Chapter 3 - Page 2

he laboured at that blot, until by the helpof his microscope he ended by making out the following Runiccharacters which he read without difficulty.

"Arne Saknussemm!" he cried in triumph. "Why that is the name ofanother Icelander, a savant of the sixteenth century, a celebratedalchemist!"

I gazed at my uncle with satisfactory admiration.

"Those alchemists," he resumed, "Avicenna, Bacon, Lully, Paracelsus,were the real and only savants of their time. They made discoveriesat which we are astonished. Has not this Saknussemm concealed underhis cryptogram some surprising invention? It is so; it must be so!"

The Professor's imagination took fire at this hypothesis.

"No doubt," I ventured to reply, "but what interest would he have inthus hiding so marvellous a discovery?"

"Why? Why? How can I tell? Did not Galileo do the same by Saturn? Weshall see. I will get at the secret of this document, and I willneither sleep nor eat until I have found it out."

My comment on this was a half-suppressed "Oh!"

"Nor you either, Axel," he added.

"The deuce!" said I to myself; "then it is lucky I have eaten twodinners to-day!"

"First of all we must find out the key to this cipher; that cannot bedifficult."

At these words I quickly raised my head; but my uncle went onsoliloquising.

"There's nothing easier. In this document there are a hundred andthirty-two letters, viz., seventy-seven consonants and fifty-fivevowels. This is the proportion found in southern languages, whilstnorthern tongues are much richer in consonants; therefore this is ina southern language."

These were very fair conclusions, I thought.

"But what language is it?"

Here I looked for a display of learning, but I met instead withprofound analysis.

"This Saknussemm," he went on, "was a very well-informed man; nowsince he was not writing in his own mother tongue, he would naturallyselect that which was currently adopted by the choice spirits of thesixteenth century; I mean Latin. If I am mistaken, I can but trySpanish, French, Italian, Greek, or Hebrew. But the savants of thesixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. I am therefore entitledto pronounce this, à priori, to be Latin. It is Latin."

I jumped up in my chair. My Latin memories rose in revolt against thenotion that these barbarous words could belong to the sweet languageof Virgil.

"Yes, it is Latin," my uncle went on; "but it is Latin confused andin disorder; "_pertubata seu inordinata,_" as Euclid has it."

"Very well," thought I, "if you can bring order out of thatconfusion, my dear uncle, you are a clever man."

"Let us examine carefully," said he again, taking up the leaf uponwhich I had written. "Here is a series of one hundred and thirty-twoletters in apparent disorder. There are words consisting ofconsonants only, as