Reply Paid

by H. F. Heard

  At last he seemed to have a direction or at least a fixed notion, and we trudged and stumbled over the rough ground for, I suppose, three or four hundred yards. As we advanced he quickened his pace, leaving me behind. I own I was getting bored and tired and very hot and I was stumping along not looking ahead (what was the use?) or, indeed, at anything in particular, for the prospect had no promise. I was surprised, then, suddenly to find Mr. Mycroft hurrying past me on his way back to the trail and evidently counting to himself. I mounted a boulder and stood watching him from that slight vantage point. I could then see back to where we had struck off from the trail. The moment he reached that he wheeled back and was standing by me in a few minutes.

  “It was a bit of a guess,” he said, “but it’s worked so far, and I think we’re over the one difficult hurdle or gap. That was the step between the Great White Throne and the other designated area—what we may call the Friar’s Heel area. We knew that it’s 663 somethings and that is all, and that is not enough as a guide, but good enough for a mnemonic, which was all that old S. himself needed. So deduction just had to be used.” He twinkled at me, but I was in no counter-twinkling mood and waited dully like a mule expecting its saddle and bridle. “The White Throne is our base; our goal must be in the most desolate and untraveled area near it, for Sanderson’s secret would otherwise have been blundered on by others. So this is the quarter to seek in. Next, Sanderson would use the trail as far as it went. He would, therefore, strike off at that point where the track began to bear away from this ultra-wilderness. So we strike away. When we had gone half a dozen hundred yards I looked for a clue. It was there all right. I then paced the area to be sure. It is 663 yards. Come here.”

  I followed him with a revived interest. Sure enough, built up against a boulder on the side we had approached from, was a little heap of stones which would, to a casual glance, have passed as a trickle of fragments weathered off the parent mass. Indeed, even when we were close to it, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t that and nothing more. The top stone was smooth and white.

  Mr. Mycroft picked it up. The underside was not so clean; there were a few scratches on it.

  “Here’s clear proof,” he said, pointing to the surface crackling.

  “Those are simply weather crackings,” I said.

  “No,” he replied. “They are, as it happens, Greek capital letters, which are scrawling things at best and are scrawlingly drawn here. But they show the seeker that he is on the right trail. For those Greek letters—as was the way in Greek, as in Latin—can be used as numerals; those three letters can be read as 666.”

  “But, if that’s so, what about the minus 3?” I asked, for this seemed to need clearing up.

  “I think because our Scotch friends like scholarship—hence the Greek riddle—and they love accuracy, even in keeping their private accounts. I paced this and it is just short, I believe, by three yards of the full 666 when I walked straight from the trail to this point. This huge boulder, I take it, stood in the way, so our friend couldn’t set up his sign-cairn exactly at the limit of his scale.”

  “But how,” I said, “could you find your way over that litter of stones to as small and as concealed a mark as this?”

  I asked, for though, of course, he struck at right angles away from the trail, there seemed no other guide to lead him and the whole thing was an almost uncanny piece of tracking.

  “I must say,” he frankly confessed, “I thought we might fail and I have been helped by something which may be fancy, but which, if it isn’t, puzzles and surprises me. I don’t think I could even point it out to you. Try and see now,” he said directing my eyes along the way we had come; “do you see any suggestion of a trail here?”

  “None,” I said.

  “Well,” he allowed, “I may have been following a fancy but I certainly had the sense that there was a very faint track here. Anyhow, it has led us to clear evidence.”

  “But how do we get any further?” I asked. For answer he put the white stone back in the precise position it had occupied on the top of the small cairn.

  “Look,” he requested. It was naturally shaped a little like those earliest stone axes one sees in museums. “I am going,” said he, “another 666 or 663 yards in the direction it points.”

  We plodded along counting and checking, for now I was almost as interested as he. As we reached 650 in our count the ground became a little more open, the boulders being smaller. It was slow work, for we had to round some big masses and then to be sure we had kept our line and made a deduction for our detour, in our reckoning. But, “Here,” cried Mr. Mycroft as we went forward a few more paces, “here, you see, he had room to let his full scale be used.”

