Jules Verne (32 page)

The magistrate's fingers commenced to beat a tattoo on his desk—a kind
of reveille to arouse his dormant faculties.

"Let us see," he said, "how many letters there are in the paragraph."

He counted them, pen in hand.

"Two hundred and seventy-six!" he said. "Well, now let us try what
proportion these different letters bear to each other."

This occupied him for some time. The judge took up the document, and,
with his pen in his hand, he noted each letter in alphabetical order.

In a quarter of an hour he had obtained the following table:

    
a
=  3 times
    
b
=  4  —
    
c
=  3  —
    
d
= 16  —
    
e
=  9  —
    
f
= 10  —
    
g
= 13  —
    
h
= 23  —
    
i
=  4  —
    
j
=  8  —
    
k
=  9  —
    
l
=  9  —
    
m
=  9  —
    
n
=  9  —
    
o
= 12  —
    
p
= 16  —
    
q
= 16  —
    
r
= 12  —
    
s
= 10  —
    
t
=  8  —
    
u
= 17  —
    
v
= 13  —
    
x
= 12  —
    
y
= 19  —
    
z
= 12  —
—————
Total... 276 times.

"Ah, ah!" he exclaimed. "One thing strikes me at once, and that is that
in this paragraph all the letters of the alphabet are not used. That is
very strange. If we take up a book and open it by chance it will be
very seldom that we shall hit upon two hundred and seventy-six letters
without all the signs of the alphabet figuring among them. After all, it
may be chance," and then he passed to a different train of thought.
"One important point is to see if the vowels and consonants are in their
normal proportion."

And so he seized his pen, counted up the vowels, and obtained the
following result:

    
a
=  3 times
    
e
=  9  —
    
i
=  4  —
    
o
= 12  —
    
u
= 17  —
    
y
= 19  —
—————
Total... 276 times.

"And thus there are in this paragraph, after we have done our
subtraction, sixty-four vowels and two hundred and twelve consonants.
Good! that is the normal proportion. That is about a fifth, as in the
alphabet, where there are six vowels among twenty-six letters. It is
possible, therefore, that the document is written in the language of our
country, and that only the signification of each letter is changed. If
it has been modified in regular order, and a
b
is always represented
by an
l,
and
o
by a
v,
a
g
by a
k,
an
u
by an
r,
etc., I
will give up my judgeship if I do not read it. What can I do better than
follow the method of that great analytical genius, Edgar Allan Poe?"

Judge Jarriquez herein alluded to a story by the great American
romancer, which is a masterpiece. Who has not read the "Gold Bug?" In
this novel a cryptogram, composed of ciphers, letters, algebraic signs,
asterisks, full-stops, and commas, is submitted to a truly mathematical
analysis, and is deciphered under extraordinary conditions, which the
admirers of that strange genius can never forget. On the reading of the
American document depended only a treasure, while on that of this
one depended a man's life. Its solution was consequently all the more
interesting.

The magistrate, who had often read and re-read his "Gold Bug," was
perfectly acquainted with the steps in the analysis so minutely
described by Edgar Poe, and he resolved to proceed in the same way on
this occasion. In doing so he was certain, as he had said, that if
the value or signification of each letter remained constant, he would,
sooner or later, arrive at the solution of the document.

"What did Edgar Poe do?" he repeated. "First of all he began by finding
out the sign—here there are only letters, let us say the letter—which
was reproduced the oftenest. I see that that is
h,
for it is met with
twenty-three times. This enormous proportion shows, to begin with, that
h
does not stand for
h,
but, on the contrary, that it represents the
letter which recurs most frequently in our language, for I suppose
the document is written in Portuguese. In English or French it would
certainly be
e,
in Italian it would be
i
or
a,
in Portuguese it
will be
a
or
o
. Now let us say that it signifies
a
or
o."

