Chapter II: Part 2

"Once I got him aboard our normal relations were resumed. He recovered his mind and obeyed orders. We steamed out of that photographer's heaven without another picture."

"Are you sure, Captain Anderson," Edith smiled, "that your mate's craze for photography isn't by your orders too?"

"Oh, quite. Still, I admit that Hansen is the keeper of my artistic temperament. Otherwise I should be mincing about Rio de Janeiro in pale lavender kid gloves instead of boiling blubber on Kerguelen like a Christian."

"What was Hansen's explanation of the storm?" Dr. Lane asked.

"The common-sense one, for a wonder. The sudden rise in temperature over the land caused the cold air from the sea to rush in toward the volcano and take us with it."

"In Hansen I recognize a brother," the Doctor laughed.

"You won't when you see him," the Captain prophesied grimly. "He looks like a fat barrel that has been well hammered down. Hullo, here's one of your mandarins."

The diplomatic Wong announced in faultless English that a gentleman by the name of Ole Hansen awaited the Doctor's pleasure.

"Show him up, Wong."

Hansen entered, as red as a lobster and shaped like a brandy keg.

"I've brought the photographs," he announced after the introductions.

"Dump them on the table and let the Doctor see for himself. They need no explanation--"

"But," Hansen expostulated, unburdening himself of his twelve dozen masterpieces, "I have a theory. If you will let me--"

"I won't, so don't try."

Giving his Captain a red explosive look, Hansen sat on the safety valve and obeyed orders. Heaven only knows what clouds of theories he generated under the suppression of all that superheated steam. A man of less robust build must have burst into a thousand hypotheses. The barrel-shaped Hansen merely swelled and held his peace.

Meanwhile Dr. Lane was devouring the photographs of the black rocks with feverish interest. Occasionally he passed one to Edith with a terse suggestion to "take a look at that." Each picture was that of a smooth black surface, in many cases badly fissured by the violence of the explosion which had disrupted the mass from its matrix, densely incised with pictograms.

"Call up Drake," the Doctor ordered before he had worked half through the pile, "and tell him we have a puzzle here that makes the Bolivian inscriptions look like A. B. C."

Edith reported that Drake would join them as fast as his legs would let him.

"Captain Anderson," the Doctor said, rising, "I'm in with you on this to the limit of my means. You can have the oil, I'll take the rest. It's worth more."

4

THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS

Lean, lanky, hatless, Drake arrived at the conference breathless and disheveled. Edith greeted him with applause and a peal of laughter.

Drake shot one agonized glance at his long legs. Reassured that the worst had not happened, he drew himself up with the dignity of a stork and replied in frigid tones,

"I am perfectly dressed."

"Where did you leave your tie and socks, John?"

Drake groaned. The telephone message had interrupted the stream of his Mexican musings and here he was, just as he had flung himself together. Striking negligées in public were his specialty. Given ten years more of bachelor freedom and he would evolve into the ideal absent-minded professor who moons through the movies and the comic supplements, but scarcely at all through the business-like atmosphere of a living university. Drake was one of the extremely rare exceptions. Like many other mortals afflicted with the same failing, Drake always indignantly repudiated the insinuation that he was not as other men. Only repeated ocular proof, which he promptly forgot after each application, convinced him when he was a walking comic. Edith's attitude toward this embryo delight was a little philistine. She should have encouraged him for the sake of art. It surely would be a great pity to thwart his almost unique proclivities to play the idiotic part demanded of him by the practical man. And what would be the net gain of her motherly efforts? Drake at thirty-five would be outwardly like any ordinary scholar--except of course the professional quacks--and quite indistinguishable from any floor walker or bank cashier.

"Never mind, Drake," the Doctor consoled him. "I'll lend you things before dinner. In the meantime, here is something more important."

He handed the ruffled young archaeologist a pocket lens and one of Hansen's photographs. With a nod of acknowledgment to Captain Anderson and the mate whom the Doctor introduced, Drake seated himself near the open window and peered through the lens at the photograph.

The fifteen minute silence lengthened to twenty and the atmosphere of the study grew unpleasantly tense. Half an hour passed without a sound. At last Drake rose and handed back the picture to Dr. Lane.

"Well, what do you make of it?" the Doctor demanded.

"Do you want the truth?"

"Of course."

