As It Was in the Beginning

by Philip Verrill Mighels

CHAPTER XI

A MYSTERY

With an odd sensation tingling in his veins, Grenville examined his find.

It was merely a cylinder, made of brass, fully three inches in diameter, and, perhaps, eight inches long. Its cap was rusted so firmly in place that he could not possibly remove it. He gave the tube a shake. There was something inside, but its weight was exceedingly light.

Once more he knelt before the secret locker to examine all its walls. But although his fingers finally played upon every square inch of the sides and ceiling, there was nothing further to be found. Apparently the only "treasure" the place had concealed was contained within the tube.

He thought of a score of documents the one-time captain of the barque might have thus desired to preserve, but the sun was rapidly nearing its purple horizon, and the old ship's hold was growing dark. Grenville gathered the last of the metal spoils he had found in an empty box, half rotted, on the floor. The tube he thrust firmly in his pocket.

What with the cannon balanced on his shoulder, his box of rusted metal hugged beneath his arm, and his bow, club, and arrows clutched tightly in his hand, he presented a singular figure as he finally made his way along the darkening trail, and came at length to the clearing, to be hailed from the heights by Elaine.

"Just for the sake of variety," he said, when he came to the terrace with his burdens, "we'll eat one more dinner of fruit."

"I couldn't think what you had killed," said Elaine, "when I saw you coming with this," and she placed her foot on the cannon he had gladly dropped to the ground. "What is it, anyway?"

"A pop-gun," he said, "to tickle my friend the tiger."

She was instantly apprehensive. "You have met him again?"

He had no intention of arousing her alarm.

"The brute is still about the island. I should like his skin for a rug."

"You could really shoot him with this?"

"Well—I shall mount it, in any case, though I have my doubts of his standing while I blow a few rocks through his person."

When he went for a fresh supply of fruits he brought up a log some four or five feet in length, with a burned-off prong at its end. This he intended to prepare as a "carriage" for the gun. He placed the pronged end down in his fire, to burn out a niche for the little brass piece, which he cleaned of its mud then and there.

His preliminary work on the bit of ordnance was soon concluded. When his log had burned to a moderate depth, he removed it to a near-by rock and gouged the charred portions away. Into the hollow thus rudely formed, the breach of the gun loosely fitted, ready to be firmly bound in place.

But the day was done, and Elaine had spread their "table," to which Sidney was glad to repair.

He had mentioned nothing of the tube still fatly bulging his pocket. Until he should first determine what the cylinder contained, he meant to arouse no unnecessary speculations in the breast of his companion. How much she might yet have to know of the barque and the mummy chained in its cabin he could not determine to-night. That something sinister lurked behind the mystery which this and the two headless skeletons involved was his constantly growing conviction.

It was not until night was heavily down, and Elaine had crept gladly to the comfort of her cave, that Grenville produced the brass cylinder, and stirred up new flames of his fire.

Then, sitting alone in the ruddy glow, with a rock for a stool, and another before him for an anvil, he scraped all he could of the greenish oxidation from the cover of the tube, and tried, as before, to wrench it off. The stubborn parts remained solidly rusted together.

This he had apparently expected. For he took up a rock of convenient size and, gently beating the cylinder just below its union with the cover, he bent it slightly inward about its entire circumference, meanwhile pausing from time to time to thrust his knife between the cemented pieces and force them a little apart.

The tube was considerably mangled by this process, while the cover still adhered. In a final burst of impatience, Grenville thrust the battered cap in the crevice between two bowlders and wrenched it roughly away.

Then he turned the hollow tube to the light, revealing, within, the edge of some document, thick and loosely rolled. This he readily removed and straightened in his hands, placing the tube beneath his arm.

For a moment the parchment seemed, despite the firelight upon it, a mere blank square, of leathery texture and weight. Then he fancied he saw upon its surface some manner of writing, or signs.