  “But where?” I asked.

  “As it’s in the open and so might be too noticeable,” he remarked, “there’s no cairn at this halt and checkpoint, only another of these white quartzite pebbles—not so uncommon as to catch a casual eye but clear enough for himself to pick out. See,” he picked up another white stone rather like an elongated egg, and, turning it over, presented it to me. “He’s put his code number on it again. Perhaps he wanted to be able to send someone else along this trail, if he ever found anyone he could trust and couldn’t come himself.”

  Certainly, scrawled, so that it might pass for chance veining on the stone, were again the three Greek letters.

  Replacing it as it had lain, he took his bearings by it and we set off again.

  “Look here,” I shouted to him, “how many of these hops have we to make?”

  “I don’t know,” came over his shoulder, as he ambled ahead, threading his way among the rocks which had again become almost as big as cottages. He was counting away to himself and making his checkings as I caught up with him. It was getting exhausting. I calculated that by the time we came to and found—if we ever did—the next check-point stone, we should have tramped over a mile on this exhausting terrain. Just before we reached 600, as far as I could check by my own counting, Mr. Mycroft had gone out of sight behind some stones even higher than any we had so far seen. We were, I judged, approaching the edge where some upreared strata had once made a crest, but were now split and shattered into a rough kind of cyclopean wall. As I trotted round the base of one of these, I nearly ran into Mr. Mycroft.

  “I was wrong,” he said. “I was too fanciful about our Gaelic hero, may he rest in peace. He was not suffering from the Scotch form of scrupulosity.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, meanwhile searching the ground for another white stone.

  “I mean that when he wrote ‘dash three’ he did not mean ‘minus three’ and just because his first span could not be precisely 666 yards. He meant 666 yards for three times and then—”

  “I don’t see the white stone to show we have reached the third span’s limit,” I said, still looking carefully over the ground.

  “No need,” he said. “As with the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren, in his masterpiece, St. Paul’s Cathedral, no need for a monument when the whole place is monumental. ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.’ Look up and around. If you want a monumental clue, look around.”

  I looked, and must own that he was right and I was startled. Rounding that last immense boulder we had come into a huge circle of such stones cleft by a million years of weather and standing in a rough ring.

  “Here,” he said, “is the circle with the big prongs standing round it. What’s the time?”

  “Twenty-five past three,” I said, glancing at my watch.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “It is a bit too late to go further today. But tomorrow we shall know. Yes, we can leave your bundle, as in Pilgrim’s Progress, here. No one will, I wager, disturb it. Tomorrow we will start early and be here when the signal tower gives its beckoning.”

  We tramped back and found the trail quickly enough. The guide had, as we’d arranged, brought the horses out for us to the bend where we had left him.

  “Any luck with your geology?” he asked.

>   “Yes,” said Mr. Mycroft. “Some interesting formations in their way, at least to specialists, don’t you think, Mr. Silchester?”

  “To specialists, certainly, certainly,” I agreed.

  The next morning I was awake almost as soon as Mr. Mycroft in the small cabin which gave us quarters and we were still at breakfast when we heard the horses outside. After a silent jog, as we dismounted at the bend of the trail Mr. Mycroft said, “If you’ll have the horses here again for us at sundown, that would be best. We want, maybe, to get a few rock specimens from one or two points and will make a full day of it.”

  We walked off slowly, Mr. Mycroft glancing at a stone every now and then and pausing even to pick up one or two, until the horse hoofs were audible no longer. Then we mended our pace. We had no difficulty in picking out our two white stone clues and, in spite of the rough going, we emerged from among the big stones into the giant circle in about half an hour. There lay the bundle just as I’d dropped it, the afternoon before.

  “We’ve plenty of time,” said Mr. Mycroft, sitting down, “so let us look to our stores.”

  His capacious pockets had our eatables. I carried, slung over my shoulders, our two flasks of cold coffee. We placed all these in “the shadow of a great rock” in what was indeed a “weary land.” Then he pulled the bundle that I had carried yesterday, toward him and unwrapped it. Out came those objects which had surprised me so much on our first desert trip—the huge black rubber gloves.

