by M. P. Shiel
think--that the mysterious, the unparalleled natureof the murders gave rise to a morbid condition in the public mind,which in turn resulted in the epidemic of suicide. But though such anepidemic has its origin in the instinct of imitation so common in men,you must not suppose that the mental process is a _conscious_ one. Aperson feels an impulse to go and do, and is not aware that at bottomit is only an impulse to go and do _likewise_. He would indeedrepudiate such an assumption. Thus one man destroys himself, andanother imitates him--but whereas the former uses a pistol, the latteruses a rope. It is rather absurd, therefore, to imagine that in any ofthose cases in which the slip of papyrus has been found in the mouthafter death, the cause of death has been the slavish imitativeness ofthe suicidal mania,--for this, as I say, is never _slavish._ Thepapyrus then--quite apart from the unmistakable evidences of suicideinvariably left by each self-destroyer--affords us definite and certainmeans by which we can distinguish the two classes of deaths; and we arethus able to divide the total number into two nearly equal halves.
'But you start--you are troubled--you never heard or read of murdersuch as this, the simultaneous murder of thousands over wide areas ofthe face of the globe; here you feel is something outside yourexperience, deeper than your profoundest imaginings. To the question"by whom committed?" and "with what motive?" your mind can conceive nopossible answer. And yet the answer must be, "by man, and for humanmotives,"--for the Angel of Death with flashing eye and flaming swordis himself long dead; and again we can say at once, by no _one_ man,but by many, a cohort, an army of men; and again, by no _common_ men,but by men hellish (or heavenly) in cunning, in resource, in strengthand unity of purpose; men laughing to scorn the flimsy prophylactics ofsociety, separated by an infinity of self-confidence and spiritualintegrity from the ordinary easily-crushed criminal of our days.
'This much at least I was able to discover from the first; andimmediately I set myself to the detection of motive by a careful studyof each case. This, too, in due time, became clear to me,--but tomotive it may perhaps be more convenient to refer later on. What nextengaged my attention was the figures on the papyrus, and devoutly did Ihope that by their solution I might be able to arrive at some moreexact knowledge of the mystery.
'The figures round the border first attracted me, and the mere_reading_ of them gave me very little trouble. But I was convinced thatbehind their meaning thus read lay some deep esoteric significance; andthis, almost to the last, I was utterly unable to fathom. You perceivethat these border figures consist of waved lines of two differentlengths, drawings of snakes, triangles looking like the Greek delta,and a heart-shaped object with a dot following it. These succeed oneanother in a certain definite order on all the slips. What, I askedmyself, were these drawings meant to represent,--letters, numbers,things, or abstractions? This I was the more readily able to determinebecause I have often, in thinking over the shape of the Roman letter S,wondered whether it did not owe its convolute form to an attempt on thepart of its inventor to make a picture of the _serpent;_ S being thesibilant or hissing letter, and the serpent the hissing animal. Thisview, I fancy (though I am not sure), has escaped the philologists, butof course you know that all letters were originally _pictures ofthings,_ and of what was S a picture, if not of the serpent? Itherefore assumed, by way of trial, that the snakes in the diagramstood for a sibilant letter, that is, either C or S. And thence,supposing this to be the case, I deduced: firstly, that all the otherfigures stood for letters; and secondly, that they all appeared in theform of pictures of the things of which those letters were originallymeant to be pictures. Thus the letter "m," one of the four "_liquid_"consonants, is, as we now write it, only a shortened form of a wavedline; and as a waved line it was originally written, and was thecharacter by which _a stream of running water_ was represented inwriting; indeed it only owes its name to the fact that when the lipsare pressed together, and "m" uttered by a continuous effort, a certainresemblance to the murmur of running water is produced. The longerwaved line in the diagram I therefore took to represent "m"; and it atonce followed that the shorter meant "n," for no two letters of thecommoner European alphabets differ only in length (as distinct fromshape) except "m" and "n", and "w" and "v"; indeed, just as the Frenchcall "w" "double-ve," so very properly might "m" be called "double-en."But, in this case, the longer not being "w," the shorter could not be"v": it was therefore "n." And now there only remained the heart andthe triangle. I was unable to think of any letter that could ever havebeen intended for the picture of a heart, but the triangle I knew to bethe letter #A.