"Very well. I do not wish to insult either of your guests," Drake began with anxious diffidence. "Especially as I have just been introduced," he added with an apprehensive glance at the compressed, husky Hansen. "However, you asked for the truth. I may as well let you have it before I know what parts precisely Mr. Hansen and Captain Anderson play in this affair. That photograph, in my opinion, is a clever fake."

"What!" the Captain exploded, bounding out of his chair. "You're crazy. Tell him about it, Ole."

But the outraged Hansen was beyond coherent speech. One of his round gross of masterpieces, and therefore the whole twelve dozen, had been pronounced fraudulent by this herring-gutted young dude without a shirt to his back or a collar to his neck.

"You'll eat those words," he spluttered in a turkey-cock fury.

Drake, with roseate visions of an early martyrdom in the cause of Truth, stood his ground before the advancing barrel of high explosives.

"Gentlemen!" the Doctor intervened sharply. "This isn't the forecastle. Be seated, Mr. Hansen. Drake, remember where you are. I won't have you making a prize ring out of my study. Sit down and explain yourself."

The bewildered Drake, by nature a pacifist to the marrow of his bones, subsided into a chair. Hansen, with a few choice compliments in Norwegian, also sat. Captain Anderson opened the attack.

"You're dead wrong, Mr. Drake. As a man of common-sense, would you suppose it likely that any fakir has money enough to manufacture a hundred and forty-four frauds weighing fifty to five hundred tons apiece? You wouldn't, eh? Well, neither would I. You've only seen the picture of one. Show him the rest, Dr. Lane."

Retiring once more with his glass to the window, Drake made a rapid inspection of the entire series of photographs. After the first few his frankly skeptical expression changed rapidly to bewilderment and finally to intense interest. Beginning again with the first he ran more slowly through the series, selecting fourteen of the pictures for further consideration.

"Well," said the Captain, "what do you make of them now?"

Like most specialists Drake saw his beloved hobby in everything.

"Pictograms," he announced incisively.

"Real or fake?" Hansen demanded with a red scowl.

"Real, I should say."

"What significance, if any, have they?" the Doctor inquired.

"That I don't know. In fact this is a problem that may well take fifty years or a century to solve."

"I have a theory--" Hansen began, but the rude Captain nipped it cruelly in the bud.

"Bother your theory!" he snapped. "Let us hear what Mr. Drake has to say."

"Perhaps," Drake hesitated, "if you told me where these pictures were taken I might be able to form a more intelligent opinion."

"No," the Doctor objected, "we want an expert's unbiased estimate. Mr. Drake," he continued, "is probably the best man in the world for our purpose. Whatever he decides will be worth learning and absolutely without prejudice. Go ahead, Drake. Take your time."

Drake picked up the fourteen pictures which he had selected from the pile.

"These," he said, "seem to go together. They are parts, I judge, of some much larger inscription. The rest of the pictures seem to be dislocated, but a close examination would be necessary before reaching a definite conclusion. I feel certain, however, of one very curious fact. Two widely separated ages of art are represented in these entire series. This feature is extremely puzzling for one peculiarity. Any archaeologist will tell you that two such periods of art are never of equal brilliance. Yet these pictograms, in respect of artistic excellence, are all on a par--and a very high one at that. Now these," he continued, exhibiting the fourteen, "are not by any means nearly the whole of their story. They are nothing more than disjointed fragments. Yet they are the one evidence of some sort of continuity in the whole lot. On them, if at all, we must base our attempt at decipherment."

"I told you we should have spent a week looking for the rest," Captain Anderson bellowed at the indignant Hansen. "Why did you drag me back to the ship?"

"It was you who got as fussy as an old woman and dragged me back," Ole retorted, swelling ominously. "I knew we hadn't enough--"

"Oh, well. Go on, Mr. Drake."

"As I was saying," Drake resumed, "these fourteen hang together. But they are evidently not by any means the whole story. However they are enough to show that there must be some consistent scheme running through the lot. Whether I shall be able to unravel the tangle is another question. At present I doubt whether the inscriptions are more than mere picture writing. If so, what meaning are we to give all these excellent representations, literally by the thousands, of impossible monsters?"

"Not so impossible as you think," Lane objected. "Had your education been less lopsided you would recognize many of these monsters as first-class and highly probably restorations of extinct animals. They are life-like to an amazing degree."

