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.