November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  Another long look convinced me that he was right. But when I suggested that our friends were studying the shell-banks, the wizened countenance of the Maltese contracted itself into a wise smile, as he closed one eye.

  “Would these gentlemen search for shells where the water is so deep?”

  “What are they doing, then?”

  “Looking for Epidauro,” he said; and with a polite bow, as if he had proved something, left the room, while I, after several efforts with the glasses to follow further the shifts of the boatmen in the glare, finally gave up the attempt.

  iii

  Early the next morning, in the laboratory, just as I had arranged my roasting apparatus and acids and was about to blow up the furnace, Silvio came into the room and placed a small brown object upon the table.

  “In the signor’s pocket,” said he, as I recognized the book we had picked up on the mountain the day before. I had entirely forgotten it; but on a quick re-inspection again realized its value. Learning that its probable owners, the men we had met painting the rocks, had been seen in the Fish Market, I told the man to find their lodgings and return it as soon as possible.

  After he had left the room, I spent some time in glancing through the well-worn, often-annotated pages, at the catalogue of prodigies, springs that turned hot and cold, mermaids captured by fishermen, dragons, sea-monsters, and tuneful shells, accepted as facts by the ancient writer. Then, margined by notes, among which appeared the names of Ptolemy, Mica Madio, and Apollonius Rhodius, came a grandiloquent passage describing a statue of the god Æsculapius, wrought in gold, highly valued by the Greeks, bargained for by treaty, and even fought for in several wars. I had skimmed through the account without paying much attention to it and was about closing the book, when a passage on one of the loosened pages caught my eye. I read, re-read, and then translated it as follows:

  “Thus the Epirotes, contrary to the advice of the augurs, brought that which they had so nearly lost to Epidaurus, a city, the very foundations of which are unsafe, for since, according to the ancients, they had risen from the sea, they might at any time sink again. And so indeed it happened, when, without any warning, an earthquake suddenly invaded that coast, destroyed whole cities, swept rivers from their course, and overturned mountains with a terrific crash. Then the foundations of the earth gave way; and Epidaurus went down in the sea, and because its twenty thousand inhabitants had no time to escape, all perished in the flood, at which many grieved, less for those who sank than for that which sank with them.”

  I remember that the first and last qualifying words of the passage impressed me at the time; but without examining or attempting to explain the text further, I called back Silvio from the adjoining bedroom.

  “What is the name of the place that you tell me can be seen under the water down yonder?”

  “They call it Epidauro, signor.”

  “Then,” said I, “here is something very curious, a city actually named Epidaurus or Epidauro, described in this book, sunken, it seems, in the sea, nearly two thousand years ago. And,” I added with a laugh, “this explains your story. The ancients were fond of wonders. So are we. Somebody at Ragusa reads this old book, gets the idea, and passes it on. Visitors see what they want to see, particularly under water. And the boatman gets his fee.”

  The Maltese showed little sympathy with this version of the matter.

  “What the book tells is well enough,” he remarked, “but what we see with our own eyes is better still. Let anybody who says the city is not there prove it.”

  “Are you sure that you ever saw anything yourself?” I asked.

  “Yes, signor, a whole row of buildings with doorways and windows. Then the weather was cloudy; but the water was clear. It was winter, and,” he continued, “I saw other things too; but not what they call the Virgin.”

  For a time he seemed unwilling to explain this last statement, but at length admitted that the object so called, which in some lights had a peculiar glitter, was not the Virgin at all, but rather, in his opinion, an idol worshipped by the ancients before the time of the Blessed Mother. Many people, including Count Seismo, had seen it, and it was because the latter did not want any one but himself to meddle with such things, that the fishermen, who were all in his pay, rarely showed the place to visitors nowadays.