Such was Dr. Lane's first opinion, reached after only a cursory examination of those remarkable inscriptions. He has since modified his estimate profoundly. Attentive study under suggestions from Drake in fact wrought a radical change in the Doctor's view within the year. For the present, however, it made a fair enough working guess.

"I must disagree with you," Drake replied. "In a way I can appreciate the obvious fact that these pictured monsters are vividly life-like, although I never saw anything resembling them. But in a more significant sense they are strikingly artificial and, if I may make a rough hypothesis, intentionally so. The people who cut these rows upon rows of pictures into the rocks must have been in a highly advanced state of civilization. The very perfection of the art was the chief thing that made me suspicious at first. Our own stone-cutters with all their modern appliances could do no better today. Now is it not at least curious, I ask you, that artists capable of such excellent work should deliberately go out of their way to cast an air of unlife-like unreality over certain aspects of their art? I shall not attempt at present to support my contention that the art is intentionally fantastic. The evidence is here; examine it for yourselves. Again, another circumstance roused my suspicions at once. There is a complete absence of any attempt to represent the human figure. How are we to explain this? I confess I don't know. Such a lack is unheard of in the art of any known race."

"Would you expect to find portraits of human beings in a treatise, say, on crabs?"

"Yes," Hansen promptly and unexpectedly replied, with a hard stare at the Captain.

"I'll crab you when we get aboard," the Captain promised sweetly. "Your style is improving, Ole. But you must not interrupt the speaker. This is not a labor temple."

"I see your point, Doctor," Drake admitted. "Yet what race of human beings would go to all this trouble to cut into hard stone a work on prehistoric animals--as you say these are--when paper and printers' ink are so cheap?"

"Suppose printing hadn't been invented when these inscriptions were cut into the rocks?"

"Your hypothesis is fantastic. What--"

"I have a theory--" Hansen interrupted with desperate eagerness, but the Captain squashed it.

"Ole!"

"Since Drake is all at sea," the Doctor smiled, "perhaps it would be as well to hear what Mr. Hansen has to say."

"All right, Ole. Get it off your chest and don't take till next Sunday."

"It's like this," Ole began, rising to give his utterance all the impressiveness of his rotund authority. "I agree with Dr. Lane and therefore disagree with Mr. Drake. Those pictures are life-like. They are life itself! And now I tell you why.

"Two years ago in the Sailors' Free Reading Room at Rio de Janeiro I saw a book with pictures of extinct animals from some French and Spanish caves. Now who made those pictures? The damn fool who found them?"

"Ole!"

"All right, Captain. I forgot the lady. No, the d ..., the fool I mean, who found those pictures did not make them. He had not brains enough, not what you call the artistic genius, to draw like that. Nobody any longer has so much genius. Those pictures were made by men who had never seen what you call modern art. They were too good, too much like nature, only better--if you know what I mean. Did the great Michael Angelo ever paint a herd of wild buffaloes? No. Michael Angelo only painted flocks of big she angels out of his head. Then came Rubenstein. Did he--"

"It's getting late, Ole. Cut out the wild asses and the encyclopaedia and come to your theory."

"I am arriving, Captain. Therefore, I say, those long extinct buffaloes were drawn by men who had seen buffaloes, who had lived with them _en famille_ as the French say. And therefore it follows in the same way," he concluded with a geometrical flower of rhetoric culled from his gourmand reading, "the men who cut the pictures of those monstrous animals into the rocks lived with them. They drew their likenesses from nature. For these animals are life-like, they are almost alive! Did those forgotten geniuses delay their masterpieces for Gutenberg? No. They needed no printing presses in their business. Which was to be proved, was it not?"

"Preposterous," Drake remarked as Ole, with a self-conscious bow, resumed his creaking chair.

"Is it?" the Doctor asked quizzically. "Precisely why is Mr. Hansen's theory absurd?"

"Because it would put the art of a million years before the Stone Age on a higher level than that of the Twentieth Century."

"Perhaps it was. It seems impossible that it could have been any lower. Edith, can you find the last number of 'Vanity Fair' with the latest masterpieces of potato peeling embroidery or whatever it is that the connoisseurs are raving over? Never mind, if you don't know where to look. After dinner will do."

