by H. F. Heard
With the glee of a child—and I must say I couldn’t help sharing a little of his glow, the clue was so neat—Mr. Mycroft enunciated, “Freas Heol in Keltic means ‘rising sun’ and, final proof, Cloc Freas Heol means ‘stone of the rising sun.’”
“I must say,” I owned, “that is very neat, very.”
“Yes,” he replied complacently; “I think that with Miss Brown and this little book we have Sanderson’s secret partly extracted.”
I took my defeat in good part; I was honestly interested; but I was not wholly unpleased to be able to add, “Of course we’re not a step nearer the whole solution, ‘Twenty minutes to three,’ which was my solution of the first part of the code, and now your fragment, ‘stone of the rising sun,’ still leave all the letter and number part undecoded. We’re not really a step nearer to an actual practical understanding of our mystery.”
“Right,” he said, “right. But it will take me some time to give you the rest. I have it all. But already I have taken a great deal of your day. My real excuse for coming to see you was to fulfill my promise—that in four days I would be able to tell you you were safe. You are. If you would like to hear the rest of my reading I could call tomorrow. You should, in any case, not have returned my check, for you had earned it. Matters of, literally, life and death have prevented us from coming down to economics. But I still hope to persuade you to see my point of view in that matter of the honorarium, and if you won’t, on second thought, then at least to give me the pleasure of going through this case with a confrere to whom I owe its elucidation.”
Clever old fox! I was glad of the opportunity to reconsider that check, and besides, he had my interest roused, and knew it. All clues to a clue-hunter are hard to drop, and here was one which had coiled itself round my mind and feelings, had threatened my life, had killed a friend and killed my would-be murderer, had—and this was my secret—even wound itself round our desert trader. Quite apart from the fact that Mr. Mycroft had hinted at even bigger fates and issues back of the whole thing, I think it will be allowed that here was enough to make any decoder almost unable to refuse to hear more.
“Very well,” I said, trying to appear the concessioner and not the concessionee, “I would be very pleased to clear up the matter tomorrow. Today I ought to finish my work.”
“At ten tomorrow morning, then,” he replied, and went without another word.
How well he had judged me! My appetite, my curiosity grew. Miss Delamere saw that I was not attending. She even made some remark about that “bald-eagle Britisher,” but I wasn’t to be drawn. I set her to go through the files ordering the card-indexes of references. I felt somehow that we had been lax. That verbal clue to the Friar’s Heel, though I don’t know why I should have been expected to know it, vexed me—perhaps because verbal clues are my forte, perhaps because I had been so completely wrong and had twice tied myself to an obviously superficial and mistaken rendering.
It was, then, with relief, with positive relief and interest that I heard Mr. Mycroft in the outer office the next morning as the watch on my wrist raised its long hand to the zenith and its short one to ten. I think I greeted the old fellow quite cordially, and he seemed quite pleased to see me and with everything. Without a pause, as though continuing a lecture which had hardly stopped, he began, “AP. 20111318—3, that’s all that remains for us to settle.”
“Pretty big, though, I should have thought,” I said, just to say something. “Twenty millions odd is a tidy sum even if it is minus three.”
“Numbers can generally be reduced to manageable proportions if we know what they refer to,” he answered. “And here we are not completely in the dark. Indeed, two lines of light focus here. Sanderson, I’ve said, was a Scotchman. He would, then, quite likely, make part of his code out of the book he would have known best—the Bible. Now, what did Miss Brown in her trance see at that point?”
He took from his pocket his neat notebook and read out an entry which vividly recalled my sitting with her. He recited, “‘Ever so big and it goes up and up!’ She makes a staircase-like figure with her hands. And everything is in front of it.’ That is all, for a time, but, on asking whether she sees anything more, the mind is switched. Now she is reporting that she sees the ocean and out of it is coming some kind of chimera.” He paused. “After all, I believe that Intil, who may well have had the same Fundamentalist upbringing as Sanderson, caught onto this clue and it was because he thought you and Miss Brown together would work it out, that he decided to murder you both. I’ve told you that my knowledge of that book, once most studied, now largely unread, was getting rusty. So, after the sitting, I consulted the volume. I remembered the outlines of textual criticism, from my college days, at least sufficiently to know there were really only two real riddle books in that classical collection.”
