Lean, lanky, hatless, Drake arrived at the conference breathless and
disheveled. Edith greeted him with applause and a peal of laughter.
Drake shot one agonized glance at his long legs. Reassured that the
worst had not happened, he drew himself up with the dignity of a stork
and replied in frigid tones,
"I am perfectly dressed."
"Where did you leave your tie and socks, John?"
Drake groaned. The telephone message had interrupted the stream of
his Mexican musings and here he was, just as he had flung himself
together. Striking negligées in public were his specialty. Given
ten years more of bachelor freedom and he would evolve into the
ideal absent-minded professor who moons through the movies and the
comic supplements, but scarcely at all through the business-like
atmosphere of a living university. Drake was one of the extremely rare
exceptions. Like many other mortals afflicted with the same failing,
Drake always indignantly repudiated the insinuation that he was not as
other men. Only repeated ocular proof, which he promptly forgot after
each application, convinced him when he was a walking comic. Edith's
attitude toward this embryo delight was a little philistine. She should
have encouraged him for the sake of art. It surely would be a great
pity to thwart his almost unique proclivities to play the idiotic part
demanded of him by the practical man. And what would be the net gain of
her motherly efforts? Drake at thirty-five would be outwardly like any
ordinary scholar--except of course the professional quacks--and quite
indistinguishable from any floor walker or bank cashier.
"Never mind, Drake," the Doctor consoled him. "I'll lend you things
before dinner. In the meantime, here is something more important."
He handed the ruffled young archaeologist a pocket lens and one of
Hansen's photographs. With a nod of acknowledgment to Captain Anderson
and the mate whom the Doctor introduced, Drake seated himself near the
open window and peered through the lens at the photograph.
The fifteen minute silence lengthened to twenty and the atmosphere of
the study grew unpleasantly tense. Half an hour passed without a sound.
At last Drake rose and handed back the picture to Dr. Lane.
"Well, what do you make of it?" the Doctor demanded.
"Do you want the truth?"
"Of course."
"Very well. I do not wish to insult either of your guests," Drake began
with anxious diffidence. "Especially as I have just been introduced,"
he added with an apprehensive glance at the compressed, husky Hansen.
"However, you asked for the truth. I may as well let you have it before
I know what parts precisely Mr. Hansen and Captain Anderson play in
this affair. That photograph, in my opinion, is a clever fake."
"What!" the Captain exploded, bounding out of his chair. "You're crazy.
Tell him about it, Ole."
But the outraged Hansen was beyond coherent speech. One of his round
gross of masterpieces, and therefore the whole twelve dozen, had been
pronounced fraudulent by this herring-gutted young dude without a shirt
to his back or a collar to his neck.
"You'll eat those words," he spluttered in a turkey-cock fury.
Drake, with roseate visions of an early martyrdom in the cause of
Truth, stood his ground before the advancing barrel of high explosives.
"Gentlemen!" the Doctor intervened sharply. "This isn't the forecastle.
Be seated, Mr. Hansen. Drake, remember where you are. I won't have you
making a prize ring out of my study. Sit down and explain yourself."
The bewildered Drake, by nature a pacifist to the marrow of his bones,
subsided into a chair. Hansen, with a few choice compliments in
Norwegian, also sat. Captain Anderson opened the attack.
"You're dead wrong, Mr. Drake. As a man of common-sense, would you
suppose it likely that any fakir has money enough to manufacture a
hundred and forty-four frauds weighing fifty to five hundred tons
apiece? You wouldn't, eh? Well, neither would I. You've only seen the
picture of one. Show him the rest, Dr. Lane."
Retiring once more with his glass to the window, Drake made a rapid
inspection of the entire series of photographs. After the first few
his frankly skeptical expression changed rapidly to bewilderment and
finally to intense interest. Beginning again with the first he ran
more slowly through the series, selecting fourteen of the pictures for
further consideration.
"Well," said the Captain, "what do you make of them now?"
Like most specialists Drake saw his beloved hobby in everything.
"Pictograms," he announced incisively.
"Real or fake?" Hansen demanded with a red scowl.
"Real, I should say."
"What significance, if any, have they?" the Doctor inquired.
"That I don't know. In fact this is a problem that may well take fifty
years or a century to solve."
"I have a theory--" Hansen began, but the rude Captain nipped it
cruelly in the bud.
"Bother your theory!" he snapped. "Let us hear what Mr. Drake has to
say."