"The point is, Drake," he continued, "that you know as little of what art was in prehistoric times as do I. Why, it is less than thirty years since you archaeological chaps were telling us that all real art began with the Greeks. Then they found those Stone Age cave paintings that Mr. Hansen has mentioned. Since then we haven't heard so much of 'Greece, wonder-child of the Ages.' You are open-minded enough about your own stuff. Why can't you examine Hansen's photographs in the same spirit?"

"Never. At least not until I have deciphered them."

"Then go to it. That's just what we want you to do."

"How can I make anything out of a bald catalogue of dead beasts? Why, I don't even know their blessed names."

"Drake, you are deliberately playing the fool for some reason of your own. I believe you have guessed more than you admit."

"It is always best," Drake generalized, "to know nothing at the beginning of an investigation. For then one is certain not to know less at the end."

"Do you see any sort of regularities running through those fourteen you put aside?" the Doctor persisted.

"Dozens of them."

"That sounds encouraging. What, for instance?"

"First, about five-eighths of the monsters have four legs each. Second, approximately fifty-five per cent of them have no tails and the rest one apiece. Third, each of several has one eye by actual count, or two by inference, the second being on the invisible side of the profile. Fourth--"

"You're an ass," the Doctor interrupted irritably.

"Hear, hear sir," Ole agreed.

Drake grinned. "Did you ever try opening a live oyster with a toothpick? When I have something definite I'll let you know. Until then Mr. Hansen no doubt will be glad to hatch out poetic theories for you."

"All right," Lane assented good-naturedly. "Only don't spend ten years in finding out that all these inscriptions are nothing more exciting than a fossilized multiplication table."

"Or a treatise on the integral calculus," Ole gravely added.

"Oh Lord," said Drake, "do you know the name of that too? When do you find time to navigate your raft?"

"He doesn't know half of what he gabs about," Anderson explained. There was a distinct note of jealousy in the Captain's voice. "He owns the A, Q, X volumes of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, the _Song of Solomon_ in Norwegian, Balzac's _Droll Stories_ in French--which I can't read, confound it, a third-rate pocket dictionary, Herbert Spencer's _Through Nature to God_, about three-quarters of Maeterlinck's _Bluebird_ in Swedish and half of it in English, and a seven figure table of logarithms. That's his whole damned library. Now if you think he's a blazing genius it's your own lookout."

"When I was in Boston two and a half years ago," Ole volunteered à propos of nothing, "I took an intelligence test. The psychologist said I was in the upper one per cent of the entire population of the United States."

"He lied," said the Captain.

"My library is not the only source of my erudition," Ole continued, ignoring the Captain's remark. "I also read much in public libraries while ashore," he concluded with smug modesty.

"Well, gentlemen," the Doctor remarked, "I am sure Mr. Hansen makes good use of his library, small though it may be. It isn't the gross tonnage that counts so much; it is the choice of one's reading matter. Mr. Hansen seems to have selected his 'five-foot shelf' with a taste and care that has not been exceeded by Dr. Eliot himself. Would you like a copy of William Jennings Bryan's memoirs on evolution as a companion piece to your Herbert Spencer, Mr. Hansen?"

Ole blushed his thanks. The Doctor turned to Anderson.

"Now Captain, what about oil?"

"Are you coming in?"

"Yes, even if our friend Drake doesn't succeed before he's seventy in deciphering Mr. Hansen's photographs. We shall need a ship, I suppose."

"The old whaler will do."

"Not much ice, then, where we are going?"

"No more than she can buck. Our troubles will begin on land."

"So I have guessed. Would an airplane be of any use? Amundsen is taking one with him on his North Polar expedition."

"Who would fly the beastly thing if we did take one along?"

"Why not Drake? He's young and therefore teachable."

"Oh, let me learn too," Edith begged. "You know how useless Drake is when anything goes wrong with his typewriter."

"Indeed?" said Drake, deeply mortified. He truly was as helpless as a baby before any machine more complicated than a monkey wrench. Rather pathetically he imagined himself a first-class amateur mechanic, for Edith always tactfully let him do the bossing while she did the tinkering when his typewriter collapsed.

The Doctor turned to Edith. "Who said you were coming with us, young lady?"

"Nobody yet. But you were just going to invite me. Weren't you, dear?"

"What about it, Captain?"

"It's up to you. She's not my daughter. If she can stand forty below zero she may enjoy the trip."

"I'm afraid not," the Doctor said doubtfully. "You do so hate the cold, Edith."