He stopped again and this time he pulled from his pocket a Bible. “The Book of Daniel is one, of course, and the other, the so-called Revelation, the real title of which is the Apocalypse, So AP is, you see, at once placed. That gives the book. Twenty-eleven must, then, be the chapter and verse and thirteen-eighteen must be another chapter and verse. Now let’s look these up. The first is the well-known reference to the Great White Throne of Final Judgment, before which the whole creation is summoned. I think,” he added reflectively, “I see the point of that,” then, going on, “the thirteenth chapter ends with the eighteenth verse. It is clear from that and the foregoing description that Miss Brown’s remarkable ‘control,’ however inadequate her vocabulary, had an amazing extra-sensory perception of the chimera in question. She told me she saw ‘an awful monster, all sorts of bits of beastly animals, all come, together.’”
I could confirm that at my sitting she had seemed to be frightened by some hallucination of a beast.
“Now,” said Mr. Mycroft, “this is the actual Apocalyptic description of what that book calls the Beast: ‘Like unto a leopard and his feet were as of a bear and his mouth the mouth of a lion.’ But all this is at the beginning of the chapter. Why, then, is the reference to the last verse? That verse begins, ‘Here is wisdom,’ which I understand apocalyptic decoders say means, ‘Here is the code-clue!’ ‘Let him that has understanding,’ it continues, ‘count the number of the Beast … the number is 666.’ I don’t think we need trouble ourselves with who the Beast is or was or shall be. For I don’t think Sanderson, who, I believe, made this code, was, when he made it, any longer interested in New Testament exegesis. He was, I am equally sure, making a mnemonic code, a memo which it pleased him to work out and which he took every care should be senseless if it fell into any fellow seeker’s hands. Six hundred and sixty-six, less three, is then some measurement.”
I remembered that Miss Brown’s “control” in our sitting had said something about losing interest in the Beast itself and seeing a lot of little squiggles. I had cut her off but perhaps she was trying to tell us she was seeing the figures 666.
“But if these are measurements,” I said, “what do they measure?”
“That we shall know when we know the place of the Great White Throne,” he answered.
“We’ll never know that in this life,” I ventured.
“I think you’re wrong,” he replied. “But first let us now read our code as far as we can. It runs now: ‘At twenty minutes to three P.M. at the stone of the rising sun’—these are evidently very precise measurements. Because a certain spot will be indicated (as the gnomon of a sun dial indicates the hour) by the tip of the shadow of an outstanding rock—something like the Cloc Freas Heol at Stonehenge—falling on the ground. Then comes the reference to the Great White Throne and the whole message ends with 663 as being the major scale, or the general direction for finding the place.”
“So everything turns on that term, and it seems to me completely and literally up in the air,” I said.
“No,” he repeated. “On the contrary, I’m quite sure this is the one reference in the whole thing which we may literally say is on the map.” He
shuffled in his pocket once more and produced a motoring tourist map of the great half-empty state of Utah. He opened it and pointed my attention to a patch he had underlined in red. There, sure enough, I read, “Canyon of the Great White Throne.”
“The early pioneers were soaked in their Bible,” he said, “and christened everything they could by biblical names. And the romantic habit remains among their descendants.
“So now we have our fixed point. And we need it,” he went on, “for about one-third of the Mormon state is still unmapped in any detail. There you may look along canyons down which, as far as we know, no human foot has ever trod. Nature has defended this solitude with three great guardians, thirst, starvation, and heat.”
“And,” I added, “the best of all defenses—that there is nothing there that anyone could want to find.”