# This was originally written without the cross-bar fromprop to prop, and the two feet at the bottom of the props were notseparated as now, but joined; so that the letter formed a truetriangle. It was meant by the primitive man to be a picture of hisprimitive house, this house being, of course, hut-shaped, andconsisting of a conical roof without walls. I had thus, with theexception of the heart, disentangled the whole, which then (leaving aspace for the heart) read as follows:
{ ss 'mn { anan ... san.' { cc
But 'c' before 'a' being never a sibilant (except in some few so-called'Romance' languages), but a guttural, it was for the moment discarded;also as no word begins with the letters 'mn'--except 'mnemonics' andits fellows--I concluded that a vowel must be omitted between theseletters, and thence that all vowels (except 'a') were omitted; again,as the double 's' can never come after 'n' I saw that either a vowelwas omitted between the two 's's,' or that the first word ended afterthe first 's.' Thus I got
'm ns sanan... san,'
or, supplying the now quite obvious vowels,
'mens sana in... sano.'
The heart I now knew represented the word 'corpore,' the Latin word for'heart' being 'cor,' and the dot--showing that the word as it stood wasan abbreviation--conclusively proved every one of my deductions.
'So far all had gone flowingly. It was only when I came to consider thecentral figures that for many days I spent my strength in vain. Youheard my exclamation of delight and astonishment when at last a ray oflight pierced the gloom. At no time, indeed, was I wholly in the darkas to the _general_ significance of these figures, for I saw at oncetheir resemblance to the sepulchral reliefs of classical times. In caseyou are not minutely acquainted with the _technique_ of these stones, Imay as well show you one, which I myself removed from an old grave inTarentum.'
He took from a niche a small piece of close-grained marble, about afoot square, and laid it before me. On one side it was exquisitelysculptured in relief.
'This,' he continued, 'is a typical example of the Greek grave-stone,and having seen one specimen you may be said to have seen almost all,for there is surprisingly little variety in the class. You will observethat the scene represents a man reclining on a couch; in his hand heholds a _patera,_ or dish, filled with grapes and pomegranates, andbeside him is a tripod bearing the viands from which he is banqueting.At his feet sits a woman--for the Greek lady never reclined at table.In addition to these two figures a horse's head, a dog, or a serpentmay sometimes be seen; and these forms comprise the almost invariablepattern of all grave reliefs. Now, that this was the real model fromwhich the figures on the papyrus were taken I could not doubt, when Iconsidered the seemingly absurd fidelity with which in each murder thepapyrus, smeared with honey, was placed under the tongue of the victim.I said to myself: it can only be that the assassins have boundthemselves to the observance of a strict and narrow ritual from whichno departure is under any circumstances permitted--perhaps for the sakeof signalling the course of events to others at a distance. But whatritual? That question I was able to answer when I knew the answer tothese others,--why _under the tongue,_ and why _smeared with honey?_For no reason, except that the Greeks (not the Romans till very late intheir history) always placed an _obolos,_ or penny, beneath the tongueof the dead to pay his passage across the Stygian river of ghosts; forno reason, except that to these same Greeks honey was a sacred fluid,intimately associated in their minds with the mournful subject ofDeath; a fluid with w
hich the bodies of the deceased were anointed, andsometimes--especially in Sparta and the Pelasgic South--embalmed; withwhich libations were poured to Hermes Psuchopompos, conductor of thedead to the regions of shade; with which offerings were made to all thechthonic deities, and the souls of the departed in general. Youremember, for instance, the melancholy words of Helen addressed toHermione in _Orestes:_
[Greek: _Kai labe choas tasd'en cheroin komas t'emas elthousa d'amphi ton Klutaimnaestras taphon melikrat'aphes galaktos oinopon t'achnaen._]
And so everywhere. The ritual then of the murderers was a