The greatest adventure
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
A WITNESS TO THE TRUTH
Their two busy months in Rio de Janeiro passed pleasantly enough. With
the help of a young lieutenant from the Brazilian navy one at least of
the adventure seekers became an expert aviator. Possibly it was Edith's
striking beauty that caused the young officer to lavish his skill
and patience upon perfecting her in those finer points of aviation
which she probably would never use unless she became a stuntist at a
county fair. It is at any rate certain that he took far less pains
with the industrious Ole who, after one shocking misalliance with a
gilded virgin--on top of a church,--developed into a safe and sane air
navigator, largely self-taught.
Captain Anderson gave it up immediately after his first stomach raising
flight with the daredevil lieutenant. He refused flatly to learn the
knack of being seasick all over again.
Dr. Lane, learning easily, showed a bad tendency to loop the loop
without due provocation. Edith begged the Captain to set her father
to work on the ship's stores--taking inventory, anything to keep
him out of the dazzling sapphire sky. The Captain consenting, Edith
was left a clean heaven which she shared with the lieutenant. Ole,
an indiscriminating admirer of Maeterlinck, remarked to Drake that
Edith's airy antics were precisely those of a queen bee on her
prenuptial flight. What Drake replied is unrepeatable.
Poor Drake had proven himself a hopeless duffer at the game. After a
truly conscientious attempt to teach him the rudiments of flight, the
lieutenant announced with considerable relief that Mr. Drake would make
excellent ballast in an emergency, but was otherwise useless. So Drake,
discomfited and humiliated, returned to his inscriptions. Such at least
was the outward appearance of things. But Ole evolved a deeper theory
which he generously confided to Edith.
"No man, Miss Lane, can be such a fool as Drake made of himself. Drake
does not want to fly. He goes back to my photographs. That young man
has brains. Some day he will have a theory." Ole spoke in the hushed
tones of a fat old woman contemplating her buxom daughter-in-law.
And Edith, reflecting that she had begged Drake to let her give him
private lessons, felt like boxing Ole's red ears. In her heart of heart
she knew that the mate's theory was the truth; Drake was infatuated
with a lovely abstraction. And sighing her exasperation she resumed her
bee-like flirtation with the lieutenant. He at any rate was aware of
her charms. But she would have liked to set her even white teeth in the
one apple just beyond her reach.
By the end of the first month in Rio Drake's habits were ruined. He
now had the whole of Hansen's masterpieces in his room for study, one
hundred and forty-four dumb tormentors of the reason. Although the heat
was terrific, the long lean Drake seemed not to suffer. But his food
did, intensely. Meals brought to his door remained outside until the
porter devoured them with ghoulish glee or took them away for burial.
At last, however, the sympathetic landlord concocted a villainous
ration which was both meat and drink, and which could be downed at one
gulp with a minimum of attention to details. Oysters and cream formed
the basis of this ghastly diet to which rum and a dash of absinthe gave
the finishing flavor. The intervening strata were a horrible mystery.
A suspicious granulated blackness about the middle suggested caviare.
This perhaps was confirmed at the curdled surface by the unmistakable
odor of finely chopped garlic. The necessary balance of carbohydrates
was supplied by a liberal admixture of brown sugar. A quart of this
ambrosial hooch placed four times daily in his hand, with unlimited
coffee "as black as the devil, as sweet as love and as hot as hell" in
the Spanish phrase, kept the wolf from Drake's vitals.
Lane spent his nights aboard ship, while Edith danced till three in the
morning with the amorous lieutenant under the perfunctory chaperonage
of his aged mother. So Drake had a free hand to do what he liked with
the twenty-four hours between dawn and dawn. He slept when sleep
stole upon him from behind and overpowered him in his chair. If when
exhausted he instinctively sought his bed he lay down without bothering
to undress. Within four hours he was at his problem again. Refuting all
theories of the hygienists he took no exercise whatever and remained in
perfect health, as hard as a rock. After all, a busy mind is perhaps
the perfect tonic and the best exerciser.
Ole, gleaning daily bulletins from the landlord, developed an awed
respect for this unprecedented young hatcher of theories. That
something huge and universal must at last leap forth from such an
aeonial gestation he had not the slightest doubt. On the morning of
departure he led Drake aboard to his quarters on the old whaler--now
cleansed and rechristened the _Edith_--with all the solicitude he would
have shown an expectant mother.
The _Edith_ slunk under her own steam from the grand harbor, rounded
the point, and headed due south in the sparkling air, cleaving a sea of
chrysoprase. Officially they were on a whaling expedition. The airplane
was sophisticated to the Brazilian officers as a freak hobby of the
rich and eccentric Dr. Lane who wished before he died to harpoon a
whale from the air.
The great adventure had begun, but what was to be its outcome not one
soul aboard the silent ship had the slightest idea. They were headed
due south for the undiscovered oilfields and for a stranger thing
which, could they have foreseen it, they would not have wished to
discover. It is in this unreasoning way that human beings are forever
blundering into the mysteries of life.
By Lane's orders Drake was left to himself. Hansen's reports had