I handed it to Kem and said, “You’re good at cryptograms. What do you make of this one?” He took the paper, put in his monocle and stopped eating salted peanuts for several minutes while he concentrated on the words before him.
Then he said, “But my dear Gerald, this is not a cryptogram at all. It is, actually, pure Arabic written phonetically, as far as that is possible, in Roman letters—only some of the words are broken up and others are run together. One needs only to read it aloud, and it becomes quite clear.”
“Arabic?” I said. “Did I hear you say Arabic?”
“Certainly—
Wafi ákher aa ’uam qalf al ássad túnsab al mashnaqat’ al rumaniya aand zuhoor al hilál gadeed.
Oulan yasqut ayuhuma. Hákaza sáttara alqãdar . . .
. . . means, in English:
In the last year of the heart of the lion, the Roman gallows must stand against new moon.
Neither may fall. So it is written . . .
. . . That is the accurate pronunciation, and a fair translation, of the first paragraph, for example. Shall I—”
“Roman gallows?” I cried. “That’s the cross! New moon—Mohammedan crescent! Last year of the heart of the lion—the crusade, in which Richard the Lion-Hearted died!”
“Exactly, Gerald, in 1199,” said Kem. “And what do you make of the second paragraph? . . .
Wayatazduag’ alhilál wal’ saleeb takht búrg ad’dúb zee al alf rigl, wa yátem’ zalik fee aam dámu al ginsee al assfáree . . .
. . . This says, in English:
Cross and crescent moon shall be married under the symbol of the bear with 1,000 legs. This is in the year of the blood of the yellow men . . .”
I said, “Why, Kem, obviously this refers to the U.S.S.R.! The bear with a thousand legs is Russia—cross and crescent moon is meant to be hammer and sickle! Go on!”
Kem said, “Freely translated, the third paragraph says—
Cross and crook shall wed crooked cross in fire and blood when lion is devoured by lamb under rod and axe and broken cross . . .”
I shouted, “The Russo-German Pact! Hammer and sickle shall wed swastika when lion (that’s Britain) is devoured by lamb (Hitler’s astronomical sign was the Lamb) under Mussolini’s fasces and the Nazi swastika!”
Kem said, “The next paragraph is rather interesting—
Wayassá ’adu al ássadu ba’adi zálik maal ’nisr, watu’-alaq dufda’a min aqdámiha . . .
It means:—
“Then the eagle shall rejoice with the lion, and the frog shall be hung by the feet . . .
Surely, Gerald, the Eagle is the United States. That bit must refer to the victory of the Allies and the death of Mussolini, ‘the Bull-Frog of the Pontine Marshes.’ They did hang him up by the feet, you know.”
“Go on! Go on!” I pleaded.
Kem went on: “The last piece is the most interesting of all, really . . .
Wáfee házihi alsána, alsánat’ al khamsoon min kharb al alfaz, yassoodu assaláam qemmáman aalat wa ’rtafáat fáuqa alkhárabi waala anqáadi al ard almahrooka . . .
This says, in effect:—
In this year, the 50th year of the war of words, peace shall come in high places above burned earth . . .”
I said, “The fiftieth year of the war of words—that might mean the cold war will last half a century, until, say, 1995. But the next bit about the burned earth; is that H-bombs, or cobalt bombs, or something even worse?”
Kem said, with a shrug, “Where did you get this remarkable document, Gerald?” I told him, then, “Swindle-sheet” Morris’s account of the trick he had played on Bohemund Raymond. Kem laughed and said, “Yes, poor Morris loved a joke. If you don’t mind my asking—does it occur to you that he might, perhaps, have been playing a trick on you, Gerald?”
“What, in Arabic?” I said. “That would have been too subtle for ‘Swindle-sheet’ Morris. Besides, remember, this was before the war, back in 1939.”
“Of course,” said Kem, “I must take in consideration the fact that you, also, are a bit of a joker, and might be playing a trick on me.”
“I give you my word of honor I am not!”
“Well, really,” said Kem, “all I can say is that it’s very strange. . . .” He passed me a piece of paper upon which he had been making notes. “Here is what you gave me translated back. It is, unquestionably, pure Arabic. I suggest we regard this as a Fleet Street hoax, Gerald; it will be healthier that way.”
And so let it be regarded.
. . . But I wish I knew exactly what Bohemund Raymond, or whatever spirit it was that possessed him, meant exactly by those last two lines. . . . We must wait until 1995, and see. . . .
THE BEGGARS’ STONE
The monotony of the plain becomes so heartbreaking that you would thank God for the sight of a withered tree. The land lies flat. The road forks and runs away into the unknown distance. Look east, look west; there is nobody, nothing but dust and grass and a dry, melancholy wind which twists the clouds into tortured shapes. The plain is mournful and legend-haunted.
Dig in it and you may find strange things: skulls scored with scars, bits of metal, defaced coins, weapons which at a touch fall to green powder. It swallows men like a sea. The Tartars passed this way, with the flat-faced riffraff of the Bad Lands. “Where my horses’ hoofs have passed no grass grows.” But grass has grown; the grass always wins in the end, and it covers everything, humbly bending before the wind, but savagely clutching the earth with its roots—bitter, gluttonous Puszta grass that devours the soil.
I say the road forks and is terribly lonely. But a few paces away from the point at which it divides there stands a stone, incalculably ancient, roughhewn into a rectangular shape, burying itself by its own weight . . . “digging its own grave,” as they say in these parts.
It used to lie flat. Now it stands erect. In the place where it used to lie there is a deep hole. Grass has begun to encroach on the stone itself. The hard, pale surface sprouts sparse tufts like an old man’s chin. These tufts somehow make the stone look older. By moonlight they give it an appearance of something grotesquely like life.
Three sides of the stone are marked with inscriptions. Bend sideways and you may read initials, names and broken phrases in all the languages of the earth: J. H.; M. B. Hunyadi; several crosses; “GOD WILL PUNISH THEM,” in ancient Slavonic. In one corner somebody has laboriously hacked out a heart and an arrow. Roman, Greek, Russian, Tartar, Georgian—all alphabets may be found there. There is even the name of one FA’OUZI, beautifully carved in curling Arabic. To whom did these names and symbols belong? Only God knows.
The time will come when even these desolate marks will have been rubbed away by the rain and the dust, and then there will be nothing but the tired old stone, imperceptibly disintegrating atom by atom in the loneliness of the plain at the fork of the dreary road.