A signal you could see and smell
A city watch had to communicate across streets where a shouted message might not carry. A hollow club packed with burning herbs offered a moving signal: air entered through its perforations, smoke escaped, and the watchman’s arrival announced that one shift was giving way to another. It was not a clock in itself; it made a change in the watch visible to people nearby.
The smoke also had a practical use. Smoke can discourage insects, and fragrant herbs made it more pleasant than the smell of plain fuel. A tool carried for a public duty could therefore serve as a small, mobile form of fumigation as well as a signal.
When practical smoke became meaningful
The same visible plume could suggest more than one thing. For a watchman, it marked a routine change of duty and helped keep pests at bay. To someone who encountered the scented smoke without knowing its purpose, it could look like an act of cleansing: something being driven away by a fragrant, rising cloud.
That gap between use and interpretation is how an ordinary object can acquire a supernatural reputation. Smoke already carried associations with purification, and the club’s unusual shape and controlled burning made the effect seem deliberate. The mystical meaning did not replace the practical one; both grew from the same smoke. One instrument could help organize a night watch while prompting a very different explanation from the people who saw it pass.
