meaning of the letters in the document. He had only to successively
apply the letters of his alphabet to those of his paragraph. But
before making this application some slight emotion seized upon the
judge. He fully experienced the intellectual gratification–much
greater than, perhaps, would be thought–of the man who, after hours
of obstinate endeavor, saw the impatiently sought-for sense of the
logogryph coming into view.
“Now let us try,” he said; “and I shall be very much surprised if I
have not got the solution of the enigma!”
Judge Jarriquez took off his spectacles and wiped the glasses; then
he put them back again and bent over the table. His special alphabet
was in one hand, the cryptogram in the other. He commenced to write
under the first line of the paragraph the true letters, which,
according to him, ought to correspond exactly with each of the
cryptographic letters. As with the first line so did he with the
second, and the third, and the fourth, until he reached the end of
the paragraph.
Oddity as he was, he did not stop to see as he wrote if the
assemblage of letters made intelligible words. No; during the first
stage his mind refused all verification of that sort. What he desired
was to give himself the ecstasy of reading it all straight off at
once.
And now he had done.
“Let us read!” he exclaimed.
And he read. Good heavens! what cacophony! The lines he had formed
with the letters of his alphabet had no more sense in them that those
of the document! It was another series of letters, and that was all.
They formed no word; they had no value. In short, they were just as
hieroglyphic.
“Confound the thing!” exclaimed Judge Jarriquez.
CHAPTER XIII
IS IT A MATTER OF FIGURES?
IT WAS SEVEN o’clock in the evening. Judge Jarriquez had all the time
been absorbed in working at the puzzle–and was no further
advanced–and had forgotten the time of repast and the time of
repose, when there came a knock at his study door.
It was time. An hour later, and all the cerebral substance of the
vexed magistrate would certainly have evaporated under the intense
heat into which he had worked his head.
At the order to enter–which was given in an impatient tone–the door
opened and Manoel presented himself.
The young doctor had left his friends on board the jangada at work on
the indecipherable document, and had come to see Judge Jarriquez. He
was anxious to know if he had been fortunate in his researches. He
had come to ask if he had at length discovered the system on which
the cryptogram had been written.
The magistrate was not sorry to see Manoel come in. He was in that
state of excitement that solitude was exasperating to him. He wanted
some one to speak to, some one as anxious to penetrate the mystery as
he was. Manoel was just the man.
“Wir,” said Manoel as he entered, “one question! Have you succeeded
better than we have?”
“Sit down first,” exclaimed Judge Jarriquez, who got up and began to
pace the room. “Sit down. If we are both of us standing, you will
walk one way and I shall walk the other, and the room will be too
narrow to hold us.”
Manoel sat down and repeated his question.
“No! I have not had any success!” replied the magistrate; “I do not
think I am any better off. I have got nothing to tell you; but I have
found out a certainty.”
“What is that, sir?”
“That the document is not based on conventional signs, but on what is
known in cryptology as a cipher, that is to say, on a number.”
“Well, sir,” answered Manoel, “cannot a document of that kind always
be read?”
“Yes,” said Jarriquez, “if a letter is invariably represented by the
same letter; if an _a,_ for example, is always a _p,_ and a _p_ is
always an _x;_ if not, it cannot.”
“And in this document?”
“In this document the value of the letter changes with the
arbitrarily selected cipher which necessitates it. So a _b_ will in
one place be represented by a _k_ will later on become a _z,_ later