"Fiddlesticks! Captain Anderson said the water was warm. Any way I'm younger than you are. If I'm unfit to go it will be suicide for you."

"Well, we'll consider your case when the time comes."

Knowing that she had won, Edith sensibly said no more.

"How long will it take us to get ready?" the Doctor asked.

"About six months. You, Drake, and your daughter if she comes, must get thoroughly hardened before we start. Hansen and I can see to overhauling the ship and laying in the necessary stores. We're both old hands at the game."

"Where is your ship now?"

"Drydock. Rio de Janeiro."

"What!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Do you mean to say you came clear to San Francisco just to show me that reptile bird?"

"Why not?" the Captain asked complacently. "I knew you would join us."

"Am I as easy as they told you I was?"

"No, Doctor. You wouldn't swallow a mermaid."

"Such is the bubble reputation. Edith, this comes of your collection of freaks. I wish you would adopt some less humiliating form of charity in future."

"You haven't believed my story of all those big beasts in the oil yet," the Captain reminded him soothingly.

"No, and I'll be hanged if I do until I see them with my own eyes. Well, I'm game. That thing in the box is real, anyway. You can telegraph the Rio de Janeiro drydock to give your ship a thorough overhauling. Fit up quarters somewhere for a passenger or two."

"Ole and I saw to all that before we left."

"Easier and easier. Well, well. You _are_ a surprising person." This bit of information seemed almost to surprise him more than the captain's strange tale. "It's too late for lunch and too early for dinner. Will you have tea with us?"

"We shall be only too glad to enjoy your hospitality," Ole sententiously replied.

"Ah, Hansen, I see you have a treatise on Dutch etiquette among your literary treasures as well as a table of logarithms. All right, boys. Edith, tell Wong to do his best in the true old Spanish style."

5

"BATTLES LONG AGO"

Seven strenuous months of physical toughening lay behind Drake, Edith, and her father. They had lost no time in setting about their preparations for the hardships ahead.

The day after the tea with Captain Anderson and the mate they were on their way to the Canadian Rockies. Before leaving, Dr. Lane gave the efficient Wong a sheaf of checks dated the first of each month for the next three years. With these Wong was to pay his own salary and keep the house in order.

To his rage and stupefaction Drake was dragged kicking from his puzzles to become a hardened mountaineer. The Doctor was determined that the obstinate archaeologist should accompany them to see with his own eyes the originals of Hansen's photographs. Anderson and the mate left San Francisco the same afternoon to return to Rio via Boston.

The party of three had gone straight north to a fashionable resort in the heart of the Canadian Rockies. They planned to begin their training gradually. Arrived at the luxurious hotel, they hired guides and mapped out their program. Four hours' mountain hiking a day for the first week, six the second, and so on up to fifteen, when they would be sufficiently seasoned to dispense with the guides.

Drake, who had brought with him the fourteen most promising of Hansen's puzzles for study, proved a most refractory companion. As the daily marches lengthened he seemed to demand more and more sleep. It was a ten minute job to get him out of bed in the mornings. The Doctor became alarmed, thinking the rarefied air and violent exercise might have affected the young man's heart. A searching physical examination showed him to be in perfect health. Drake himself said nothing, enduring the interminable climbs up precipices and the endless crawls over glaciers with glum stoicism.

When the party left their quarters at the hotel to live in the bleak open with only their sleeping bags for shelter, Drake became positively morose. Edith declared in confidence to her father that the cranky young antiquarian was developing such a devil of a temper that the only comfortable course would be to send him home. She had stood all she could of the snapping turtle. The thought of a possible two years with him in a frozen wilderness appeared singularly uninviting.

"I should like to beat him up," she confided, "for I am sure there is nothing the matter with him but a vile disposition."

An unusually cold and foggy night on the snowfields gave her the key to Drake's ailment. Unable to sleep for the wretched discomfort, she lay on her side staring wide-eyed at the soupy mist. Presently she became aware of a tiny, faint glow in the direction of Drake's quarters. Slipping from her bag she crawled on all fours over the soft snow toward the source of the light. Unobserved she got close enough to see Drake lying flat on his stomach in his sleeping bag, his head propped up on his hands, intent on one of Hansen's photographs. The dim illumination came from an improvised reading lamp consisting of two inches of candle in a small tomato can on its side. She stole back to her bag and crept in, to keep a lookout on the dim glow. After what seemed an eternity it vanished, only to reappear half a minute later. Drake had lighted another two-inch candle. And so it went until about an hour before dawn when the glow finally disappeared and Drake presumably slept the sleep of the unjust.

