Page:Amazing Stories Volume 10 Number 13.djvu/109

Rh a greater interest in the square heads and mandibles of the soldiers than his readers are likely to share.—Note.)

Our most important discovery was made ten days later, when at the very heart of the termitarium we found a lump of cement so nearly cylindrical that it might almost have been shaped by human instruments. Applying acid to melt the cement away, we came upon a roll of paper-thin, flexible metal, scarred with perforations such as appear on the roll of a player piano. Apparently it consisted of a material that the white ants, disliking it, had sealed away.

Corker was much excited, insisting that the roll had been constructed by human hands. The assertion convicted him out of his own mouth, since humans did not exist on earth for a million years after the subtropical Miocene days; and I pointed out with some acerbity that he was contradicting himself as to the termitarium's age. Corker, though ordinarily as self-opinionated a man as you will meet in a month of Sundays, admitted the inconsistency, and suggested that the roll be offered to experts for examination. I made no objection, though I didn't like his acting as though the honor of the discovery was automatically his. After all, I was the entomologist of the party.

HE philologist and code expert with whom we consulted in Paris was a young man with a furtive glance and big ears. I fancy that he took days to stumble on the analogy between the metal roll and the familiar player piano recordings—which I, as you will recall, had remarked immediately; Corker maintains that he first spoke of the resemblance, but he is trying to steal the credit due me, as is his habit—but in the end he appeared at our rooms with a caterwauling talking-machine. Corker and I had left further excavations to Spada and Hyde, and were staying in a rooming house on the Left Bank (Rue Saint Jacques) with no occupation but cribbage and arguments.

"You understand, zhentlemen," he explained, waving the crank to the phonograph as though it were an orchestra conductor's baton, "zat zese sounds bear not no relation to zose eentended by ze maker of ze roll, eef he wass trying to make sounds at all."

It was difficult to understand him; he spoke English as badly as most Frenchmen speak French. Apparently, however, he was trying to tell us that whether the slots represented sounds or written words, their relationship to one another would be preserved by a properly adjusted string instrument, thus giving the effect of music, or of speech in a foreign tongue. These were transposed phonetically, replaced by their alphabetical counter-part, and pouf! there was your code.

"But you have no key," I pointed out.

"Zere, my cher Dr. Whitehead, you err," he said, his big, red ears wiggling with the effort of English speech. "Eef you regard ze page close-lee, you see zat we have brought out one picture of ze ant—"

"Termite," I corrected, examining it.

"—Or termite—which évidement she ees named by ze slot dessous. Pictures weez correspondant slot-