After this was done, the judge found out the letter which recurred most
frequently after
h,
and so on, and he formed the following table:

    
h
= 23 times
    
y
= 19  —
    
u
= 17  —
  
d p q
= 16  —
   
g v
= 13  —
 
o r x z
= 12  —
   
f s
= 10  —
e k l m n
=  9  —
   
j t
=  8  —
   
b i
=  8  —
   
a c
=  8  —

"Now the letter
a
only occurs thrice!" exclaimed the judge, "and it
ought to occur the oftenest. Ah! that clearly proves that the meaning
had been changed. And now, after
a
or
o,
what are the letters which
figure oftenest in our language? Let us see," and Judge Jarriquez, with
truly remarkable sagacity, which denoted a very observant mind, started
on this new quest. In this he was only imitating the American romancer,
who, great analyst as he was, had, by simple induction, been able to
construct an alphabet corresponding to the signs of the cryptogram and
by means of it to eventually read the pirate's parchment note with ease.

The magistrate set to work in the same way, and we may affirm that he
was no whit inferior to his illustrious master. Thanks to his previous
work at logogryphs and squares, rectangular arrangements and other
enigmas, which depend only on an arbitrary disposition of the letters,
he was already pretty strong in such mental pastimes. On this
occasion he sought to establish the order in which the letters were
reproduced—vowels first, consonants afterward.

Three hours had elapsed since he began. He had before his eyes an
alphabet which, if his procedure were right, would give him the right
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.

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.

"Sir," 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 on an
u
or an
n
or an
f,
or any other letter."

"And then?"

"And then, I am sorry to say, the cryptogram is indecipherable."

"Indecipherable!" exclaimed Manoel. "No, sir; we shall end by finding
the key of the document on which the man's life depends."

Manoel had risen, a prey to the excitement he could not control; the
reply he had received was too hopeless, and he refused to accept it for
good.

At a gesture from the judge, however, he sat down again, and in a calmer
voice asked:

"And in the first place, sir, what makes you think that the basis of
this document is a number, or, as you call it, a cipher?"

"Listen to me, young man," replied the judge, "and you will be forced to
give in to the evidence."

The magistrate took the document and put it before the eyes of Manoel
and showed him what he had done.

"I began," he said, "by treating this document in the proper way, that
is to say, logically, leaving nothing to chance. I applied to it an
alphabet based on the proportion the letters bear to one another
which is usual in our language, and I sought to obtain the meaning by
following the precepts of our immortal analyst, Edgar Poe. Well, what
succeeded with him collapsed with me."

"Collapsed!" exclaimed Manoel.

"Yes, my dear young man, and I at once saw that success sought in that
fashion was impossible. In truth, a stronger man than I might have been
deceived."

"But I should like to understand," said Manoel, "and I do not—"

"Take the document," continued Judge Jarriquez; "first look at the
disposition of the letters, and read it through."

Manoel obeyed.

"Do you not see that the combination of several of the letters is very
strange?" asked the magistrate.

"I do not see anything," said Manoel, after having for perhaps the
hundredth time read through the document.

"Well! study the last paragraph! There you understand the sense of the
whole is bound to be summed up. Do you see anything abnormal?"

"Nothing."

"There is, however, one thing which absolutely proves that the language
is subject to the laws of number."

"And that is?"

"That is that you see three
h's
coming together in two different
places."

What Jarriquez said was correct, and it was of a nature to attract
attention. The two hundred and fourth, two hundred and fifth, and two
hundred and sixth letters of the paragraph, and the two hundred and
fifty-eight, two hundred and fifty-ninth, and two hundred and sixtieth
letters of the paragraph were consecutive
h's
. At first this
peculiarity had not struck the magistrate.

"And that proves?" asked Manoel, without divining the deduction that
could be drawn from the combination.

"That simply proves that the basis of the document is a number. It shows
à priori
that each letter is modified in virtue of the ciphers of the
number and according to the place which it occupies."

"And why?"

"Because in no language will you find words with three consecutive
repetitions of the letter
h."