Edith said nothing of her discovery to her father. The next night was clearer. Between cat naps she watched again. Once more the light vanished an hour before dawn, and the criminal slept. Edith decided not to peach. Instead she contrived an ingenious plan for the salvaging of whatever survived the general wreck of Drake's temper.

She had not long to wait before putting her plan into action. The two men shared the labor of splitting wood and keeping the campfire going while she cooked. They planned at last two hot meals a week, descending from the snowfields to the timberline to find fuel, for with their heavy packs it was impossible to carry oil. On these occasions the men peeled off their coats and went after wood with a will. The prospect of a well-cooked steaming hot meal put enthusiasm even into the dissipated, cantankerous Drake.

Edith bided her time. When next the perspiring Drake, having collected twice as much wood as he could carry, was swearing under his breath like a bobcat, she quietly abstracted the fourteen photographic puzzles from the inner pocket of his discarded coat.

"It's a dirty trick," she murmured, stowing them safely away inside her shirt, "but it is for his own good."

That night Drake was like a forlorn cow that has just lost its beloved calf. Edith heard him rooting about in the dark, scraping his shins and swearing at anything and everything. That night, she said later, was just one long, whispered curse.

She let him suffer for his calf three days. Then, with a six-foot crevasse between them, she confessed. Drake looked murder at her. But by the time he scrambled the mile and a half which she, with rare foresight, had placed between them by going rapidly ahead of the party, the outraged Drake was too exhausted to fight. He regained his fourteen tormentors only on the solemn promise that he would blow out the candle every morning at two o'clock sharp. Thus, unless the enthusiastic Doctor insisted upon routing them from their bags ahead of schedule, Drake would get a full four hours' sleep every night.

"If that isn't enough to sweeten your disposition," Edith stipulated, "I'll add half an hour at a time until we hit the right dose."

Under the new ordering of his disreputable habits Drake became as suave as melted butter. Not that he talked much more than he had, for he still emulated the oyster. What little he did say, however, was all that Edith desired in affability. The Doctor, noticing the change, ascribed it to a sudden, bone-freezing drop in the temperature.

"Drake will do famously when we get to the real thing," he told Edith. "Just see how this cold snap bucks him up."

"Oh, he will be all right," Edith agreed. "When he gets something to do he will lose his grouch for good."

After twelve weeks of roughing it on the snowfields and glaciers of the Rockies the three went to Alaska for a more drastic course of the same training. Little by little they accustomed themselves to scantier and scantier clothing, until by the end of their hardening they were clambering over ice and snow in howling blizzards with no clothing but a single loose overall garment of wool. The Doctor in his joyous enthusiasm was inclined to go farther, pointing out that if stark nakedness in the snow is the proper thing for consumptive children, surely a breech clout in a blizzard should be sufficient for tough campaigners like themselves. But Edith wouldn't hear of it, although Drake seemed to entertain the suggestion favorably.

And now all this, the hardship and the fun, lay behind them. That night they were sailing from Montreal for Rio de Janeiro, there to meet the rest of the expedition and undergo their last training. They must learn to fly. Dr. Lane still believed that an airplane might prove the decisive factor in the success of their venture, although Captain Anderson, with all an old sailor's conservatism, belittled the idea and grudged the two months' delay which it would cost.

Ole, on the contrary, by letter and cablegram, fairly gloated over the prospect. A mastery of flying would bring him many steps nearer the omniscience which was his ideal in this imperfect life. The Captain's letters reported him already a past master of the art of flying--on paper. He had even invented an improved type of flying machine which, according to the envious Anderson, resembled a wheelbarrow with wings. This masterpiece of Ole's unsuspected mechanical genius was still in the chrysaloid stage of development, being as yet only one-third drawings and two-thirds pure theory. Still, all in all it justified Ole's high rating in the Boston intelligence tests. Anderson could never have done anything like it.