  “One hardly needs winter clothing in a place like this,” I remarked facetiously.

  “Oh, it can be cold enough here in winter,” was his noncommittal counter. Well, I would let him keep his secret a little longer, if he wished, seeing we were really right on the goal. “Now,” he said, “let’s get our bearings so that at the right time we shall be in the right place.” And he was right to take that precaution; I was wrong in thinking we had practically arrived.

  “There must be an outstanding rock,” he said, “which holds a position in relation to this huge natural ring somewhat similar to that held by the Friar’s Heel to the Stonehenge circle.”

  “If so, it should lie east,” I said.

  We crossed over to that side and went through the huge rough natural columns that enclosed the area. Emerging, we saw a tumble of rocks stretching away, but sure enough, to the east there was an outstanding peak, almost a mesa, a huge shaft of stone, its sides looking as sheer and smooth as a wall. Mr. Mycroft consulted his watch and a compass.

  “At twenty minutes to three,” he remarked. But a thought had flashed into my mind. How had we been so stupid as to overlook it!

  “It’s no use our being here,” I said, “whether there’s anything to find or not. We’ll never find it in this wilderness for we don’t know the day.”

  “You mean,” he said, “that I had overlooked the fact that though Sanderson gave time of day and place, he didn’t give day of month or year? No,” he continued easily, “no, I noticed that, and the answer was pretty clear. Sanderson was using Stonehenge as his code system. Well, what is the whole meaning and raison d’être of Stonehenge? Like all megalithic circle-temples, it is built for sun worship and the Friar’s Heel, which has given us a little trouble, owing to its folk-disguised name, here is literally as plain as a pikestaff. It points for one day of the year and one only—the sun-rising on midsummer day, when sacrifice was made as the rising sun made the tip of the Freas Heol cast its fatal shadow on the victim on the altar. Whatever Sanderson’s code points to, it was meant to point by the shadow of that rock at twenty to three P.M. on midsummer day, June 21.”

  “But this isn’t June 21.”

  “That presents no difficulty. A simple calculation will show where it would fall at two-forty today. The indicative shadow won’t point at another angle of the horizon. At worst, as we are some months past the summer solstice, and therefore the sun’s inclination is increased from the zenith, the shaft of shadow will run past and over the spot we want pointed out.”

  There ensued an arduous effort, as journalists like to say, or, in my own words, a long and very hot scramble. The whole scale of the place was far vaster than the area we had left behind us, the other side of the broken ridge out of which the circle had formed itself. Here rocks which seemed, when one first saw them, stones on which one might sit, turned out to be, when one came up to them after a quarter of an hour’s walking, high platforms on which one could easily have put a house. After some surveying, however, and a good deal of looking back to the big Friar’s Heel and getting its line, Mr. Mycroft said, “An early lunch; we have just time,” and we returned to our stores in the shadow of the great circle.

  When we came back to our former “furthest out” the sun was already making the mesa monolith begin to throw up its finger of shadow far out to the northeast across a desolation of smaller stone. We set out, but always the great avenue of shadow seemed to advance far faster than we were moving. At last, however, we were abreast of the monolith itself and by bearing toward it we passed into its shadow.

  “We shall be late after all,” said Mr. Mycroft, hurrying me far faster than I liked, for quick movement after meals has never agreed with me. “The scale of this country deceived me. Still, though we may not be exactly where we should, at two-forty, still we shall be on the road to our goal if we take the line of the shadow at that moment and mark some outstanding rock to keep us going straight.” So we panted on, and at last Mr. Mycroft called, “The time is due; now we must take our line. From now on the shadow will only mislead us.”

  We looked ahead, but as far as I could see there were no outstanding stones to guide us; the wilderness on this side, too, was subsiding into the same chaos as it presented on the other side of the stone circle. It was as featureless as a frozen sea of ice-hummocks. Mr. Mycroft, though, forged ahead. I was, indeed, getting pretty badly winded and am glad, if not proud, to say Mr. Mycroft was carrying the parcel.

