The Glyphs/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I.
IT is impossible for me to decide, even to this day, whether the learned Doctor Morgano was an inspired genius or a crack-brained fool.
He had the strangest set of vices of any man I have ever known. If he desired something that he couldn’t buy, he had not the slightest hesitancy in stealing it. If he was in funds, which was seldom, he made it a rule to pay his debts, and then to give away all he had left to the most palpable leeches, tramps, vagabonds, and utterly worthless women of the Quartier Latin where I first met him.
When out of funds and low in credit he drank heavily of the cheapest drinks and—got drunk! In funds, and with credit restored, he became almost abstemious, drinking nothing but rare vintages, which he sipped in obscure cafés, thoughtfully smacking his lean lips and for long, ecstatic pauses eying the ceiling, the trees visible through open windows, and sometimes condescending to lower his eyes to the mere human side of the spectacle, even as a god given to lofty dreams might pityingly deign to observe the movements of ants in a neighboring hill. Sober he was silent, ascetic; drunk he sang Goliardic songs. He was a splendid liar. Sometimes I used to think he lied merely that he might entertain, enliven, or inspire those who sought the solace of his company. He lied about a hundred things; but, so far as I ever knew, never lied to save himself. If these be virtues, he merits a statue. If they are crimes, he should have been hanged before his progress was extended beyond the first quarter of his allotted span.
Personally, I don’t care much one way or the other, because I laughed at him, derided him; laughed with him, and now, unlike Antony, come not to bury this dead Cæsar, but to praise. I take the unsanctioned liberty because it was characteristic of him in life that whenever he stole anything he said so and therefore I am certain he would not object to this childishly frank recountal of our adventures. If he filched a tablecloth from the invitingly open window of a mansion on the decent side of the Seine and within an hour made of it a present to some gray-haired old concierge on the other side, he never neglected to inform the recipient that it was pilfered. Why, then, following his own self-imposed rule, shouldn’t I write? I presume that he is no longer alive, for doubtless he would have told the tale himself had he survived. I was too good a friend of his to neglect this habitual clearance of record now that he is dead. Hence my written accounting!
In was in 1912 that I returned to my old stamping ground in the Quarter from an expedition into and across Africa that was not entirely too legitimate, I am convinced, but an expedition in which I had been duped to lead the way by a bunch of presumably German barons who presumably wished to make a mere trip for exploration and sport. I have since learned that they were more interested in making maps than in the indulgence of the sporting instinct; but they paid all they agreed to pay—in fact, paid well. They sought and secured my services because they wanted an out-of-doors man, and I am that. They learned somehow, and how they learned I have never known, that I had been in most of the out-of-the-way places of the globe from the Arctic to Tibet, and from the Mountains of the Rif to the Mountains of the Moon; that I had been an ivory poacher in Africa, and a fur poacher in Siberia; that, to paraphrase the estimable Francois Villon, I was “handy with gun, guts, and grub.”
I earned the money they paid. Also I earned the quiet, semibohemian rest that followed in the beloved haunts of my youth—there in the graying majestic part of Paris where I am at home. And so, enough of myself summarized in this: that I was somewhat known, was considered an adventurer neither unscrupulous nor overly scrupulous, a man beginning to show white hair in a clipped mustache, a man beginning to have much tolerance for the weaknesses of other men, and capable of keeping his mouth shut concerning mere peccadillos, fantasies, and frailties. A man who had a little money, was not averse to taking legitimate chances for more, and was unafraid. No hero at all, you see, but just an ordinary individual such as may be found in similar places in any big city on earth from Liverpool to Lacadiva, Singapore to Seattle, or Peking to Paris.
Doctor Morgano was known in Rome, London, New York, Leipsic, Cairo, and Paris as an archæologist always out of a job. His specialty was deciphering hieroglyphics that other renowned professors and doctors couldn’t read, collecting money for the knowledge, writing learned treatises upon such subjects, and riotously spending the revenues thus gained.
He newer prospered, owing to his deficiencies. I use the last word charitably, perhaps; but the fact is that once a delegation of learned men from the Royal Society sought converse with him and went to Leipsic, where he declined to talk to them because he was playing pinochle in a beer garden; an agent for the Metropolitan Museum in New York went to Cairo to offer him a life job, which the doctor declined because he couldn’t part from association with a dirty old Arab mystic for whom he had conceived a liking; the Royal Museum offered him a place as a sort of honored curator, but he was at the moment engrossed in a profound study of the habits, systems, and social amenities of snails, and so couldn’t accept.