"Perhaps," Drake hesitated, "if you told me where these pictures were
taken I might be able to form a more intelligent opinion."
"No," the Doctor objected, "we want an expert's unbiased estimate. Mr.
Drake," he continued, "is probably the best man in the world for our
purpose. Whatever he decides will be worth learning and absolutely
without prejudice. Go ahead, Drake. Take your time."
Drake picked up the fourteen pictures which he had selected from the
pile.
"These," he said, "seem to go together. They are parts, I judge, of
some much larger inscription. The rest of the pictures seem to be
dislocated, but a close examination would be necessary before reaching
a definite conclusion. I feel certain, however, of one very curious
fact. Two widely separated ages of art are represented in these entire
series. This feature is extremely puzzling for one peculiarity. Any
archaeologist will tell you that two such periods of art are never
of equal brilliance. Yet these pictograms, in respect of artistic
excellence, are all on a par--and a very high one at that. Now these,"
he continued, exhibiting the fourteen, "are not by any means nearly the
whole of their story. They are nothing more than disjointed fragments.
Yet they are the one evidence of some sort of continuity in the whole
lot. On them, if at all, we must base our attempt at decipherment."
"I told you we should have spent a week looking for the rest," Captain
Anderson bellowed at the indignant Hansen. "Why did you drag me back to
the ship?"
"It was you who got as fussy as an old woman and dragged me back," Ole
retorted, swelling ominously. "I knew we hadn't enough--"
"Oh, well. Go on, Mr. Drake."
"As I was saying," Drake resumed, "these fourteen hang together. But
they are evidently not by any means the whole story. However they
are enough to show that there must be some consistent scheme running
through the lot. Whether I shall be able to unravel the tangle is
another question. At present I doubt whether the inscriptions are more
than mere picture writing. If so, what meaning are we to give all these
excellent representations, literally by the thousands, of impossible
monsters?"
"Not so impossible as you think," Lane objected. "Had your education
been less lopsided you would recognize many of these monsters as
first-class and highly probably restorations of extinct animals. They
are life-like to an amazing degree."
Such was Dr. Lane's first opinion, reached after only a cursory
examination of those remarkable inscriptions. He has since modified his
estimate profoundly. Attentive study under suggestions from Drake in
fact wrought a radical change in the Doctor's view within the year. For
the present, however, it made a fair enough working guess.
"I must disagree with you," Drake replied. "In a way I can appreciate
the obvious fact that these pictured monsters are vividly life-like,
although I never saw anything resembling them. But in a more
significant sense they are strikingly artificial and, if I may make a
rough hypothesis, intentionally so. The people who cut these rows upon
rows of pictures into the rocks must have been in a highly advanced
state of civilization. The very perfection of the art was the chief
thing that made me suspicious at first. Our own stone-cutters with all
their modern appliances could do no better today. Now is it not at
least curious, I ask you, that artists capable of such excellent work
should deliberately go out of their way to cast an air of unlife-like
unreality over certain aspects of their art? I shall not attempt
at present to support my contention that the art is intentionally
fantastic. The evidence is here; examine it for yourselves. Again,
another circumstance roused my suspicions at once. There is a complete
absence of any attempt to represent the human figure. How are we to
explain this? I confess I don't know. Such a lack is unheard of in the
art of any known race."
"Would you expect to find portraits of human beings in a treatise, say,
on crabs?"
"Yes," Hansen promptly and unexpectedly replied, with a hard stare at
the Captain.
"I'll crab you when we get aboard," the Captain promised sweetly. "Your
style is improving, Ole. But you must not interrupt the speaker. This
is not a labor temple."
"I see your point, Doctor," Drake admitted. "Yet what race of human
beings would go to all this trouble to cut into hard stone a work on
prehistoric animals--as you say these are--when paper and printers' ink
are so cheap?"
"Suppose printing hadn't been invented when these inscriptions were cut
into the rocks?"
"Your hypothesis is fantastic. What--"
"I have a theory--" Hansen interrupted with desperate eagerness, but
the Captain squashed it.
"Ole!"
"Since Drake is all at sea," the Doctor smiled, "perhaps it would be as
well to hear what Mr. Hansen has to say."
"All right, Ole. Get it off your chest and don't take till next Sunday."