Except for Drake's alleged seasickness the voyage down to Rio de Janeiro was uneventful. Drake had telegraphed from Vancouver to one of his antiquarian cronies to meet him in Montreal with half a ton of carefully selected books, for the most part profusely illustrated works on biology, geology and evolution. With these he shut himself up in his cabin, admitting only the stewards who reported him in the last stages of seasickness. Smelling a prosperous rat, Dr. Lane left the sufferer to his agonies and hopefully promenaded the decks or played quoits with Edith.

On the morning of the last day of the voyage the doctor's patience was rewarded. The invalid emerged from his cabin looking, as Edith informed him, as fresh as a young string bean.

"I'm better," Drake announced.

"That's good," said the Doctor. "How are Hansen's photographs?"

Drake tried not to look pleased. He failed. His face broke into a grin.

"Doing as well as could be expected, thank you," he replied.

"Have you deciphered them?"

"If I say 'yes' you will pester me to death with questions; if I say 'no' you will set me down as a blockhead. So I shall evade the question by answering both yes and no. And that, as a matter of fact, is the exact state of affairs."

"The Lord should have made you a woman," the Doctor remarked.

"A beautiful blonde," Drake sighed. "A perfect thirty-six," he added with an admiring glance at Edith's lithe figure.

"I'll give you a swift kick unless you come through with what you have found," the Doctor snapped. "Come on; out with it."

"Before violence I am powerless. I am too proud to run away." He became more serious. "You were right when you said my education was lopsided. A thorough knowledge of biology, geology, evolution and half a dozen tougher sciences is just what I lack now to read those fragments fully. 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 impressed him, and he knew from experience the powerful drive of unbroken thought.

As the days flew over them like azure birds the breeze freshened and knife-edged cold cut the unhardened members of the crew to the bones. The oldtimers and the well-seasoned beginners merely quickened their movements and went about their work with a new energy. The greenhorns would soon get used to it. In the meantime they must stamp and swear and get on with it as best they could.

The lightly ballasted _Edith_ beginning to pitch and roll like a porpoise, the oysters, caviare and brown sugar of Drake's orgy had their revenge. His abused stomach, protesting at the sound ship fare, rejected honest salt horse with ineffable scorn. Edith forgot his inconstancy, pardoning him all his theories, and ministered to him like a white robed angel of forgiveness. His recovery was as sudden as his collapse. And with the return of his vigor and his temper--he had been as sweet as a consumptive curate during his prostration--he once more jilted Edith for his houri.

"Let us go to the Captain's cabin and talk over what we are to do," he suggested. "You bring your father and I'll rout out Ole. This is the second mate's watch. They will be off duty."

Seated comfortably round the red baize of the Captain's table the five discussed their plans. Anderson and Lane had decided to head directly for the inlet which the Captain had discovered the morning after the submarine eruption. They were then to steam up the inlet as far as possible. Then they were to leave the ship in charge of Bronson, the second mate and a capable seaman, and travel inland by dogteam and sledges to the volcano whose smoke and flames Anderson and the mate had seen from the inlet. If practicable to use the airplane two of the party could return for it.

The men under Bronson's charge were to wait at the ship three months for the party to return. If at the end of that time they had heard nothing from the explorers they were to despatch a relief party to go in search. The organization of the relief had been planned to its last detail. Should circumstances so dictate Bronson would have only to carry out his written instructions to the letter.

Anderson had made only a rough guess as to the probable location of the oil which he expected to find. Although this first conjecture was founded on a theory of Ole's the Captain refused to give him any credit. With a rare flash of common sense Ole had observed that since the heavy black smoke and ruddy pillar of flame which they had seen from the inlet looked like burning oil, probably it was burning oil.

The one stumbling block which this sensible hypothesis had to surmount was, as Lane pointed out, the Captain's estimate of two hundred fifty to three hundred miles inland as the distance of the explosion which they had heard. It hardly seemed probable that an outburst of burning oil could make itself heard and seen at such a distance. A volcanic eruption, on the other hand, easily might carry that far. Krakatoa, Katmai, Pelée and many others among the more famous eruptions had carried even farther.

The Captain, however, would have none of Lane's objections. To him the mere vastness of an oilfield was no slur on its probability. The bigger the likelier was his theory. And staring up at the swinging kerosene lamp he beheld a beatific vision of stocks and shares floating like all the leaves of Vallombrosa on an ocean of unlimited liability.

