected to see newspaper as old as I was, in its yellow and tattered glory. Instead, I had to scroll through microfilm. It turned out that day was the day of the greatest flood that year; and somehow after that, the National Library always seemed to me like a lost Atlantis, with its treasures hidden in deep waters from men.