"It's like this," Ole began, rising to give his utterance all the
impressiveness of his rotund authority. "I agree with Dr. Lane and
therefore disagree with Mr. Drake. Those pictures are life-like. They
are life itself! And now I tell you why.
"Two years ago in the Sailors' Free Reading Room at Rio de Janeiro
I saw a book with pictures of extinct animals from some French and
Spanish caves. Now who made those pictures? The damn fool who found
them?"
"Ole!"
"All right, Captain. I forgot the lady. No, the d ..., the fool I mean,
who found those pictures did not make them. He had not brains enough,
not what you call the artistic genius, to draw like that. Nobody any
longer has so much genius. Those pictures were made by men who had
never seen what you call modern art. They were too good, too much like
nature, only better--if you know what I mean. Did the great Michael
Angelo ever paint a herd of wild buffaloes? No. Michael Angelo only
painted flocks of big she angels out of his head. Then came Rubenstein.
Did he--"
"It's getting late, Ole. Cut out the wild asses and the encyclopaedia
and come to your theory."
"I am arriving, Captain. Therefore, I say, those long extinct buffaloes
were drawn by men who had seen buffaloes, who had lived with them _en
famille_ as the French say. And therefore it follows in the same way,"
he concluded with a geometrical flower of rhetoric culled from his
gourmand reading, "the men who cut the pictures of those monstrous
animals into the rocks lived with them. They drew their likenesses
from nature. For these animals are life-like, they are almost alive!
Did those forgotten geniuses delay their masterpieces for Gutenberg?
No. They needed no printing presses in their business. Which was to be
proved, was it not?"
"Preposterous," Drake remarked as Ole, with a self-conscious bow,
resumed his creaking chair.
"Is it?" the Doctor asked quizzically. "Precisely why is Mr. Hansen's
theory absurd?"
"Because it would put the art of a million years before the Stone Age
on a higher level than that of the Twentieth Century."
"Perhaps it was. It seems impossible that it could have been any lower.
Edith, can you find the last number of 'Vanity Fair' with the latest
masterpieces of potato peeling embroidery or whatever it is that the
connoisseurs are raving over? Never mind, if you don't know where to
look. After dinner will do."
"The point is, Drake," he continued, "that you know as little of what
art was in prehistoric times as do I. Why, it is less than thirty
years since you archaeological chaps were telling us that all real art
began with the Greeks. Then they found those Stone Age cave paintings
that Mr. Hansen has mentioned. Since then we haven't heard so much of
'Greece, wonder-child of the Ages.' You are open-minded enough about
your own stuff. Why can't you examine Hansen's photographs in the same
spirit?"
"Never. At least not until I have deciphered them."
"Then go to it. That's just what we want you to do."
"How can I make anything out of a bald catalogue of dead beasts? Why, I
don't even know their blessed names."
"Drake, you are deliberately playing the fool for some reason of your
own. I believe you have guessed more than you admit."
"It is always best," Drake generalized, "to know nothing at the
beginning of an investigation. For then one is certain not to know less
at the end."
"Do you see any sort of regularities running through those fourteen you
put aside?" the Doctor persisted.
"Dozens of them."
"That sounds encouraging. What, for instance?"
"First, about five-eighths of the monsters have four legs each. Second,
approximately fifty-five per cent of them have no tails and the rest
one apiece. Third, each of several has one eye by actual count, or two
by inference, the second being on the invisible side of the profile.
Fourth--"
"You're an ass," the Doctor interrupted irritably.
"Hear, hear sir," Ole agreed.
Drake grinned. "Did you ever try opening a live oyster with a
toothpick? When I have something definite I'll let you know. Until then
Mr. Hansen no doubt will be glad to hatch out poetic theories for you."
"All right," Lane assented good-naturedly. "Only don't spend ten years
in finding out that all these inscriptions are nothing more exciting
than a fossilized multiplication table."
"Or a treatise on the integral calculus," Ole gravely added.
"Oh Lord," said Drake, "do you know the name of that too? When do you
find time to navigate your raft?"
"He doesn't know half of what he gabs about," Anderson explained. There
was a distinct note of jealousy in the Captain's voice. "He owns the A,
Q, X volumes of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, the _Song of Solomon_
in Norwegian, Balzac's _Droll Stories_ in French--which I can't read,
confound it, a third-rate pocket dictionary, Herbert Spencer's _Through
Nature to God_, about three-quarters of Maeterlinck's _Bluebird_
in Swedish and half of it in English, and a seven figure table of
logarithms. That's his whole damned library. Now if you think he's a
blazing genius it's your own lookout."