He resumed his seat and held the thing to the fullest light of the flames. It was yellowish tan in color, a trifle stiff, and inclined to curl to the shape it had held so long. Grenville turned it over, so dim were the characters it bore. There was nothing, however, on its outer side, wherefore he bent more closely towards his wavering light above such signs as he could finally discern.

Perhaps the fact that he began by expecting to find some ordinary map, or printed or written characters, for a short time baffled his wits. Howbeit, he began at length to discover the fact that a few large signs or hieroglyphics had been rudely sketched upon the parchment. When this discovery was finally confirmed, he had still considerable difficulty in tracing the lines that comprised these singular designs.

The firelight cast dark shadows in certain crease-like traceries that folds in the substance had formed. It was not until he presently managed to discriminate between these mere wrinkles and the "writing," that he made the slightest progress. His eyes at last became more keen to follow the artist's meaning. With his stub of a pencil, on a whittled bit of wood, he began to copy what he "read."

The result was, crudely, this:

It was not a map; it could hardly be a message—unless expressed in some short-hand system heretofore unknown—yet it must at some time or other have been accounted important to have been so elaborately preserved.

Grenville turned it upside down, compared his copy with the original repeatedly, and then examined the parchment with most minute particularity in search of some smaller writing to explain these mysterious signs.

There was nothing further to be seen—at least by the light of his fire. Two of the symbols only did he recognize as ever having come to his attention before. These were, first, the lines like a series of M's, and second the oval, about a human figure. This last suggested unmistakably an ancient Egyptian cartouch—the name or title of a king. But containing one sign only, and that apparently representing a mummy, it puzzled the inventor no less than the pyramids and curves.

That some either crude or crafty mind had combined this mixture of Egyptian and nondescript hieroglyphics with intent to reveal some secret message or information to other initiated beings, while concealing its import from all accidental beholders of the script, seemed to Grenville perfectly obvious.

He sat for three hours replenishing the fire and goading his brain for a key to the puzzle, before it occurred to his mind at last the tube might contain the explanation.

All this while he had held it beneath his arm, hard pressed against his body. As he peered down its dark interior once more, he likewise thrust in his fingers. It was they that discovered and fastened upon another sheet of something he had missed.

This clung so close to the tube's metal walls he wetted his finger to remove it. The light then shone opaquely through its substance. It was ordinary foolscap paper, the half of a sheet, gone yellowish with age, but otherwise very well preserved.

It was covered with roughly scrawled characters.

Grenville glanced it through—and irrelevantly longed for a pipe. He felt he should like some good tobacco to assist in the puzzle's solution.

He felt convinced, however, that a crude example of the simplest, most primitive cipher was contained upon the sheet. Should the words later prove to be in English he could finally read it all. He began to compare the recurrence of the various symbols at once, discovering that the sign in the form of a cross had been used no less than fourteen times, and was therefore almost certainly E. The next in importance was the figure 3, which he felt might be either A, or N, or S, since these, after E, are among the characters in English spelling most frequently employed.

On another clean chip of whittled wood he jotted down a few of the "words" with E's in each instance substituted for the crosses, and then began attempting to make clear sense by substituting A's, N's, and S's for the figure three, the figure one, and open squares, which, he found, had been often represented.

It was a blind and tedious business. His fire burned low, in his absorption, and the midnight constellations marched past the zenith of the heavens before he finally realized the folly of his quest.

"It's not a bit of good in the world, if I knew all about it," he finally confessed, "no matter what it means."

He went to bed. But he did not sleep. Those singular pyramids and the cipher still lingered before his inner vision. What was the mystery hidden behind the dead man chained in the rotting barque, the headless skeletons lying near the swamp, and now these documents, found in the tube and so carefully concealed?

"I give it up," he told himself at last, in an effort to dismiss it all and compose his active brain. "I wish I had a stouter tube to make a good bomb for the tiger."

He thought perhaps he could use the oxidized cylinder as it was, and began thereupon to wonder how he should make a fuse by which its powder contents might be ignited. Thus he drowsed off at last, with fantastic dreams swiftly solving the sum of his problems.