“Generally speaking, yes,” he replied. “But in this particular case I can’t agree. Of course, gold might turn up somewhere in that vast area. But I don’t believe it was gold that Sanderson was after and Intil hijacked him for.”
“Then you believe Intil’s rigmarole?”
Mr. Mycroft was silent. After a few moments he began in another tone. “We met because you could help me, I told you, in a peculiarly important search. You did help me to track Intil; that led us to finding Sanderson’s body; that, in turn, to discovering his code. Intil’s and Sanderson’s deaths are serious matters, though neither of them will make any stir if we stay silent. Nor, indeed, will poor, dear Miss Brown’s. We can leave the matter as it is, if we like. You can leave this problem as it is, if you like. It has neatly, if tragically, terminated itself. It nearly finished you off, in the same neat and leaving-no-suspicious-loose-ends way, also. But I cannot leave the matter to rest there. For me, tragic as these cases are, they are, after all, only incidents in a much larger mystery, a much more important issue.”
He saw me about to say something, though I am not sure what it was that I was going to say; my mind was confused. In the night I had decided I had, anyhow, a right to the first check, but, in making up my mind to re-accept it, I couldn’t help feeling under some sort of obligation to the old man!
He forestalled my slowly gathering thoughts: “I repeat, then, my offer. I am an old man to work alone. You know about this. Do you care to clear this up for good? As I have said, I am sure that my clients would not have sent me on this trail unless they had had, as I believe they have, adequate proof that what we may find is worth any expense to discover. Meanwhile, in any case, you will, of course, accept again this check about which you had some generous doubts.”
I know it may sound absurd—the reason which made me finally decide to entertain again this proposal from which I had already broken away decisively enough. It wasn’t that Intil was gone and so the danger of running into a very awkward rival was out of the way. It was, odd as it may seem, that I was keeping a secret back from Mr. Mycroft. I believe that the sole reason why he exasperated me was because he was always right. I was “weary of hearing Aristides called the just” and sometimes so calling himself, too. In his presence I was the little nephew who never knows and he was dear old Uncle Wiseacre who is always informed. Perhaps, I suppose, I really admired and envied him. I think that must have been it, and the thought that I knew and he didn’t know, that there was now still another rival in the path, another seeker, already perhaps ahead of us on the trail, made me, unwisely no doubt, but all the more keenly, anxious to see what would happen, to watch Mr. Mycroft’s growing suspicion and surprise, and all the while to be for once the wiser of the two. I wanted to detect, undetected, the detective waking up to the surprising knowledge that he had left undetected, unsuspected, an important factor in the plot.
“Very well,” I said, after a deliberation which I was pleased to think he must fail to understand. “Very well, I will come along again, provided that you can give me any clear proof that we have a definite chart to go upon.”
For answer, another rummage in another pocket produced another map. “This,” he said, “is the best obtainable for the desert round the canyon which contains the huge rock bluff called the Great White Throne. Here is the main trail. You see, in this direction we can go into a complete unmapped desolation into which even the hardiest sightseers never go. I am sure I can pick up a trail if I have time to look out from that ‘jumping-off place,’ for I feel certain that Sanderson left for himself some marks to point his way back. I expect he had not visited the spot for some time; at least we know he was for some reason—perhaps for the best of reasons, for leading Intil astray—far away from his real trail when he was killed.”
I couldn’t resist asking, “Won’t you ask Kerson the trader to come with you? He’d be better at picking up a trail?”
“No,” was the reply. “I don’t think we shall need anybody but ourselves and I do think that this secret should not be shared.” That, then, was perhaps the reason why he wanted me—to keep me under his eye? “I’ve already made other arrangements and ordered the baggage we left with him to be sent down. We shall need that, but the man himself might easily be in the way.”
“Yes,” I thought to myself, “he certainly might and indeed even may be!”