  The name of Count Seismo had already figured in Silvio’s talk, and I listened for nearly a half-hour to further gossip as to the enormous wealth of the eccentric savant; stories of false relics detected by him, collisions with impostors, and other incidents until, ending with an account of a wonderful museum in one of the old palaces, my servant finally left the room.

  iv

  During several days that followed, whether because of Silvio’s delay or my own carelessness, the unreturned volume of Ammianus lying on my writing table continued to remind me of my evaded duty. At last, one afternoon I determined to end my responsibility in the matter, and noting down some instructions from Silvio, left my lodgings with the book in my pocket.

  Following my pencilled chart half-an-hour’s walk, by way of several steep streets and a little windy square near the city wall, brought me to a gateway and then to a hillside garden, where a large gloomy building, with many windows, overlooked the sea.

  Under a cloister, here and there reinforced with iron rods and near an obstructing pile of stones, I found a doorway, pulled repeatedly but in vain upon a bell-rod, and was going away, when, at a sudden sound of footsteps, I turned to see the tall, bearded man, whom I had met upon the mountain. Covered with dust, and without a hat, his grizzled hair rose high above a pair of grotesque, black-rimmed goggles, as through their luminous discs he fixed upon me a questioning stare. To my surprise, he seemed unable to remember me. So much so that I had to awkwardly recall our meeting and express more interest than I felt in his marine studies before he turned back along a flagged terrace and, by way of a window-door, led me into a very large dilapidated room, with mouldy stuccoed walls.

  The place was littered with heavy packing-boxes, and at one end of a long table, covered with pasteboard trays, sat the small, wiry, red-faced, snub-nosed man of my previous acquaintance. He recognized me and, as he rose, greeted me with an exaggerated and mirthless smile. His tall friend walked across the room to an open inner-door, closed it, and, returning to the table, pointed to the collection of arranged shells. Some of these, he said, were very rare species of the murex that had not yet been classified.

  At this, the small man began shifting the trays, and in the excited talk that followed, shuffled restlessly around the table. With high-keyed outbursts and sudden stops, he continually interrupted the explanations of his tall friend. But his apish gestures and spluttered words failed to offset an impression of profound learning conveyed in his comments. I knew enough of conchology to appreciate this, admire the display with reasonable intelligence, and ask a few questions. After a time I managed to turn the talk to the subject of our former meeting.

  The tall man had taken off his goggles. Before he could readjust them, I saw that he was suffering from an affection of the eyes, one of which twitched nervously. I explained the purpose of my visit, pulled the volume from my pocket, and handed it to him, when, as he took it and glanced at it, a hardly perceptible frown like a quick shadow, crossed his deeply-furrowed face.

  He thanked me. They had carried the book to the mountains for reference, he explained, and had missed it not long before my coming.

  “You probably looked through it,” he continued, fixing his watery eyes upon me. “A remarkable book. Obsolete, of course, full of fables, but yet suggestive. There are notes on mollusca that interest my friend here, which ought to be winnowed, as it were. Did you notice several references to the murex?”

  “No,” said I. “But how strange that the author should corroborate the local myth of a neighboring city, called Epidaurus
or Epidauro, sunk in the sea.”

  Again the quick-passing frown, as he interrupted me: “Unfortunately there are two other ancient cities called Epidaurus, not by the sea, but several miles inland. Diodorus and Pausanias describe them, and them only. Why talk of a third Epidaurus sinking in the sea? Ammianus has misnamed the place, or mixed up some cock-and-bull story with the real Epidaurus.”

  “Nevertheless,” I continued, still tempted to draw out the speaker, “some city seems to have sunken here, if we are to believe the popular story of walls and towers, seen under water with a water-glass, or, as they say, at certain tides.”

  “Always at certain tides,” he answered with a contemptuous laugh. “We have settled the Epidaurus story. We have dredged and we have used the water-glass. Whether you believe these people or not, I tell you that there is nothing here, except several angular rock-ledges, which the wonder-hunter loves to mistake for houses, towers, and God knows what. Then comes the tradition, no doubt several hundred years old, which delights the visitor and fees the boatman. All very charming, of course.”