There you have the man. One who liked money to spend on others, but didn’t like to take much trouble to get it, but could be quite content if he hadn’t a centime in his purse; one who could be inordinately industrious in the study of a foolish hobby, but was too devilish lazy to make an honest living merely to pay his bills and be comfortable.
And this was the man who, on a summer’s night in 1912, came to the vacant chair on the opposite side of the little, black, marble-topped liqueur-stained table on the pave in front of the Pantheon Café and said, in his soft, broken, foreign-tainted English:
“Ah! It is Signor Henri Hallewell, for whom I have so long looked. It is the signor who is back from—ees eet the sun, moon, or some star? We shall drink if my friend has the money to pay. As for me—thee renowned Signor Doctore—must ordair no more until I have more money! But, the Signor Henri is my guest! Some day I shall pay him. Now, let’s have somesing vairy good to drink—somesing extraordinaire, because this is une grande occasion! I have to-day stolen from a private collection some tablets that have geeven to me thee secrits of a long-dead race! Ah! I am still ze maitre of fools!”
I couldn’t make much from this. The fact that he had stolen something he desired wasn’t sufficiently peculiar to arouse my interest or curiosity. I knew he’d steal anything he wanted and couldn’t otherwise get. He had no moral sense in regard to property. It was his if he could get away with it—a most simple and satisfying creed. I remember, however, that I was impressed with the premise that this must have been a particularly shocking theft from the fact that he talked to me in English; because on ordinary occasions he discoursed in the Italian tongue, with which I am, through early years spent in Italy, as much at home as was he. I spare you who may read this the tortuous winding and mispronunciation of his words, and, incidentally, spare myself the trouble of phonetic spelling, by a most liberal interpretation of what he said as he leaned across that tiny table and told me the story that started me off with him into a singular if not particularly interesting adventure. An adventure into tropical jungles; into places where miasma hung like a shroud of death to bar our steps where there were deadly things; where each serpeant carried the coup de grace behind its laden and waiting fangs; where each insect was the bearer of the keys to another world; where each human being was an enemy, and where a scratch from a thorn might hurl one to earth a writhing, tormented thing until death gave welcomed release.
“I have to-day discovered,” he said impressively, as he leaned across the table, “the key to the glyphs of Guatemala!” He waited for me to express my astonishment and appeared disappointed when I did not immediately enthuse.
“I’m mighty glad to hear that,” I said politely. “I didn’t know the keys had been lost. If the chap that lost them is liberal he should pay you well. I found a bunch of keys one time in Naples that”
“By the love of our lady! Hear him jest! Hear him!” he muttered in an awed voice that carried the singular effect of a scream of outrage, and I knew by the fact that he spoke in his native tongue that he was actually shocked and talking of me as a third person. “I find the key to the symbols of a lost race—a race which has hitherto been in the darkness of past and unknown ages—the story of the old, old world, and he, this man, jests! I find that for which great minds have earnestly sought since the very days of Hernando Cortez and Las Casas, the lost hand for which in vain strove Brasseur de Bourburg to guide him in his research, and this man—this damned Philistine—gibes!”
Pitying him for his suffering and myself for my intense ignorance, I said: “Well, if you’ve found the key to something, and it’s worth keeping, or selling, worth hanging up or using, suppose you tell us about it. You’ve mentioned Cortez, the Spanish explorer of the sixteenth century, I presume. Also I know that old Las Casas was about as good a historian as he was peaceable friar; but I’ve never heard of this chap Brasseur de Bourburg. He’s a new one on me. Whom did he torture and, if he did, what’s it got to do with your stealing something for which you may get pinched? What has that to do with a key and with glyphs? Glyphs? What are glyphs, anyhow?”
“Glyphs, my friend,” he said, after sadly shaking himself and presumably at my expense ordering another drink, “glyphs are—are—carving on stones and other things. Carving that were made on stone by the lost races of the Central American isthmus—hieroglyphics of the Maya race there, of the Quicha race in Peru, and all those peoples who were civilized and old when Egypt was young. In vain for centuries have men tried to read them. In vain have they endeavored to lift the veil from that long-dead past—to read the history written in imperishable stone. And it is I—I—Morgano, who have accomplished where others failed!”
He leaned back, rounded his eyes, thumped his chest with both fists, and haughtily stared at me as if expecting me to get up and give three cheers or to pay the exaggerated deference due to a great conqueror!
But I didn’t. I yawned, much to his obvious contempt, and said: “Well? Go ahead. Tell us all about it. What has that to do with me? You don’t think I’m running an exploration society, do you?”
