The greatest adventure
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.