Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon
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Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 Next page observant mind, started on this new quest. In this he was only imitating the American romancer, who, great analyst as he was, had, by simple induction, been able to construct an alphabet corresponding to the signs of the cryptogram and by means of it to eventually read the pirate's parchment note with ease. The magistrate set to work in the same way, and we may affirm that he was no whit inferior to his illustrious master. Thanks to his previous work at logogryphs and squares, rectangular arrangements and other enigmas, which depend only on an arbitrary disposition of the letters, he was already pretty strong in such mental pastimes. On this occasion he sought to establish the order in which the letters were reproduced--vowels first, consonants afterward. Three hours had elapsed since he began. He had before his eyes an alphabet which, if his procedure were right, would give him the right meaning of the letters in the document. He had only to successively apply the letters of his alphabet to those of his paragraph. But before making this application some slight emotion seized upon the judge. He fully experienced the intellectual gratification--much greater than, perhaps, would be thought--of the man who, after hours of obstinate endeavor, saw the impatiently sought-for sense of the logogryph coming into view. "Now let us try," he said; "and I shall be very much surprised if I have not got the solution of the enigma!" Judge Jarriquez took off his spectacles and wiped the glasses; then he put them back again and bent over the table. His special alphabet was in one hand, the cryptogram in the other. He commenced to write under the first line of the paragraph the true letters, which, according to him, ought to correspond exactly with each of the cryptographic letters. As with the first line so did he with the second, and the third, and the fourth, until he reached the end of the paragraph. Oddity as he was, he did not stop to see as he wrote if the assemblage of letters made intelligible words. No; during the first stage his mind refused all verification of that sort. What he desired was to give himself the ecstasy of reading it all straight off at once. And now he had done. "Let us read!" he exclaimed. And he read. Good heavens! what cacophony! The lines he had formed with the letters of his alphabet had no more sense in them that those of the document! It was another series of letters, and that was all. They formed no word; they had no value. In short, they were just as hieroglyphic. "Confound the thing!" exclaimed Judge Jarriquez. CHAPTER XIII IS IT A MATTER OF FIGURES? IT WAS SEVEN o'clock in the evening. Judge Jarriquez had all the time been absorbed in working at the puzzle--and was no further advanced--and had forgotten the time of repast and the time of repose, when there came a knock at his study door. It was time. An hour later, and all the cerebral substance of the vexed magistrate would certainly have evaporated under the intense heat into which he had worked his head. At the order to enter--which was given in an impatient tone--the door opened and Manoel presented himself. The young doctor had left his friends on board the jangada at work on the indecipherable document, and had come to see Judge Jarriquez. He was anxious to know if he had been fortunate in his researches. He had come to ask if he had at length discovered the system on which the cryptogram had been written. The magistrate was not sorry to see Manoel come in. He was in that state of excitement that solitude was exasperating to him. He wanted some one to speak to, some one as anxious to penetrate the mystery as he was. Manoel was just the man. "Wir," said Manoel as he entered, "one question! Have you succeeded better than we have?" "Sit down first," exclaimed Judge Jarriquez, who got up and began to pace the room. "Sit down. If we are both of us standing, you will walk one way and I shall walk the other, and the room will be too narrow to hold us." Manoel sat down and repeated his question. "No! I have not had any success!" replied the magistrate; "I do not think I am any better off. I have got nothing to tell you; but I have found out a certainty." "What is that, sir?" "That the document is not based on conventional signs, but on what is known in cryptology as a cipher, that is to say, on a number." "Well, sir," answered Manoel, "cannot a document of that kind always be read?" "Yes," said Jarriquez, "if a letter is invariably represented by the same letter; if an _a,_ for example, is always a _p,_ and a _p_ is always an _x;_ if not, it cannot." "And in this document?" "In this document the value of the letter changes with the arbitrarily selected cipher which necessitates it. So a _b_ will in one place be represented by a _k_ will later on become a _z,_ later on an _u_ or an _n_ or an _f,_ or any other letter." "And then?" "And then, I am sorry to say, the cryptogram is indecipherable." "Indecipherable!" exclaimed Manoel. "No, sir; we shall end by finding the key of the document on which the man's life depends." Manoel had risen, a prey to the excitement he could not control; the reply he had received was too hopeless, and he refused to accept it for good. At a gesture from the judge, however, he sat down again, and in a calmer voice asked: "And in the first place, sir, what makes you think that the basis of this document is a number, or, as you call it, a cipher?" "Listen to me, young man," replied the judge, "and you will be forced to give in to the evidence." The magistrate took the document and put it before the eyes of Manoel and showed him what he had done. "I began," he said, "by treating this document in the proper way, that is to say, logically, leaving nothing to chance. I applied to it an alphabet based on the proportion the letters bear to one another which is usual in our language, and I sought to obtain the meaning by following the precepts of our immortal analyst, Edgar Poe. Well, what succeeded with him collapsed with me." "Collapsed!" exclaimed Manoel. "Yes, my dear young man, and I at once saw that success sought in that fashion was impossible. In truth, a stronger man than I might have been deceived." "But I should like to understand," said Manoel, "and I do not----" "Take the document," continued Judge Jarriquez; "first look at the disposition of the letters, and read it through." Manoel obeyed. "Do you not see that the combination of several of the letters is very strange?" asked the magistrate. "I do not see anything," said Manoel, after having for perhaps the hundredth time read through the document. "Well! study the last paragraph! There you understand the sense of the whole is bound to be summed up. Do you see anything abnormal?" "Nothing." "There is, however, one thing which absolutely proves that the language is subject to the laws of number." "And that is?" "That is that you see three _h's_ coming together in two different places." What Jarriquez said was correct, and it was of a nature to attract attention. The two hundred and fourth, two hundred and fifth, and two hundred and sixth letters of the paragraph, and the two hundred and fifty-eight, two hundred and fifty-ninth, and two hundred and sixtieth letters of the paragraph were consecutive _h's_. At first this peculiarity had not struck the magistrate. "And that proves?" asked Manoel, without divining the deduction that could be drawn from the combination. "That simply proves that the basis of the document is a number. It shows _à priori_ that each letter is modified in virtue of the ciphers of the number and according to the place which it occupies." "And why?" "Because in no language will you find words with three consecutive repetitions of the letter _h."_ Manoel was struck with the argument; he thought about it, and, in short, had no reply to make." "And had I made the observation sooner," continued the magistrate, "I |
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