“I think,” he said hopelessly, “that you’re an incurable fool!” And then, after a moment’s deliberation: “No, I shouldn’t say that! I retract. I think you don’t understand. I think you are the one man I can trust who will help me. You know the ways of the inaccessible hills; of deserts, and of snows; of forests and of jungles! You know how to help me to get to the places where I must go. To where I, Doctor Morgano, the wasted, and despised, and dissolute, may read the secrets of the lost races of the world and perhaps fill in the lost pages of man’s life on this earth. You are the man who may be the instrument to recover much that knowledge has lost. You, the veteran adventurer, wise and experienced, I the man who would be lost, panic-stricken, mad, when removed from the concomitants of civilization as we know it. If I could but make you see; make you understand; make you appreciate the opportunity!”
He paused, despondently, as if appalled by the perplexing task of getting either an idea or enthusiasm through my skull, then suddenly brightened and leaned across to whisper: “Who knows? There might be treasure in it. The finding of long-hidden jewels, stores of golden ingots, great bars of silver! But,” he added hastily and harshly when he saw that I was at last fully interested, “the archæological treasures shall be mine! Mine, you understand, for it would not do for priceless relics to be sullied by falling into ignorant and profane hands!”
“Meaning mine, I suppose,” I said with some sarcasm.
“Of course I mean yours,” he had no hesitancy in replying. The doctor was never very polite.
I laughed. He didn’t seem to mind any more than did that historic philosopher mentioned by Rameses who merely considered the source of insult when kicked by a mule. And then, remembering that I could use considerable more money than I possessed, and that a man can scarcely retire for life on five or six thousand dollars, I began to ponder over what he had so astutely suggested. I recall that I was fascinated by a little pool of wine spilled on the black marble and that it reminded me of a black lake in the midst of a black jungle, a lake of death such as I had once seen in the heart of Africa and into whose sullen depths I had seen disappear for the last time the face of a friend. I can’t tell why I was so strangely affected by this flash of imagination; but I do know that I must have momentarily forgotten the doctor, for his voice startled me when he said: “Come, come! What is the matter?” For an instant I was bewildered and astonished by the fact that I was still here in Paris, that the table was still there, and that Doctor Morgano was staring at me in a puzzled way.
“Nothing, nothing!” I replied hastily.
“Mon Dieu! I thought you saw a ghost!” he exclaimed, and then reverting to his own enthusiasm: “It is better that we go to my rooms to talk. I will there show you something.”
“All right. Let’s go now,” I said, getting to my feet and—to be honest—rather eager to get away from that nasty little black pool that had so strangely disturbed me.
With an air of satisfaction, quite as if he regarded this as a step in advance along his path of enterprise, the doctor walked by my side and directed the way. He talked breathlessly, en route, of lost peoples, of the Atalantis theory that civilization sprang from the West instead of the East and that a continent had been submerged; that perhaps the seat of civilization had been along the great Panama Isthmus and the northern portion of South America; of archæological mysteries in Guatemala and Peru; of Aztecs and Mayas, Incas and Quichuas and a dozen people I had not thought of since being bored stiff by their recountal when cramming for my school examinations.
Indeed, so fast had I led the pace and so steadily had he talked that he was somewhat breathless when we came to the door of the tall old building in that narrow ancient street of the Rue Beaux Arts that straggles, narrow and obscure, away from the Rue Buonaparte. The big doors were still open and the concierge merely glared at us through the window, identified the doctor with a sniff that suggested that his rent was overdue, and we began to climb flight after flight of stone stairs, all in darkness save when lighted now and then by a wax match which my conductor scratched to assist me over treacherous portions of the ascent. The place smelled of garlic, of herbs, of fish, and of paints. From the fact that the doctor’s quarters were exactly under the tiles I surmised that he had not been in funds for some time. But evidently his gas bill had been paid, because the room was remarkably well lighted by an exceptionally good chandelier. I looked at it with admiration.
“I must have good lights for my work,” he explained when he saw my look. “That is a most excellent light. Excellent! Most excellent! Came from the house of Monsieur le Duc de Angoulême when it was being renovated. It was of far less importance that the duke rather than a savant be without such a light.” He chuckled as if amused. “The workman who stole it for me asked but five francs for it!”
I had time to look about me. The place was like a junk shop. It had more worthless plunder in it than I had even seen collected outside a museum. It was the untidiest room I ever saw, and I have dwelt, storm-bound, in an Eskimo barrabara which I had hitherto regarded as the limit of dirt. Actually, the floor was so covered with papers, books, chunks of stone, and pieces of marble, that one followed a trail to get to a chair from which the doctor unceremoniously dumped a pile of manuscript and invited me to be seated. His worktable was littered with dishes and the remnants of a home-cooked meal. This débris he made into a pile and deposited on the floor, after which he unlocked his desk and produced therefrom, carefully swathed, several stone tablets.
