HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY
One of the most interesting stories of men's handwriting on the walls and how scholars, many centuries afterward, learned to read it, you will find in encyclopædias, histories, and other books under such headings as Egypt, Assyria, Rosetta Stone, and most of all under Hieroglyphics; a big word, but full of meat when once you've cracked the shell.
Among other things, you will find that if it hadn't been for the Egyptians and other clever people of the long ago we would not have had our written language to read at all; on walls or anywhere else!
If you had been an Egyptian, say 4,000 years ago, how many letters do you suppose you would have had to learn before you could have read well? About a thousand! But it wouldn't have been so hard as you think, for the Egyptian letters talked, so to speak. They told their own story much as did the picture words that told so much to the little Greeks. These Egyptian words, however—for they were words, or several words in one, rather than letters—were real pictures, and very good pictures, too. (See Chambers under "Hieroglyphics" for the little pictures.)
Some of them were very simple. It wasn't hard to learn.
But now suppose you were an Egyptian and you wanted to write a letter telling somebody how pleased you were about something—a nice new book an uncle had sent you, for instance—the proper picture-word to use would be a lady beating a tambourine. She is pleased—that's why she is beating the tambourine, just as a small boy claps his hands when he says, "Oh, goody, goody!" So this picture-word came to be used to express "joy" or "pleasure" over anything.
These are just some samples to show you what interesting things even such formidable words as "hieroglyphics" are when you make friends with them. But now, to get back to Nature's handwriting and the nature myths connected with it, what do you know about this Vulcan, who left so much of his manuscript in the rocks?
The ancients thought of him as a worker in metals. Don't you think they would have, been quite sure of it if they had known about the dikes and the palisades of the Hudson, and Fingal's cave, with their remarkable iron-like columns of cooled lava? But he was an artist in metals, too, and a mechanical engineer, it seems. Do you remember about those two statues of beautiful women that he made of pure gold, and how they walked about with him wherever he went? And the brazen-footed bulls of Ætes, that filled the air with their bellowings and from their nostrils blew flame and smoke?[56]
[56] I wonder if Vulcan could have been thinking of locomotives—what we sometimes call "iron horses"—when he made those bulls. Do you suppose?
The Greeks probably didn't know about such "art metal" work as the palisades—certainly they didn't know about the Hudson River or Fingal's Cave—but they had Vulcan (Hephæstus they called him) doing all sorts of other art-metal things. There was the famous shield he made for Achilles, for instance. Homer takes several pages just to tell about the different figures on it and what they meant.[57]