"When I was in Boston two and a half years ago," Ole volunteered à
propos of nothing, "I took an intelligence test. The psychologist said
I was in the upper one per cent of the entire population of the United
States."
"He lied," said the Captain.
"My library is not the only source of my erudition," Ole continued,
ignoring the Captain's remark. "I also read much in public libraries
while ashore," he concluded with smug modesty.
"Well, gentlemen," the Doctor remarked, "I am sure Mr. Hansen makes
good use of his library, small though it may be. It isn't the gross
tonnage that counts so much; it is the choice of one's reading matter.
Mr. Hansen seems to have selected his 'five-foot shelf' with a taste
and care that has not been exceeded by Dr. Eliot himself. Would you
like a copy of William Jennings Bryan's memoirs on evolution as a
companion piece to your Herbert Spencer, Mr. Hansen?"
Ole blushed his thanks. The Doctor turned to Anderson.
"Now Captain, what about oil?"
"Are you coming in?"
"Yes, even if our friend Drake doesn't succeed before he's seventy in
deciphering Mr. Hansen's photographs. We shall need a ship, I suppose."
"The old whaler will do."
"Not much ice, then, where we are going?"
"No more than she can buck. Our troubles will begin on land."
"So I have guessed. Would an airplane be of any use? Amundsen is taking
one with him on his North Polar expedition."
"Who would fly the beastly thing if we did take one along?"
"Why not Drake? He's young and therefore teachable."
"Oh, let me learn too," Edith begged. "You know how useless Drake is
when anything goes wrong with his typewriter."
"Indeed?" said Drake, deeply mortified. He truly was as helpless as a
baby before any machine more complicated than a monkey wrench. Rather
pathetically he imagined himself a first-class amateur mechanic,
for Edith always tactfully let him do the bossing while she did the
tinkering when his typewriter collapsed.
The Doctor turned to Edith. "Who said you were coming with us, young
lady?"
"Nobody yet. But you were just going to invite me. Weren't you, dear?"
"What about it, Captain?"
"It's up to you. She's not my daughter. If she can stand forty below
zero she may enjoy the trip."
"I'm afraid not," the Doctor said doubtfully. "You do so hate the cold,
Edith."
"Fiddlesticks! Captain Anderson said the water was warm. Any way I'm
younger than you are. If I'm unfit to go it will be suicide for you."
"Well, we'll consider your case when the time comes."
Knowing that she had won, Edith sensibly said no more.
"How long will it take us to get ready?" the Doctor asked.
"About six months. You, Drake, and your daughter if she comes, must
get thoroughly hardened before we start. Hansen and I can see to
overhauling the ship and laying in the necessary stores. We're both old
hands at the game."
"Where is your ship now?"
"Drydock. Rio de Janeiro."
"What!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you came clear to San
Francisco just to show me that reptile bird?"
"Why not?" the Captain asked complacently. "I knew you would join us."
"Am I as easy as they told you I was?"
"No, Doctor. You wouldn't swallow a mermaid."
"Such is the bubble reputation. Edith, this comes of your collection of
freaks. I wish you would adopt some less humiliating form of charity in
future."
"You haven't believed my story of all those big beasts in the oil yet,"
the Captain reminded him soothingly.
"No, and I'll be hanged if I do until I see them with my own eyes.
Well, I'm game. That thing in the box is real, anyway. You can
telegraph the Rio de Janeiro drydock to give your ship a thorough
overhauling. Fit up quarters somewhere for a passenger or two."
"Ole and I saw to all that before we left."
"Easier and easier. Well, well. You _are_ a surprising person."
This bit of information seemed almost to surprise him more than the
captain's strange tale. "It's too late for lunch and too early for
dinner. Will you have tea with us?"
"We shall be only too glad to enjoy your hospitality," Ole
sententiously replied.
"Ah, Hansen, I see you have a treatise on Dutch etiquette among your
literary treasures as well as a table of logarithms. All right, boys.
Edith, tell Wong to do his best in the true old Spanish style."
5
"BATTLES LONG AGO"
Seven strenuous months of physical toughening lay behind Drake,
Edith, and her father. They had lost no time in setting about their
preparations for the hardships ahead.
