by Jules Verne
CHAPTER IV.
THE ENEMY TO BE STARVED INTO SUBMISSION
"He is gone!" cried Martha, running out of her kitchen at the noiseof the violent slamming of doors.
"Yes," I replied, "completely gone."
"Well; and how about his dinner?" said the old servant.
"He won't have any."
"And his supper?"
"He won't have any."
"What?" cried Martha, with clasped hands.
"No, my dear Martha, he will eat no more. No one in the house is toeat anything at all. Uncle Liedenbrock is going to make us all fastuntil he has succeeded in deciphering an undecipherable scrawl."
"Oh, my dear! must we then all die of hunger?"
I hardly dared to confess that, with so absolute a ruler as my uncle,this fate was inevitable.
The old servant, visibly moved, returned to the kitchen, moaningpiteously.
When I was alone, I thought I would go and tell Graeuben all about it.But how should I be able to escape from the house? The Professormight return at any moment. And suppose he called me? And suppose hetackled me again with this logomachy, which might vainly have beenset before ancient Oedipus. And if I did not obey his call, who couldanswer for what might happen?
The wisest course was to remain where I was. A mineralogist atBesancon had just sent us a collection of siliceous nodules, which Ihad to classify: so I set to work; I sorted, labelled, and arrangedin their own glass case all these hollow specimens, in the cavity ofeach of which was a nest of little crystals.
But this work did not succeed in absorbing all my attention. That olddocument kept working in my brain. My head throbbed with excitement,and I felt an undefined uneasiness. I was possessed with apresentiment of coming evil.
In an hour my nodules were all arranged upon successive shelves. ThenI dropped down into the old velvet armchair, my head thrown back andmy hands joined over it. I lighted my long crooked pipe, with apainting on it of an idle-looking naiad; then I amused myselfwatching the process of the conversion of the tobacco into carbon,which was by slow degrees making my naiad into a negress. Now andthen I listened to hear whether a well-known step was on the stairs.No. Where could my uncle be at that moment? I fancied him runningunder the noble trees which line the road to Altona, gesticulating,making shots with his cane, thrashing the long grass, cutting theheads off the thistles, and disturbing the contemplative storks intheir peaceful solitude.
Would he return in triumph or in discouragement? Which would get theupper hand, he or the secret? I was thus asking myself questions, andmechanically taking between my fingers the sheet of papermysteriously disfigured with the incomprehensible succession ofletters I had written down; and I repeated to myself "What does itall mean?"
I sought to group the letters so as to form words. Quite impossible!When I put them together by twos, threes, fives or sixes, nothingcame of it but nonsense. To be sure the fourteenth, fifteenth andsixteenth letters made the English word 'ice'; the eighty-third andtwo following made 'sir'; and in the midst of the document, in thesecond and third lines, I observed the words, "rots," "mutabile,""ira," "net," "atra."
"Come now," I thought, "these words seem to justify my uncle's viewabout the language of the document. In the fourth line appeared theword "luco", which means a sacred wood. It is true that in the thirdline was the word "tabiled", which looked like Hebrew, and in thelast the purely French words "mer", "arc", "mere.""
All this was enough to drive a poor fellow crazy. Four differentlanguages in this ridiculous sentence! What connection could therepossibly be between such words as ice, sir, anger, cruel, sacredwood, changeable, mother, bow, and sea? The first and the last mighthave something to do with each other; it was not at all surprisingthat in a document written in Iceland there should be mention of asea of ice; but it was quite another thing to get to the end of thiscryptogram with so small a clue. So I was struggling with aninsurmountable difficulty; my brain got heated, my eyes watered overthat sheet of paper; its hundred and thirty-two letters seemed toflutter and fly around me like those motes of mingled light anddarkness which float in the air around the head when the blood isrushing upwards with undue violence. I was a prey to a kind ofhallucination; I was stifling; I wanted air. Unconsciously I fannedmyself with the bit of paper, the back and front of whichsuccessively came before my eyes. What was my surprise when, in oneof those rapid revolutions, at the moment when the back was turned tome I thought I caught sight of the Latin words "craterem,""terrestre," and others.
A sudden light burst in upon me; these hints alone gave me the firstglimpse of the truth; I had discovered the key to the cipher. To readthe document, it would not even be necessary to read it through thepaper. Such as it was, just such as it had been dictated to me, so itmight be spelt out with ease. All those ingenious professorialcombinations were coming right. He was right as to the arrangement ofthe letters; he was right as to the language. He had been within ahair's breadth of reading this Latin document from end to end; butthat hair's breadth, chance had given it to me!
You may be sure I felt stirred up. My eyes were dim, I could scarcelysee. I had laid the paper upon the table. At a glance I could tellthe whole secret.
At last I became more calm. I made a wise resolve to walk twice roundthe room quietly and settle my nerves, and then I returned into thedeep gulf of the huge armchair.
"Now I'll read it," I cried, after having well distended my lungswith air.
I leaned over the table; I laid my finger successively upon everyletter; and without a pause, without one moment's hesitation, I readoff the whole sentence aloud.
Stupefaction! terror! I sat overwhelmed as if with a sudden deadlyblow. What! that which I read had actually, really been done! Amortal man had had the audacity to penetrate! . . .
"Ah!" I cried, springing up. "But no! no! My uncle shall never knowit. He would insist upon doing it too. He would want to know allabout it. Ropes could not hold him, such a determined geologist as heis! He would start, he would, in spite of everything and everybody,and he would take me with him, and we should never get back. No,never! never!"
My over-excitement was beyond all description.
"No! no! it shall not be," I declared energetically; "and as it is inmy power to prevent the knowledge of it coming into the mind of mytyrant, I will do it. By dint of turning this document round andround, he too might discover the key. I will destroy it."
There was a little fire left on the hearth. I seized not only thepaper but Saknussemm's parchment; with a feverish hand I was about tofling it all upon the coals and utterly destroy and abolish thisdangerous secret, when the study door opened, and my uncle appeared.