Chapter XI
So it was that within three clays I was once more off on a Mycroft meander, my office left in Miss Delamere’s carmine-tipped but capable hands. He and I looked like ordinary sightseers. And we played our part, gazing at the immense rock, when we had arrived in its canyon, that Throne which was to be the starting point of our real exploration. A local worthy acted as our dragoman. We were all mounted on horses which, I am glad to say, had wisely exchanged fire and mettlesomeness for docility and endurance.
Mr. Mycroft had told our guide that we wished to do a little real exploring, to go a little off the trails altogether—just to get a real sense of the desert, after we had seen all the standard, well-photographed views. “I see,” he said, “that there is emptiest country out in this direction.”
“There’s nothing anyone could photo out there,” said the guide. “It just goes on and on. It’s so much the same you can’t hardly tell you’re moving—till you want to come back, and then you can’t find your way. It’s just quiet Hell—even if you could get water, a man’d go mad out there. ’Tisn’t grand or fine. It’s just as near nothing as earth’s ever gone. It’s just a rubble world.” He spoke with a real sense of dislike of this, the real wilderness—not the National Park fringe of stately escarpments. And I must say I shared it. The absolute desert is simply untidiness extended to lunatic lengths and breadths.
His next remark, however, made me prick my rather wilting ears: “Still, though, you sightseers always seem just to want to see something simply because you hope no one else has ever seen it. My father remembers when no one came even to see the old White Throne unless they jest happened to pass that way. A cornfield, and the flatter the better, was always a better sight than a canyon, however grand. The Indians still call all this ‘evil land,’ and it is, if it’s yours and not simply something to gape at and not live off. Yet, as I say, every year more of your lot push out further and further into this jumping-off jumble land. Why, only last week there was a man up here who went right off up that there canyon and he hasn’t come back yet, as far as I know. There’s nothing up there, but I suppose he knows his own business or his own queer notion of a vacation.”
I was riding along just behind Mr. Mycroft, but he showed, as far as I could see, no sign of additional interest at this remark. He looked, in a big-brimmed hat, dark glasses, and his long dust coat, so like faded pictures of my grand-uncles photographed in Egypt, with the valley of the Tombs of the Kings rather out of focus in the background, that I had another acute attack of nepotophrenia, or whatever modern psychologists call that respect which is the most civil but not the least intense form of dislike. And, shortly after, when we had gone some distance into a desolation which had less design of any sort in its confusion than any piece of land I’ve ever se
en, Mr. Mycroft drew rein.
“It’s interesting geologically,” he remarked, “but to enjoy that one needs to be on foot. I think we’ll go back now and return for a closer look round tomorrow.”
The following day he haled me off alone. In the first part of the morning we had let ourselves be taken a trail ride. Then, on reaching where we lodged, Mr. Mycroft remarked, “This afternoon we’ll do a little geology. We’ll take along this bundle, as it has our gear for collecting specimens.” Then, turning to our guide, he said, “If you will come along with us, when we reach the spot where we were yesterday we’ll take to our feet and meet you again at the same place, if you’ll bring along the horses in the evening.”
When we were left alone we did not go far. That was perhaps the weirdest thing about this strange area—it simply had no scale. The air was so clear that there was not the slightest atmosphere to give any sense of distance. A broken rock six inches high and one sixty feet high have really nothing to distinguish them from each other unless you know how far you are away from them. Here there were nothing but broken rocks of all sizes, from one-inch pebbles to thousand-foot fragments of shattered mountains. And there was nothing else, not even a shrub. Heavens, what a desolation! So complete, so utterly unrelieved, that you had only to go round a single boulder and you were lost—you had left the known world as completely behind, you had as little sense of your bearings as though you had been marooned on the snow wastes of Antarctica.
So, after striking off the trail we were as much by ourselves as though we had been in the nothing-but-rock-strewn deserts of the moon. I was lugging along a bundle he had told me to carry. I left the direction, if there was one, to him. He walked slowly, stopping every now and then like a hound questing for a scent.