The Runic Writing Exercises The Professor

: A Journey To The Interior Of The Earth

"Undoubtedly it is Runic," said the Professor, bending his brows;

"but there is a secret in it, and I mean to discover the key."



A violent gesture finished the sentence.



"Sit there," he added, holding out his fist towards the table. "Sit

there, and write."



I was seated in a trice.



"Now I will dictate to you every letter of our alphabet which

correspon s with each of these Icelandic characters. We will see what

that will give us. But, by St. Michael, if you should dare to deceive

me--"



The dictation commenced. I did my best. Every letter was given me one

after the other, with the following remarkable result:



mm.rnlls esrevel seecIde

sgtssmf vnteief niedrke

kt,samn atrateS saodrrn

emtnaeI nvaect rrilSa

Atsaar .nvcrc ieaabs

ccrmi eevtVl frAntv

dt,iac oseibo KediiI



[Redactor: In the original version the initial letter is an 'm' with

a superscore over it. It is my supposition that this is the

translator's way of writing 'mm' and I have replaced it accordingly,

since our typography does not allow such a character.]



When this work was ended my uncle tore the paper from me and examined

it attentively for a long time.



"What does it all mean?" he kept repeating mechanically.



Upon my honour I could not have enlightened him. Besides he did not

ask me, and he went on talking to himself.



"This is what is called a cryptogram, or cipher," he said, "in which

letters are purposely thrown in confusion, which if properly arranged

would reveal their sense. Only think that under this jargon there may

lie concealed the clue to some great discovery!"



As for me, I was of opinion that there was nothing at all, in it;

though, of course, I took care not to say so.



Then the Professor took the book and the parchment, and diligently

compared them together.



"These two writings are not by the same hand," he said; "the cipher

is of later date than the book, an undoubted proof of which I see in

a moment. The first letter is a double m, a letter which is not to be

found in Turlleson's book, and which was only added to the alphabet

in the fourteenth century. Therefore there are two hundred years

between the manuscript and the document."



I admitted that this was a strictly logical conclusion.



"I am therefore led to imagine," continued my uncle, "that some

possessor of this book wrote these mysterious letters. But who was

that possessor? Is his name nowhere to be found in the manuscript?"



My uncle raised his spectacles, took up a strong lens, and carefully

examined the blank pages of the book. On the front of the second, the

title-page, he noticed a sort of stain which looked like an ink blot.

But in looking at it very closely he thought he could distinguish

some half-effaced letters. My uncle at once fastened upon this as the

centre of interest, and he laboured at that blot, until by the help

of his microscope he ended by making out the following Runic

characters which he read without difficulty.



"Arne Saknussemm!" he cried in triumph. "Why that is the name of

another Icelander, a savant of the sixteenth century, a celebrated

alchemist!"



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 discoveries

at which we are astonished. Has not this Saknussemm concealed under

his 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 in

thus hiding so marvellous a discovery?"



"Why? Why? How can I tell? Did not Galileo do the same by Saturn? We

shall see. I will get at the secret of this document, and I will

neither 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 two

dinners to-day!"



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

difficult."



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

soliloquising.



"There's nothing easier. In this document there are a hundred and

thirty-two letters, viz., seventy-seven consonants and fifty-five

vowels. This is the proportion found in southern languages, whilst

northern tongues are much richer in consonants; therefore this is in

a 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 with

profound analysis.



"This Saknussemm," he went on, "was a very well-informed man; now

since he was not writing in his own mother tongue, he would naturally

select that which was currently adopted by the choice spirits of the

sixteenth century; I mean Latin. If I am mistaken, I can but try

Spanish, French, Italian, Greek, or Hebrew. But the savants of the

sixteenth century generally wrote in Latin. I am therefore entitled

to pronounce this, a priori, to be Latin. It is Latin."



I jumped up in my chair. My Latin memories rose in revolt against the

notion that these barbarous words could belong to the sweet language

of Virgil.



"Yes, it is Latin," my uncle went on; "but it is Latin confused and

in disorder; "PERTUBATA SEU INORDINATA," as Euclid has it."



"Very well," thought I, "if you can bring order out of that

confusion, my dear uncle, you are a clever man."



"Let us examine carefully," said he again, taking up the leaf upon

which I had written. "Here is a series of one hundred and thirty-two

letters in apparent disorder. There are words consisting of

consonants only, as NRRLLS; others, on the other hand, in which

vowels predominate, as for instance the fifth, UNEEIEF, or the last

but one, OSEIBO. Now this arrangement has evidently not been

premeditated; it has arisen mathematically in obedience to the

unknown law which has ruled in the succession of these letters. It

appears to me a certainty that the original sentence was written in a

proper manner, and afterwards distorted by a law which we have yet to

discover. Whoever possesses the key of this cipher will read it with

fluency. What is that key? Axel, have you got it?"