  I suppose it was because my fatigue was rising that after what seemed an interminable tramp and stumble I could not say when I first noticed that the going itself was getting better. I felt a strong feeling of relief, however, when I noticed that my old leader was not pressing the pace as he had been. His speed slackened, he almost seemed to be sauntering, and finally he came to a standstill. Then I had time to notice that not far ahead of us the boulder-strewn surface suddenly “improved”; it looked as though it were no more than a shingle beach, and still further on, I thought it might have been even sand, Mr. Mycroft, however, was not taking a view ahead or around. He had dropped the parcel and was crouched on the ground examining something in the palm of his hand through a lens in the other.

  As I came up he remarked, “I think the mesa monolith has served its purpose and led us to our spot. We are arrived, or so near that we shall need only our own eyes to lead us to the actual goal.”

  “I see nothing,” I said, looking around and then peering down at the ground from which he had picked up, I now saw, a handful of sand-grains. “And I can’t see what clue you can be finding here.”

  “Look at these,” was his reply, emptying his small runnel of silica dust into my hand, “through this,” handing me the lens.

  “All I see is that the grains look like pebbles, as they should under such magnification.”

  “Pebbles, yes,” he replied, “but that’s the point.”

  “No, I don’t see.”

  He was just about to say something more to enlighten my mind, to give me understanding as well as information, as usual, when his eye was evidently caught by something else on the ground near by. He hurried over to it and I saw something like a piece of crystal glitter as he picked it up.

  “Look at this. This is a far clearer proof than the sand, though the sand is indubitable evidence in itself.” He was holding out to me what looked more than anything else like a piece of half-sucked candy dropped by a dirty child into the dust. Fortunately in this place it couldn’t be that—there are some advantages in bei
ng in a wilderness and one is the absence of dirty children—so I took it from him and examined it.

  “Now,” he said rallyingly—that tone of his entire repertoire tried me, I think, the most—“here’s the riddle: the first point is some sand and the point of that is that it is pointless.”

  He was in high spirits, I suppose because he felt the goal was near. But I was just tired.

  “Oh, stop it!” I snapped.

  “Very well. But I understood that in your branch of detection you use a lens occasionally and find evidence that way. Please look again at the grains.” I was still holding them. He had taken his lens from me as he had handed me the “false candy.” Now he relieved me of that and gave me his magnifier again. As under its power the sand looked like pebbles, his voice at my side said: “Silica grains have naturally very distinct and sharp edges. That’s why sand is a sharp polisher and cutter. For millennia men could carve such super-hard stones as jade and porphyry only with sand. For sand is a natural glass, a hard crystal shattered into grains. But look at this stuff. It is sand right enough, but all the edges are rounded and smoothed.” It was true.

  “Looks like sugar lumps that have just begun to melt.”

  “Good,” he commended. “You’re right, I’m sure. That is precisely what has happened. These little cubes of silica have been melted.”

  I looked up. “Why, that’s nonsense. I know enough about chemistry to know that.”

  “Well, that’s the way glass is said to have been invented,” he replied. “Men lighting a bonfire on the shore and, after, finding this.” He held out to me the piece of “false candy.”

  “But who’s been lighting huge bonfires here?” I asked.

  “The real difficulty isn’t that,” he said. “It’s the chemical fact that though some sands will melt into a glass of a sort at a heat given by an ordinary big fire, they need, if they are to melt, a ‘flux’ mixed with them: sea kale used for the ‘shore glass’ or beach twigs used for the ‘forest glass.’ Well, look around here. Where is there any weed or wood to help?” There certainly was none. “That’s why,” he went on holding up the “candy,” “this is so remarkable. On the one hand, here are half-melted grains and here, on the other hand, is actually a piece of half-made glass. The heat required to melt sand into glass without a flux is immense. We have only just begun to be able to do so in the most modern furnaces. Yet this took place in the open desert and”—he was now walking about rapidly, every now and then stopping and picking up more small fragments of the “candy”—“over a large area. Yes, we are arrived, and the spot itself lies just ahead of us—the fused silica lumps increase in that direction.”