  From this version of the matter,—which, notwithstanding the way in which it was expressed, entirely agreed with my view,—the discussion led back to the subject of the murex shells and finally to the reappearance of the lost purple dye, once the celebrated product of ancient Tyre. Here the gigantic speaker again yielded to his companion, who proved by a show of several scarfs and aprons that neighboring peasants had reproduced the noble color that once glorified the robes of emperors. By the time he had denounced the bad taste of certain popes,—who, he said, had supplanted this magnificent hue with a vulgar red,—I realized that it was getting late. Not too well satisfied with my reception I bade my new friends good-bye.

  v

  In looking back upon the fateful events which followed this curious encounter, I have often wondered what would have happened if on a certain day not long after this I had remained at home and had not, as the result of a delayed errand, chanced to breakfast that morning at a restaurant.

  The place known as the Giardino d’Espana overlooked the city harbor, under a porch built, according to a mural inscription, by the soldiers of Diocletian. An immense plane tree, shading the flagstones, accounted for its name. And as I sat there, by one of the high-shuttered windows, enjoying the sea breeze and my second cup of coffee, for which the kitchen was famous, my quiet was disturbed by the behavior of several card-playing fishermen nearby.

  They were gathered under the great tree around a table where a pile of coins had probably several times changed hands. The native wine had done its usual work, as the angry uproar proved, when suddenly one of the men sprang from his chair, grasped a small brown object set before him on the coins, and hurled it across the table. By a quick dodge, one of his companions escaped the missile, which, striking the trunk of the plane tree, glanced toward me, bounded over the flags, and fell at my feet. A fight followed, at which the landlord and two of the waiters rushed out, seized, and held apart the offenders.

  Meanwhile, I had picked up the projectile and placed it on the table before me. A short inspection showed it to be an ancient lamp of bronze, with surmounting figures in relief, which more or less obscured the shape of the oil cup. Just as the outlines of a serpent and the fairly visible letters of an inscription caught my eye, my scrutiny was interrupted by the approach of the missile-thrower, a black haired, sunburned, ear-ringed fisherman, wearing a gayly printed and very clean shirt.

  “I am sorry to disturb the signor,” he said politely, cap in hand, and pointing to his adversary, who was still talking loudly to the landlord; “but that is a bad man, and he plays bad cards. You see, signor, we played for this bottle, which belongs to me. If it had hit him,” he added, with a mischievous grin, “he would have remembered it.”

  I held it up admiringly. “This is a great curiosity,” said I. “Where did you get it?”

  “On the beach down that way,” he answered, pointing beyond the ships. “If the Count Seismo were only here, it would bring me good money, for it is very old, signor, very old.”

  Although not an expert, I knew enough of antiquities to covet what looked like a treasure; so I shammed indifference, bargained in the usual way, and bought the relic so cheaply that, in order to ease my conscience, I felt obliged to nearly double its price.

  By this time the other fishermen had gone, and as my cold coffee had lost its delicious flavor, I paid my bill, carefully wrapped up my prize, and returned home.

  There I took my time in examining the relic. But after a few experiments had proved the danger of hastily loosening the layers of green rust, which partly hid the work of the ancient artist, I laid down my file. I had made out the figure of an old man, holding a bowl in one hand while grasping the neck of a serpent in the other.

  Whether from my knowledge of mythology the thing would have suggested the god Æsculapius but for the passage recently seen in Ammianus, I hardly know, but when it further appeared that the rust had not quite hidden the outlines of a child, seated upon the back of a centaur, college memories, associating centaurs with the youth of Æsculapius, convinced me that I had not mistaken the figure, until I came to the inscription. That puzzled me. For the letters IOV, preceded by the syllable CULA, could only, I thought, refer to Jupiter,—Jove. More and more interested in the waif, I sat for a long time, baffled with the meaning of CULA, and trying to account for the snake, which as an attribute of Æsculapius rather than Jupiter, seemed to contradict the legend. The longer I looked, the more I regretted my hasty return, to its unsympathetic owners, of the book, which, if carefully read, might have solved my difficulty.