“Behold,” he cried, “the Glyphs! The key to the break in the history of the world.”
They looked to me like a few slabs on which an apprentice to a tombstone maker had been practicing his chisels; but the doctor was so evidently enthused and happy over them that I hadn’t the cruelty to bring him back to earth.
“To think,” he said with something like tragic agitation, “that these priceless, peerless jewels have been for years, perhaps hundreds of years, in the filthy hands of some idle, ignorant ass of a curio collector, while scientists such as I have unearthed buried cities, lost temples, removed mountains of sand to find them! Braved deserts and death, endured hardships untold, while all the time these were reposing here in Paris! Faugh! Sapristi! ’Tis enough to make one doubt the existence of a Supreme Being. There they are! Gaze upon them.”
I tried to appear spellbound. He actually fell to caressing them with his long, lean, unclean fingers. For the moment he was certainly mad. His eyes, wildly lighted and glowing, betrayed insanity as surely as I’m here. His leathery, clean-shaven lips twisted as if he were mentally uttering an incantation to strange gods. He looked like Mephistopheles gloating over an acquisition of lost souls.
“These,” he said, patting them, “are key stones; as if some tutor had cut a full alphabet to instruct children how to read!”
I thought to myself that those ancient schoolmasters must have been a lot of bone-heads not to have been able to invent simpler alphabets than those. I was deucedly glad I didn’t have to go to school in those times; for I’m convinced I should have remained illiterate all my life.
“Look to me like a lot of funny faces made accidentally by drunken slugs on a garden path,” I said, and he opened his lips to anathematize me, I think, when we were suddenly aware that some one with heavy feet was ascending the stairs. The doctor abruptly, nay hurriedly, thrust his stone quarry back into the drawers of the desk and listened intently. The concierge’s voice could be heard volubly discoursing, and then there was a breathless moment while we listened to learn if they were passing our door; but they didn’t. There was a sharp, staccato rapping, and the archæologist with a frown made his way to the door and opened it. A large, fat sergeant de ville stood there puffing after his long climb, and wheezed out an interrogatory “Doctor Paolo Morgano?”
“Yes. What do you wish?” replied my host with surprising coolness and sang-froid, although I’ll bet his heart was thumping a tattoo on his lean ribs.
“I should like to come inside. Official business, monsieur,” he said, somewhat pompously.
“Why certainly. Come in,” the doctor replied, throwing the door wide and beckoning a graceful invitation to the policeman.
His manner appeared to somewhat overawe the officer, which takes a bit of doing in Paris, as I have sometimes learned to my cost. But so frank, so cool was this old rascal that he could have befooled a much smarter policeman than that fat sergeant.
“Some curios have been stolen from the house of Monsieur Beauvaix in the Bois.”
“Oh,” said the doctor thoughtfully. “Monsieur Beauvaix the—let me think Ah! the man who made a fortune out of soap fat and who is the biggest fool of a collector in all Paris! I remember now. He asked me to inspect and catalogue his precious stuff and after one look I told him it was not worth his while. That was rubbish—all rubbish! Who could have been fool enough to steal anything from him?”
“That is what my superior wishes to learn,” replied the officer dryly. “He sent me to notify all collectors in Paris to watch for them. The objects stolen were some stone tablets”
The doctor suddenly doubled over with laughter, much to my astonishment as well as the agent’s, and then, to my much greater surprise, said: “Ah! that explains it. Wait a moment, monsieur. Just a moment.” And then he actually walked to the desk, pulled the glyphs out and held them toward the policeman, who blinked at them, handled them, and said as if to himself: “Yes, one had a carving that looked like a sheep’s head and another had snakes and Perhaps Monsieur le Doctor will tell me how these came into his possession?” he ended rather sternly.
“Vraiment! Easily,” declared the doctor without the slightest sign of annoyance, or anything other than of extreme candor. “A gamin stopped me on the street at the foot of my stairs the other night and said he had heard that I sometimes purchased funny stones. He showed me these. I bought them there in the darkness for two francs. Ha! Ha! that gamin got my two francs for nothing. He fooled me—Doctor Paolo Morgano—member of a dozen distinguished archæological societies, author of a thousand monographs, originator of the Morganic theory of Egyptian decadence.” Again he doubled over with a pretense of mirth that was sufficiently well simulated to fool even me. I wondered if he had not actually been “stringing” me all that evening. I was convinced of it when he carelessly shoved the tablets into the policeman’s hands and said, sarcastically: “You are most welcome to them. Take them back to the soap man; but for heaven’s sake, monsieur, don’t tell any one about me. It would cause a laugh in every renowned society in Europe that I, Doctor Paolo Morgano, should have been bilked of two francs by a mere gamin of the streets of Paris, an impudent little ragamuffin of a thief who might as well have sold me a parcel of bricks or cobblestones!”
