I sorted, labeled, and arranged all these hollow rocks, in each of which grew little crystals, in their display case.

But this work did not absorb all my attention. The business of the old document kept working in my brain. My head throbbed with excitement, and I felt a vague uneasiness. I had a premonition of an incipient disaster.

In an hour my nodules were all arranged in good order. Then I dropped down into the old velvet armchair, my arms hanging down and my head thrown back. I lit my long crooked pipe, whose head was sculpted to look like an idly resting naiad; then I entertained myself by watching the carbonization that gradually turned my naiad into a real negress. Now and then I listened whether a well-known step sounded on the stairs. But no. Where could my uncle be at that moment? I imagined him running under the beautiful trees which line the road to Altona, gesticulating, hitting the wall with his cane, violently thrashing the grass, cutting the heads off the thistles, and disturbing the solitary storks in their rest.

Would he return in triumph or discouraged? Which would get the upper hand, he or the secret? I was asking myself these questions, and mechanically took between my fingers the sheet of paper with the incomprehensible succession of letters I had written down; and I repeated to myself:

“What does it mean?”

I tried to group the letters so as to form words. Quite impossible! When I put them together by twos, threes, fives or sixes, nothing came of it but nonsense. To be sure, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth letters made the English word ‘ice’; the eighty-fourth, eighty-fifth and eighty-sixth made up the word ‘sir.’ In the midst of the document, in the third line, I noticed the Latin words “rota,” “mutabile,” “ira,” “nec,” “atra.”

“Devil,” I thought, “these words seem to justify my uncle’s view about the language of the document. In the fourth line I see the word ‘luco,’ which translates as ‘sacred wood.’ It is true that in the third line there’s the word ”tabiled“, which looks like perfect Hebrew, and in the last the words ‘mer,’ ‘arc,’ ‘mere,’ which are purely French.”

All this was enough to drive a poor fellow crazy. Four different languages in this ridiculous sentence! What connection could there possibly be between such words as ice, sir, anger, cruel, sacred wood, changeable, mother, bow, and sea? The first and the last might have something to do with each other; it was not at all surprising that in a document written in Iceland there should be mention of a sea of ice; but it was quite another thing to get to the end of this cryptogram with so small a clue.

So I struggled with an insurmountable difficulty; my brain heated up, my eyes became blinked at that sheet of paper; its hundred and thirty-two letters fluttered around me like those silver teardrops which float in the air around our heads when the blood has rushed toward it.

I was in the grip of a kind of hallucination; I was suffocating; I needed air. Mechanically, I fanned myself with the piece of paper, the back and front of which came successively before my eyes.

What was my surprise when, in one of those rapid turns, at the moment when the back was turned to me, I thought I caught sight of the Latin words “craterem” and “terrestre,” among others!

A sudden light burst in on me; these hints alone gave me the first glimpse of the truth; I had discovered the key to the cipher. To read the document, it would not even be necessary to read it with the paper turned upside down. Such as it was, just as it had been dictated to me, so it might be spelled out with ease. All the professor’s ingenious combinations were coming into their own. He was right as to the arrangement of the letters; he was right as to the language. He had been within a hair’s breadth of reading this Latin document from end to end; but that hair’s breadth, chance had given it to me!

You will understand if I was excited! My eyes glazed over. I could barely use them. I had spread the paper out on the table. It was enough to take one look at it to grasp the secret.

At last I calmed down. I forced myself to walk twice round the room quietly and settle my nerves, and then I sank again into the huge armchair.

“Let’s read it,” I exclaimed, after having filled my lungs with air.

I leaned over the table; I laid my finger successively on every letter; and without a pause, without one moment’s hesitation, I read off the whole sentence aloud.

But what amazement, what terror came over me! I sat overwhelmed as if struck by a sudden deadly blow. What! that which I read had actually, really been done! A mortal man had had the audacity to penetrate! …

“Ah!” I exclaimed, jumping up. “But no! no! My uncle will never know it. He’d insist on doing it too. He’d want to know all about it. Nothing could stop him! Such a determined geologist! He’d go, he would, in spite of everything and everybody, and he’d take me with him, and we’d never get back. Never! never!”

My overexcitement was beyond all description.

“No! no! it can’t be,” I declared energetically; “and as it’s in my power to prevent the knowledge of it coming into the mind of my tyrant, I’ll do it. By dint of turning this document round and round, he too might discover the key.