The day after the tea with Captain Anderson and the mate they were on
their way to the Canadian Rockies. Before leaving, Dr. Lane gave the
efficient Wong a sheaf of checks dated the first of each month for the
next three years. With these Wong was to pay his own salary and keep
the house in order.
To his rage and stupefaction Drake was dragged kicking from his puzzles
to become a hardened mountaineer. The Doctor was determined that the
obstinate archaeologist should accompany them to see with his own eyes
the originals of Hansen's photographs. Anderson and the mate left San
Francisco the same afternoon to return to Rio via Boston.
The party of three had gone straight north to a fashionable resort
in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. They planned to begin their
training gradually. Arrived at the luxurious hotel, they hired guides
and mapped out their program. Four hours' mountain hiking a day for the
first week, six the second, and so on up to fifteen, when they would be
sufficiently seasoned to dispense with the guides.
Drake, who had brought with him the fourteen most promising of Hansen's
puzzles for study, proved a most refractory companion. As the daily
marches lengthened he seemed to demand more and more sleep. It was a
ten minute job to get him out of bed in the mornings. The Doctor became
alarmed, thinking the rarefied air and violent exercise might have
affected the young man's heart. A searching physical examination showed
him to be in perfect health. Drake himself said nothing, enduring the
interminable climbs up precipices and the endless crawls over glaciers
with glum stoicism.
When the party left their quarters at the hotel to live in the bleak
open with only their sleeping bags for shelter, Drake became positively
morose. Edith declared in confidence to her father that the cranky
young antiquarian was developing such a devil of a temper that the only
comfortable course would be to send him home. She had stood all she
could of the snapping turtle. The thought of a possible two years with
him in a frozen wilderness appeared singularly uninviting.
"I should like to beat him up," she confided, "for I am sure there is
nothing the matter with him but a vile disposition."
An unusually cold and foggy night on the snowfields gave her the key
to Drake's ailment. Unable to sleep for the wretched discomfort,
she lay on her side staring wide-eyed at the soupy mist. Presently
she became aware of a tiny, faint glow in the direction of Drake's
quarters. Slipping from her bag she crawled on all fours over the soft
snow toward the source of the light. Unobserved she got close enough
to see Drake lying flat on his stomach in his sleeping bag, his head
propped up on his hands, intent on one of Hansen's photographs. The
dim illumination came from an improvised reading lamp consisting of
two inches of candle in a small tomato can on its side. She stole back
to her bag and crept in, to keep a lookout on the dim glow. After
what seemed an eternity it vanished, only to reappear half a minute
later. Drake had lighted another two-inch candle. And so it went until
about an hour before dawn when the glow finally disappeared and Drake
presumably slept the sleep of the unjust.
Edith said nothing of her discovery to her father. The next night
was clearer. Between cat naps she watched again. Once more the light
vanished an hour before dawn, and the criminal slept. Edith decided not
to peach. Instead she contrived an ingenious plan for the salvaging of
whatever survived the general wreck of Drake's temper.
She had not long to wait before putting her plan into action. The two
men shared the labor of splitting wood and keeping the campfire going
while she cooked. They planned at last two hot meals a week, descending
from the snowfields to the timberline to find fuel, for with their
heavy packs it was impossible to carry oil. On these occasions the men
peeled off their coats and went after wood with a will. The prospect
of a well-cooked steaming hot meal put enthusiasm even into the
dissipated, cantankerous Drake.
Edith bided her time. When next the perspiring Drake, having collected
twice as much wood as he could carry, was swearing under his breath
like a bobcat, she quietly abstracted the fourteen photographic puzzles
from the inner pocket of his discarded coat.
"It's a dirty trick," she murmured, stowing them safely away inside her
shirt, "but it is for his own good."
That night Drake was like a forlorn cow that has just lost its beloved
calf. Edith heard him rooting about in the dark, scraping his shins and
swearing at anything and everything. That night, she said later, was
just one long, whispered curse.
She let him suffer for his calf three days. Then, with a six-foot
crevasse between them, she confessed. Drake looked murder at her. But
by the time he scrambled the mile and a half which she, with rare
foresight, had placed between them by going rapidly ahead of the party,
the outraged Drake was too exhausted to fight. He regained his fourteen
tormentors only on the solemn promise that he would blow out the candle
every morning at two o'clock sharp. Thus, unless the enthusiastic
Doctor insisted upon routing them from their bags ahead of schedule,
Drake would get a full four hours' sleep every night.