Lane was curiously reticent about what he expected to get out of the expedition. Since that afternoon, now ten months ago, in his San Francisco study, he had not once alluded to the Captain's tale of dead prehistoric monsters boiling up as fresh as life through a sea of pitch. If questioned he would have said that his judgment was suspended, as undoubtedly it was. The indubitable bird-reptile obstinately continued to exist as an awkward reality not yet satisfactorily explained away.

On mature reflection he had abandoned his first theory that the reptilian bird had been preserved for ages like a sardine in oil. But he refrained from acquainting the Captain with his changed state of mind lest that imaginative ex-mining engineer and inventive whaler should be moved to show what he really could do in the way of a yarn when put on his mettle. In the true scientific spirit the Doctor was resolved to wait further facts before abandoning himself like Ole to seductive theories.

One sore spot in his memories hardened him in this decision. He had not yet forgiven the Captain for assuming that he was a gullible enthusiast eager to swallow the first mermaid with a cocoanut head dangled before his mouth. Above all, still holding the opinion that Drake was the greatest decipherer of his time, he wished to hear what the young archaeologist had to report as to the outcome of his intense concentration on Hansen's photographs. Edith, with Drake's permission, had revealed the secret of his vile temper in the Canadian Rockies.

"Well, oyster," said the Doctor, turning to Drake, "are you ready to open up yet?"

"Have you a theory?" Ole blurted out.

"Two," Drake replied.

"Two theories!" Ole rhapsodized. "Young man, you are a scientist. What are your theories?"

"The first, and the one which I favor, is that I'm crazy."

"So impossible as all that?" the Doctor asked, raising his brows.

"I told you in San Francisco it was impossible," the Captain asserted. "Now Drake is going to prove what I said. Wait till you see it with your own eyes."

"It is not that part of it which is impossible," Drake replied. "After what I have guessed as the true meaning of the symbolism of the inscriptions your stew of monsters sounds a little tame. I am willing to accept your account as true to the facts, even if Dr. Lane is still too cautious to commit himself. But the other thing, the real meaning of that fragmentary history recorded in the inscriptions, is a subject which I must decline to discuss until events have proved me either crazy or right."

"I appreciate your stand, Drake," said the Doctor. "Under like circumstances I should feel the same way. Still, you can tell us this much without prejudicing your case. From what you have made out so far do you believe that we shall find any tangible evidence of the true struggle? I mean of course the one which the makers of the inscriptions took such pains to disguise."

Drake gave him a shrewd look. "You have guessed the nature of that conflict?"

"Perhaps, reasoning from other data, I have. In that case you can understand why I prefer to wait before venturing my guesses. Shall we find any traces of the real fight?"

"I don't know. To me it is incredible that we should."

"Some things are eternal," the Doctor remarked quietly. "For all we know life may be indestructible."

"Have you ever whiffed a dead whale?" the Captain interposed. He was a practical man.

"That isn't what the Doctor means," Ole expostulated, beginning to redden.

"I know, Ole. I know what the doctor means. He's talking of the soul. Now, did you ever see a whale with a soul?"

"Not after it was dead," the Doctor admitted with a smile. "However, that was not what I had in mind. My idea was something much more prosaic--question of energy and cells, and all that commonplace sort of stuff."

"Cells?" the Captain snorted. "Rotten fish is rotten fish, cells or no cells."

"That isn't--"

"Shut up, Ole. No, Doctor Lane, I'm not fool enough to argue with you on your own deck. But when you show me a whale that I can't set stinking ripe in three weeks I'll begin to believe in the indestructibility of life."

"That--"

"Shut up, Ole. Well, Doctor, where's your immortal whale?"

"In Heaven," the Doctor replied without the flicker of an eyelash.

"Father," Edith protested, "you are irreverent."

"Not necessarily, Chick. Remember the prophet of Nineveh. Now Drake, what is your second theory?"

"That the whole thing is literally true."

"And that is mine," said the Doctor.

"Mine too," Ole echoed before the Captain could squelch him.

"It can't be, Ole," the Doctor replied. "For, prolific as you may be, you are constitutionally incapable of hatching such a nightmare."

Ole looked crestfallen. He was rebuked. Edith felt for him as she was suffering acutely from repressed curiosity.

"I wish you two wouldn't talk as if I were a baby in long dresses. If I'm old enough to be here I'm certainly old enough to be let in on things."

"You might take the plane and fly back to Rio in the night," her father laughed, "if we frightened you with all our half-baked theories. Better wait and see--"