Soon after that Mr. Furze had to catch his train. I was sorry when he went away.
There was a tensity in the air when we were alone, and I felt somehow as though I were there on false pretences. Walter took me to a big stone in a square frame.
‘This is the Rosetta Stone,’ he said. ‘I think this is one of the most exciting things here.’
And he told me that there were three different languages on it, and three different scripts, and that had been the key to discovering a whole new civilization. People had worked out another language—Ancient Egyptian, he said it was—letter by letter, sign by sign, through comparing one side of the stone with the other, for the same legend was written on all three.
I could see that that was rather an exciting thing to do.
‘You know,’ he said suddenly. ‘I saw this stone first when I was ten years old. I had read about it in a book called The Wonders of Antiquity, and I came to see it with my mother, and it seemed to me even then the best thing in the world to work out new languages from old inscriptions, and discover new worlds like that—much better than discovering new things in this world. I have wanted to do it ever since, and now, partly, I can work at that; but I have to do Roman inscriptions too, because that was for a thesis to start with, to get my D.Litt., and I have to for the History school also. So I have got launched into Roman Britain, but what I really want to get at is the proto-Hittite script from Zenjirli and Sakjegöze and those things—those undeciphered hieroglyphs, you know.’
I did not know what the proto-Hittite script was then; it seems curious now to think of a time when I had not heard of it, but I thought I understood what he meant about discovering new worlds that way.
I asked:
‘Do you feel you can find out quite a lot about the people who wrote those inscriptions? Do they get quite real to you in the end?’
He said: