“Well,” declared the Doctor, speaking to himself, “even my success in
intra-laryngeal operations was not half so interesting as this!”
And again he bent to examine the half-charred fragments before him.
Some were in typewriting, one was in a small fine script. One hardly
legible was in German, others were in English, interspersed here and
there with words which he recognised were in Hebrew character.
In that small bedroom, beneath the rather dim electric light, the
deformed little man sat pouring over the folios so dry that they cracked
and crumbled when touched.
Much was undecipherable; the greater part had indeed been utterly
consumed, but here and there he was enabled to read consecutive
sentences, and those he made out utterly staggered him.
Indeed, so full of interest, so curious, and so amazing they would have
staggered anybody.
He held in his hands the dead man’s secret--a secret that on the face of
it, seemed to be the strangest and at the same time the most unsuspected
in all the world.
Suddenly he sat back, and, staring straight across the narrow room,
exclaimed aloud:
“Why, there are men in the city this very day who’d give me ten thousand
pounds for the remains of these papers! But would I sell them? No--not
for ten times that amount! Who knows what this discovery may not be
worth?”
He chuckled to himself. Already he felt himself a wealthy man, a man
who could dictate his own terms in financial circles--a man who would be
welcomed in audience by crowned heads themselves!
He sighed, and the heavy exhalation blew a quantity of fragments of
tinder away upon the carpet.
“I wish I hadn’t burned them quite so much,” he said regretfully. “Had
I had a newspaper handy I could have lit that instead. Or--or I might
easily have delayed their destruction until--until after the end. Yet
he seemed quite conscious, up to the very last moment. No wonder he
regretted death before the fulfilment of the great work he had
commenced--no wonder he contemplated moving to the Grand Hotel at an
early date! And yet,” he added, after a pause, “it’s all very
intricate, very indistinct, and requires a greater scholar than myself
to properly understand and unravel it.”
The chief document, consisting of about ten typewritten pages in
English, had been badly burned. It was this which he was now engaged in
trying to decipher. At the top left-hand corner the sheets had
originally been held together by a paper-fastener, but that corner had
been consumed as well as all round the edges. The centre alone of three
folios remained readable, even though it had been yellowed by smoke.
“There seem very many references to Israel, to Nebuchadnezzar, King of
Babylon, and to the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. Yet they seem to
convey nothing. Ah!” he sighed, “if only I could reconstruct the
context. There are Biblical references, too. I must obtain a Bible.”
So he rose, rang for a waiter, and asked him whether there was such a
thing in the hotel as a copy of Holy Writ.
The man, a young German, naturally regarded the visitor as an eccentric
person or a religious crank, but he went at once and borrowed a small
Bible from the chambermaid--a volume which afterwards proved to contain,
between its leaves, small texts of her Sunday-school days, several
pressed flowers, and a lock of hair.
A reference given upon one of the crinkled folios was “Ezekiel xxviii,
24.”
Reseating himself after the young German had left, Raymond Diamond
hastily turned over the pages of the little well-thumbed Bible and found
what proved to be the prophecy of the restoration of Israel.
Another reference in the next line of the half-burnt screed was Ezekiel
xl, xli and xlii, no verses being designated.
On turning to these chapters, the doctor found that they contained a
description of Ezekiel’s vision of the measuring of the temple.
Continuing, he read the further dimensions of the temple, the size of
the chambers for the priests, and the measures of the outer court “to
make a separation between the sanctuary and the profane place.”
All this conveyed to the deformed man but little.
That it had some connection with the strange secret was apparent, but in
what manner he failed to distinguish.
He had gathered broadly that the dead man’s discovery was an amazing
one, and that a strange secret was revealed by those documents when they
were intact, but it was all so mystifying, so astounding, that he could
scarce give it shape within his own bewildered brain.
The enormous possibilities of the discovery had utterly dumbfounded
him--it was a discovery that was unheard of.
In order to present to the reader some idea of the fragments of the dead
man’s papers lying upon the table before him, it may be of interest if
the present writer gives a photographic representation of one of the
badly burned folios.
As will easily be seen, the undestroyed fragment of the document showed
but little that was tangible. Of interest, it was true, but the
interest was, alas! a well-concealed one. The dead man was a scholar.
Of that there was no doubt whatsoever. The doctor had recognised from
the first that he was no ordinary person.
The document seemed to be a portion of some statement made by a person
as to the curious and unexpected result of certain studies.
He who made the declaration had apparently been a student of the Talmud,
and especially the school of the Amoraim, or debaters, who about A.D.
250 expounded the “Mishna.”
Raymond Diamond had long ago read Wunsche, Bacher and Strack, and from
them had learned how the Amoraim had expounded the “Mishna,” and how
their labours had formed the Gemara, while the united Mishna and Gemara
formed the books of the Talmud. By that time, and even earlier, the
teachers of Judaism were also working in the schools of Babylonis.
Hence the Talmud now exists in two forms--the Palestinian Talmud, or
Talmud of Jerusalem, and the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Jehuda compiled
the “Mishna” which, in general, sums up the outcome of the activity of
the Sopherim, Zugoth and Tannaim, and thus became the canonical book of
the oral law.
He was recalling these facts as he sat staring at the half-charred
fragments on the table before him.
“The person making the declaration,” he said aloud to himself, “appears
to have discovered certain hidden meanings in the ‘Mishna.’ Well--one
can read hidden meanings in most writings, I believe, if one wishes.
Yet he seems to have come across something which amazed him--some
cabalistic message very complicated and ingenious. It caused him great
astonishment when he found himself able to--able to what? Ah! that’s
the point,” he sighed.
Then, after another long pause, he decided that “nine ch--” meant “nine
chapters,” and that the final lines of the page dealt with some
declaration opening with the arrival of the Messiah.
“Yes,” he said in a hard decisive tone, straightening his crooked back
as well as he was able. “There is a mystery explained here--a great and
most astounding mystery.”