He actually got away with it. The sergeant de ville laughed boisterously. I pretended to do likewise. The doctor slapped the policeman on the back as if overcome with mirth. The concierge opened the door and stared in as if wishing to hear the joke. And then the officer carelessly tied a piece of string around the tablets, Doctor Morgano assisted him to wrap them in an old copy of Le Matin, and, still chuckling at such a fine joke, the sergeant apologized for disturbing so renowned a savant, and disappeared. We were motionless and listening until the steps died away down the well of the staircase. The doctor went to the door, opened it, tiptoed out into the darkness, and, I think, hung over the upper banister. I wondered if this madman had been having a little fun with me, and was half inclined to resentment until he returned, carefully shut the door, and threw a pair of frenzied, gesticulatory hands into the air above his head and burst into a stream of Italian objurgation.
“Think of it! Those precious stones—worth their weight in diamonds or pearls—being carried through the streets by a policeman and back to the house of that father of all asses! That unspeakable, impossible ignoramus of a soap-fat boiler, Beauvaix! What a tragedy! Tragedy! Suppose something should happen to them? Suppose they should be lost?”
He clutched his fingers through his hair and threatened to pick a few handfuls, and I thought it best to calm him.
“Steady, doctor! Steady! Don’t take it too much to heart. Beauvaix will doubtless let you look at them again,” I remonstrated.
He suddenly relaxed, grinned, and said: “I don’t need to look at them again to know their semblance. I took care to make a carbon rubbing and two exact copies of them in indelible ink.” He paused and then added quite hopefully, “And, furthermore, I can steal them again when I want them. They’ll be safer there, perhaps, than in this room. Old Beauvaix is like a custodian at the Cluny Musée—doesn’t know the value of what he keeps, but keeps it well! I think he suspected me. Otherwise I’d not have given them up so easily. You can readily understand,” he said almost apologetically, “that it wouldn’t have done at all for me to be arrested just now when time is so essential. We must hurry to our enterprise. We must!”
“What’s the rush?” I asked in plain Americanese.
“Rush? I suppose that means haste. What is the haste, monsieur my friend? Simply this: that I am nearly sixty years of age; that in me reposes a great secret; that my life is to-day more precious than that of any man on earth because of the knowledge that is herein contained!”
And he thumped his head with his knuckles as if to impress upon me the idea that he was thumping a treasure box of exceeding worth. He glared at me with an enormous solemnity, his round eyes, large, black, and inscrutable-looking as if struggling to pop out from the confining caverns of thatched, overhanging eyebrows which twitched nervously above them.
“Now, the tablets have left my possession. That is settled. You seek treasure. I seek knowledge. You know the material side of how to live while penetrating into savage places. I don’t. You know what such expeditions cost. I don’t. So it seems that we are partners.”
I wasn’t so sure of this. I hadn’t fully taken it on, although I admit that it sounded mighty attractive. I’ve always maintained a sort of sneaking love for the idea of hidden treasure, ever since, as a boy, I read “Treasure Island.” What boy with red blood in his veins hasn’t? It’s no disgrace, and isn’t disreputable, as far as I can reason.
“But,” I objected dubiously, “I don’t have the remotest idea of how much it would cost to get to Guatemala. I don’t even know what the steamer fares would be. I’ve never been there. Then there is the question of labor—packers and such—a safari, as we call it in Africa. All those details mean money. How are we to get it?”
“Oh, that,” said Doctor Morgano with an air of boredom, “is nothing. That is for you to accomplish. Maybe you have it. Maybe it could be borrowed from somebody. Maybe you could get it from some bank. I have noticed that banks most always have a lot of money around in trays behind glass cases. It’s no good there. Why couldn’t you go and get some of that? Perhaps if you told them you wanted a little of it for an urgent need, they’d let you have some of it. Of course, if we find a lot of treasure stored away somewhere, we’d give it back to them and a lot more beside. We can’t afford to be ungenerous or stingy, can we?”
As if all obstacles had been successfully negotiated, he bade me good night. It was not until, still in a maze, I was halfway down the five flights of stairs that the full measure of his absurdities dawned upon me, and I had to lean against the wall and laugh.