“Better not. I think we can raise the cover as it is.”
He slit up the front corners, and then with comparative ease bent the entire top upward. To the explorer's eyes stood revealed a chest of cedar, its cover held with copper screws.
“Now for it!” said the man. “We ought to have one of the screw-drivers from the Pauillac, but that would take too much time. I guess the knife will do.”
With the blade he attacked the screws, one by one, and by dint of laborious patience in about an hour had removed all twenty of them.
A minute later he had pried up the cover, had quite removed it, and had set it on the floor.
Within, at one side, they saw a formless something swathed in oiled canvas. The other half of the space was occupied by eighty or a hundred vertical compartments, in each of which stood something carefully enveloped in the same material.
“Well, for all the world if it doesn't look like a set of big phonograph records!” exclaimed the man. He drew one of the objects out and very carefully unwrapped it.
“Just what they are--records! On steel. The new Chalmers-Enemarck process--new, that is, in 1917. So, then, that's a phonograph, eh?”
He pointed at the oiled canvas.
“Open it, quick, Allan!” Beatrice exclaimed. “If it is a phonograph, why, we can hear the very voices of the past, the dead, a full thousand years ago!”