Prospector-General

The Prospector-General is the senior surveying officer of the Tower's downward and upward expeditions, charged with establishing, recording, and certifying the distance between any given floor and any other. The office is ancient and its authority narrow: a Prospector-General may declare a floor found, measured, and named, but may not declare it reached, since reaching is a matter for the Librarian-General's Office and its General Orders. The current occupant of the office, Prospector-General Havre, has held it since Year 1041 without having led an expedition in nine years, a circumstance the General Administrative Protocols permit and the Spiral Auditor-General has twice remarked upon in writing.

Origin and the Cartilaginous Expedition

The office predates most of the Concordances that now govern it. Its first recorded use is in the survey returns of Kaelen, who led the Cartilaginous Expedition under the title Prospector-General and whose inventories remain the standard against which downward parties are checked on departure. Kaelen's mandate was to descend until the stairwells disagreed with one another, and to catalogue the point of disagreement. The party returned after eleven months with two hundred and six floor-names, four hundred and eleven measurements, and no statement as to which of the two was the more trustworthy. The Prospector-General's seal — a plumb line crossed by a rule — dates from this expedition and is still struck on every certified survey.

Following Kaelen, the office was made permanent by Third Concordance, which assigned it the keeping of the Survey Ledger and forbade any other officer from entering a distance in it. The prohibition has been tested four times and upheld three.

The Survey Ledger and the problem of numbering

The Survey Ledger is the only complete record of how far any floor is from any other, and it is not complete. Because floor numbers are not sequential in any reconstructable order, distance must be recorded relationally: the Ledger holds entries of the form "Floor 89 is one hundred and twelve risers below Floor 17, or four hundred and one above Floor 403, depending on the stair." Both figures are entered. The Prospector-General certifies that both were taken; the Prospector-General does not certify that both are true.

"Where two distances are returned for one stair, the Prospector-General shall enter both, and shall enter no third."

— Third Concordance, Annex 7, clause 3

Annex 7 is contradicted by Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2, which requires the Prospector-General to strike the longer measurement as "presumptively a miscount of landings." No Prospector-General has ever complied with the Eleventh, and the Survey Ledger continues to hold both figures in every case. Registrar-General Eloise declined to resolve the conflict during her tenure as Archivist General, noting in the margin of the Ledger's 848th folio that the two instruments "address different stairs," a reading no one has since confirmed or refuted.

Method and instruments

Prospectors work by riser-count and by echo, and the two methods have never agreed. Riser-counting is performed in parties of three, one counting aloud, one tallying, and one walking backward to confirm the count upon return. Echo-survey is performed alone, by voice and by struck bell, and is permitted only below Floor 200, where the stairwells are said to answer.

Discrepancies between methods are recorded rather than reconciled. A party returning in the winter of Year 967 reported Floor 314 at nine thousand and six risers by count and at "a little over a day" by echo; both entries stand. Survey parties are required to carry two plumb lines, a ledger of no fewer than forty leaves, and a spare boot, the last on the instruction of Prospector-General Havre, who lost a party to footwear in Year 1033 and has not spoken of it since.

Relations with other offices

The Prospector-General reports to the Librarian-General through the Librarian-General's Office and is audited by the Spiral Auditor-General, who serves at the Librarian-General's discretion. Certified surveys enter the archive through the Office of the Archivist-General, whose principal executive officer under the General Administrative Protocols receives them and may return them unentered, a power exercised most recently in Year 1039 against a survey of Floor 89 that the then-Archivist judged to have been conducted partly from memory.

The office holds no authority over naming, which belongs to the floor itself once a name has been entered and survives challenge; it holds authority only over the distance to that floor, which does not. Prospectors have long complained of this arrangement. A petition of Year 1002, signed by nine surveyors, requested that a certified distance be made as durable as a name, and was answered by General Order Theta-7, which declined the request and restated the rule that distances are held "provisionally and forever."

Disputed descent of the office

Two accounts of the office's descent circulate. The first holds that the Prospector-General derives authority from the Librarian-General's Assembly and is therefore answerable to it directly; the second holds that the office is autonomous by Kaelen's original commission and answerable to no assembly at all. The Arbiter-General was asked to settle the question in Year 918 and returned the finding that both accounts are correct, "the one as to the office and the other as to the officer," which has satisfied no one and is quoted at every investiture.

Since Year 870 the incumbent has been required to present the Survey Ledger in person at the investiture of each Scribe-General, a duty Kaelen's commission does not mention and whose origin is unknown. The Proctor-General has officiated at three such ceremonies and has each time recorded that the Ledger was presented, closed, and not opened.