"If that isn't enough to sweeten your disposition," Edith stipulated,
"I'll add half an hour at a time until we hit the right dose."
Under the new ordering of his disreputable habits Drake became as
suave as melted butter. Not that he talked much more than he had, for
he still emulated the oyster. What little he did say, however, was all
that Edith desired in affability. The Doctor, noticing the change,
ascribed it to a sudden, bone-freezing drop in the temperature.
"Drake will do famously when we get to the real thing," he told Edith.
"Just see how this cold snap bucks him up."
"Oh, he will be all right," Edith agreed. "When he gets something to do
he will lose his grouch for good."
After twelve weeks of roughing it on the snowfields and glaciers of
the Rockies the three went to Alaska for a more drastic course of the
same training. Little by little they accustomed themselves to scantier
and scantier clothing, until by the end of their hardening they were
clambering over ice and snow in howling blizzards with no clothing
but a single loose overall garment of wool. The Doctor in his joyous
enthusiasm was inclined to go farther, pointing out that if stark
nakedness in the snow is the proper thing for consumptive children,
surely a breech clout in a blizzard should be sufficient for tough
campaigners like themselves. But Edith wouldn't hear of it, although
Drake seemed to entertain the suggestion favorably.
And now all this, the hardship and the fun, lay behind them. That night
they were sailing from Montreal for Rio de Janeiro, there to meet the
rest of the expedition and undergo their last training. They must
learn to fly. Dr. Lane still believed that an airplane might prove
the decisive factor in the success of their venture, although Captain
Anderson, with all an old sailor's conservatism, belittled the idea
and grudged the two months' delay which it would cost.
Ole, on the contrary, by letter and cablegram, fairly gloated over the
prospect. A mastery of flying would bring him many steps nearer the
omniscience which was his ideal in this imperfect life. The Captain's
letters reported him already a past master of the art of flying--on
paper. He had even invented an improved type of flying machine which,
according to the envious Anderson, resembled a wheelbarrow with wings.
This masterpiece of Ole's unsuspected mechanical genius was still
in the chrysaloid stage of development, being as yet only one-third
drawings and two-thirds pure theory. Still, all in all it justified
Ole's high rating in the Boston intelligence tests. Anderson could
never have done anything like it.
Except for Drake's alleged seasickness the voyage down to Rio de
Janeiro was uneventful. Drake had telegraphed from Vancouver to one
of his antiquarian cronies to meet him in Montreal with half a ton of
carefully selected books, for the most part profusely illustrated works
on biology, geology and evolution. With these he shut himself up in his
cabin, admitting only the stewards who reported him in the last stages
of seasickness. Smelling a prosperous rat, Dr. Lane left the sufferer
to his agonies and hopefully promenaded the decks or played quoits with
Edith.
On the morning of the last day of the voyage the doctor's patience
was rewarded. The invalid emerged from his cabin looking, as Edith
informed him, as fresh as a young string bean.
"I'm better," Drake announced.
"That's good," said the Doctor. "How are Hansen's photographs?"
Drake tried not to look pleased. He failed. His face broke into a grin.
"Doing as well as could be expected, thank you," he replied.
"Have you deciphered them?"
"If I say 'yes' you will pester me to death with questions; if I say
'no' you will set me down as a blockhead. So I shall evade the question
by answering both yes and no. And that, as a matter of fact, is the
exact state of affairs."
"The Lord should have made you a woman," the Doctor remarked.
"A beautiful blonde," Drake sighed. "A perfect thirty-six," he added
with an admiring glance at Edith's lithe figure.
"I'll give you a swift kick unless you come through with what you have
found," the Doctor snapped. "Come on; out with it."
"Before violence I am powerless. I am too proud to run away." He became
more serious. "You were right when you said my education was lopsided.
A thorough knowledge of biology, geology, evolution and half a dozen
tougher sciences is just what I lack now to read those fragments fully.
I have been doing my weak best to make up the deficiency and learn
something worth knowing. At present I can guess at the meaning of those
fragments, but only through thick blankets of woolly ignorance. Unless
I am clean off there is vastly more than can be read at a glance in
those rows upon rows of prehistoric monsters. I don't believe those
inscriptions will ever be fully deciphered by any man who like me is an
ignoramus on all the sciences connected with living things."
"You evidently have found more than you admit. Tell us what you know.
If you need more science to go ahead I'll give you all I have."