  But at length I realized that I was wasting time, since reference to any Latin original would settle the matter. Remembering the neighboring library of the Franciscan monks, I placed the lamp in one of the drawers of my writing-desk and dismissed the puzzle from my thoughts.

  vi

  At that time an insignificant door opening upon a side street led to the famous library of the Franciscans at Ragusa, which, with its noble collection of early printed volumes, manuscripts, and incunabula, thrown open to the public by order of Pius VI, filled one of the upper wings of the monastery, overlooking its Byzantine cloister.

  On the day of my visit the great room, where Time’s censer had swung a heavy must of vellum and old leather over the work of scribe and printer, was empty. But in a small ante-chamber, whose high ceiling seemed lost in shadows, I found the librarian, a pleasant-looking, pale, broad-faced, dark-browed man, in the dress of a lay priest. He was busy with a lot of engravings that lay in piles upon a large table, several chairs and on the floor around him, and as I introduced myself and explained the purpose of my visit, his blue, deeply-fringed eyes twinkled pleasantly. He told me that there were several Latin originals and one or two translations of Ammianus in the library. But, when I described the passage which had aroused my curiosity, a look of puzzled astonishment sobered his boyish face.

  “Book Nine?” said he, repeating the words. “You say you are positive of the number?”

  “Perfectly,” I replied, briefly describing my discovery and recent return of the book to its owners.

  “In that case you may not know that you are in search of the doubtful ninth volume of the edition published by Gonelli at Venice early in the last century,—one of the ‘lost books,’ condemned as a fraud by scholars. Out of print, of course, and very scarce. Some years ago,” he went on, after a pause, “our copy strangely disappeared, and things happened here that make me familiar, too familiar, perhaps, with the subject,—not only because my predecessor lost his place——” He stopped a moment, then added, “You speak of a serpent, Æsculapius and a serpent.”

  “Yes,” said I, again stating my lamp difficulty.

  “Some such thing,” he went on, “is associated in my mind either with this book or a copy that my old
friend Count Seismo has in his museum and has several times shown me. Besides, there is a very remarkable bronze serpent, which he dug up some years ago, at Monte Bergato. Yes, the doctor’s symbol, Æsculapius and the Serpent, is one of his pet subjects, in some way connected with his theory of earthquakes.”

  He paused again; then, on my suggesting that I might perhaps be allowed to examine the volume in question, told me that, owing to the absence and supposed illness of the count, the much-admired museum referred to was closed.

  “Count Seismo,” he continued, “has become very sensitive of late,—absorbed in his studies, difficult to approach. Strange to say, the subject of this particular book would be very distasteful to him. In fact, certain gossip in the matter has ended in a misunderstanding between him and our abbot.”

  As he said this I noticed a humorous twitching about the corners of his large, expressive mouth and wide-cut nostrils.

  “The result is good-bye to one of our chief patrons. Look there!” He pointed to the engravings spread before us as gifts of the highly cultivated scholar, and among them to several rare etchings of Titian, nearly all of the prints of Parmigiano, and a set of transcripts of Cherubino Alberti, which copies on copper, he explained, remained as the only record of the lost paintings of Caravaggio.

  “How well I remember them,” said I, recalling my own small collection of the works of Alberti, together with several of my adventures as a print collector, until my unexpected comments on the rarities, known as the “Golden Apples” and “The Spoiling of the Egyptians,” so much pleased him that, when we turned again to the subject of the Ammianus, he appeared to have forgotten the difficulty of getting at the book. Declaring that he knew the count’s janitor, he seemed so loath to let me give up my classic search that, ten minutes later, we were on our way to the closed museum.