I answered not a word, and for a very good reason. My eyes had fallen

upon a charming picture, suspended against the wall, the portrait of

Grauben. My uncle's ward was at that time at Altona, staying with a

relation, and in her absence I was very downhearted; for I may

confess it to you now, the pretty Virlandaise and the professor's

nephew loved each other with a patience and a calmness entirely

German. We had become engaged unknown to my uncle, who was too much

taken up with geology to be able to enter into such feelings as ours.

Grauben was a lovely blue-eyed blonde, rather given to gravity and

seriousness; but that did not prevent her from loving me very

sincerely. As for me, I adored her, if there is such a word in the

German language. Thus it happened that the picture of my pretty

Virlandaise threw me in a moment out of the world of realities into

that of memory and fancy.



There looked down upon me the faithful companion of my labours and my

recreations. Every day she helped me to arrange my uncle's precious

specimens; she and I labelled them together. Mademoiselle Grauben was

an accomplished mineralogist; she could have taught a few things to a

savant. She was fond of investigating abstruse scientific questions.

What pleasant hours we have spent in study; and how often I envied

the very stones which she handled with her charming fingers.



Then, when our leisure hours came, we used to go out together and

turn into the shady avenues by the Alster, and went happily side by

side up to the old windmill, which forms such an improvement to the

landscape at the head of the lake. On the road we chatted hand in

hand; I told her amusing tales at which she laughed heartilv. Then we

reached the banks of the Elbe, and after having bid good-bye to the

swan, sailing gracefully amidst the white water lilies, we returned

to the quay by the steamer.



That is just where I was in my dream, when my uncle with a vehement

thump on the table dragged me back to the realities of life.



"Come," said he, "the very first idea which would come into any one's

head to confuse the letters of a sentence would be to write the words

vertically instead of horizontally."



"Indeed!" said I.



"Now we must see what would be the effect of that, Axel; put down

upon this paper any sentence you like, only instead of arranging the

letters in the usual way, one after the other, place them in

succession in vertical columns, so as to group them together in five

or six vertical lines."



I caught his meaning, and immediately produced the following literary

wonder:



I y l o a u

l o l w r b

o u , n G e

v w m d r n

e e y e a !



"Good," said the professor, without reading them, "now set down those

words in a horizontal line."



I obeyed, and with this result:



Iyloau lolwrb ou,nGe vwmdrn eeyea!



"Excellent!" said my uncle, taking the paper hastily out of my hands.

"This begins to look just like an ancient document: the vowels and

the consonants are grouped together in equal disorder; there are even

capitals in the middle of words, and commas too, just as in

Saknussemm's parchment."



I considered these remarks very clever.



"Now," said my uncle, looking straight at me, "to read the sentence

which you have just written, and with which I am wholly unacquainted,

I shall only have to take the first letter of each word, then the

second, the third, and so forth."



And my uncle, to his great astonishment, and my much greater, read:



"I love you well, my own dear Grauben!"



"Hallo!" cried the Professor.



Yes, indeed, without knowing what I was about, like an awkward and

unlucky lover, I had compromised myself by writing this unfortunate

sentence.



"Aha! you are in love with Grauben?" he said, with the right look for

a guardian.



"Yes; no!" I stammered.



"You love Grauben," he went on once or twice dreamily. "Well, let us

apply the process I have suggested to the document in question."



My uncle, falling back into his absorbing contemplations, had already

forgotten my imprudent words. I merely say imprudent, for the great

mind of so learned a man of course had no place for love affairs, and

happily the grand business of the document gained me the victory.



Just as the moment of the supreme experiment arrived the Professor's

eyes flashed right through his spectacles. There was a quivering in

his fingers as he grasped the old parchment. He was deeply moved. At

last he gave a preliminary cough, and with profound gravity, naming

in succession the first, then the second letter of each word, he

dictated me the following:



mmessvnkaSenrA.icefdoK.segnittamvrtn

ecertserrette,rotaisadva,ednecsedsadne

lacartniiilvIsiratracSarbmvtabiledmek

meretarcsilvcoIsleffenSnI.



I confess I felt considerably excited in coming to the end; these

letters named, one at a time, had carried no sense to my mind; I

therefore waited for the Professor with great pomp to unfold the

magnificent but hidden Latin of this mysterious phrase.



But who could have foretold the result? A violent thump made the

furniture rattle, and spilt some ink, and my pen dropped from between

my fingers.



"That's not it," cried my uncle, "there's no sense in it."



Then darting out like a shot, bowling down stairs like an avalanche,

he rushed into the Konigstrasse and fled.