After a brief tussle with his antiquarian conscience Drake yielded.
"First," he began, "this sort of work is very deceptive. Take the case
of the Etruscan writing for instance, or the Hittite inscriptions if
you prefer. Either one has been 'read' in half a dozen different ways.
One man making perfect sense of a particular inscription says it is
an extremely modest account of a marriage ceremony. His opponent and
critic reads precisely the same signs as a detailed description of the
slaughter of forty bulls. Both can't be right, unless of course the
forty bulls are a poetic metaphor for the bridegroom. And so it goes;
what one theorist reads as a beautiful prayer to the goddess of love
another deciphers as a simple recipe for lentil soup. Unless there are
dates, numerals, or other mathematical signs that can be definitely
checked against facts in such work it is all likely to be a mere
reflection of the decipherer's personality. So when a man says 'forty
bulls,' I know what to think of him."
"And you are afraid now," Edith smiled, "of giving yourself away? Never
mind, I'll forget all the compromising parts."
"I have nothing to be ashamed of in my private life," he retorted,
drawing himself up like a stork.
"That is what they all say when they begin to tell their dreams," the
Doctor laughed. "Then they are as mad as tarantulas when they find they
have given away the whole show. But go ahead; those beasts of yours are
not all purely subjective."
"That is where you are wrong. It is the ideal, the subjective part
that matters in these particular inscriptions. And that is precisely
what I can't decipher. The rest is easy enough. Superficially those
fourteen inscriptions are fragments of the history of a terrible war.
It is the symbolism behind the bald account of battles and sieges that
I can't get at. It is like one of those sentences that can be read in
a dozen different ways to give good sense. The surface meaning seems
perfectly clear. Then when the sentence is read a second time another
meaning begins to appear, and so on, until the whole shows up as a most
ingeniously constructed cipher.
"Consider, for example, the simple statement 'It rained yesterday.'
Ordinarily we should think nothing of it. But suppose you were an
intelligence officer in the army and you found one of your men sneaking
over to the enemy with 'It rained yesterday' sewn into his left sock.
You would ask for the code, wouldn't you, before shooting?
"Well, so it is in my case. At first sight those inscriptions record
only fragments of a hideous war. But only at first sight. The account
of the war is consistent and thorough, even if it is appalling in
its stark insanity. Intelligence, if I may say so without becoming
oratorical, is dethroned. There never was another war like it, and
there never will be again. For the fighting material has gone out of
existence."
"Beast against beast?" the Doctor hazarded.
"No. Beast against intellect and intellect against beast. Only I can't
make out whose intellect it was or what, exactly, the beasts were.
"That, however, is not my main difficulty. The whole story, I am
convinced, is merely the symbol of the real conflict which those
inscriptions record. I have no definite knowledge that this is the
case. Yet I feel it to be the absolute truth. Some terrific struggle
has been disguised under the fairly straightforward account of a war
unique in the history of the world. It is my guess that the real
conflict was of so terrible a character that the survivors deliberately
wrapped it up in a symbolism that may never be explained."
"What could have been their motive for recording this struggle at all
if they took such pains to obscure its history?"
"Can't you see? Perhaps they guessed that some day a similar devil
might break loose, and they left this hint of their own chaining of
the fiend. They suppressed a plain history lest some idiot be tempted
to try again what had wrecked them. Such things do happen. If it were
not for the lofty patriotism of certain old men we younger fellows
might never have to face gas and other horrors never intended for
the destruction of life. The makers of those inscriptions decided
to disguise the truth so that only beings as intelligent as they
themselves could decipher its meaning. This is only my theory, as our
friend Hansen would say."
"Still," the Doctor objected, "I fail to see in your theory why a
record of the horror should have been left at all, even in the most
obscure form. If they wished oblivion for it, surely the safest way
would have been to leave no record, symbolic or otherwise."
"If that was their only anxiety, yes. But what if they wished to leave
a warning to anyone intelligent enough to read and take it? Suppose,
for the sake of argument, they had discovered some secret of nature.
And suppose that this very discovery undid them. Would they not wish
to leave a caution to the next race of investigators who might blunder
through to the forbidden door?"
"Your imagination is running away with your brains, to say nothing of
your tongue. What about the actual war that is recorded?"
"I'm feeling seasick again," Drake prevaricated, diving for his cabin.
"Some other time."
And that was all they got out of him, for he locked his stateroom door.
6