While Whitney was not entirely a recluse, the bulk of the time he could spare from routine lectures and paleographic studies — which continued to be an extensive avocation — was still devoted to chemical experiments. He achieved a certain reputation and in time was promoted to the chair of chemistry at Beloin; and thereafter his new facilities were used wholeheartedly for research — for a great dream had taken shape in his mind.
It was an absurd dream whose possibility of fulfillment was so fantastic that he would never have dared to confide it to another; yet so poignantly appealing that he finally embraced it with a passionate, blind acceptance, directing all his thoughts and actions to its realization. Before the dream had crystallized as a potential reality, he had half unconsciously selected and catalogued various data relating to it; and perhaps this segregated information itself suggested the use to which it might be put. And so, at the age of forty-five, Gordon Whitney entered unreservedly upon his great quest for omniscience in fact.
His plan was daring enough but not, he fondly insisted, impossible. Yet after five years of intensive research he had not realized his objective, although he had achieved a number of radical developments in the field of mental stimulants. Profound familiarity with cellular structure and characteristics, coupled with a minute knowledge of pertinent drugs and compounds, had given him a great advantage; but a series of cautious experiments convinced him that the ultimate refinement of his formulae could offer no more than a temporary and perhaps dangerous stimulus. And he finally accepted, regretfully enough, the fact that he had been evading from the first — that no drug by itself could endow his brain with the extraordinary clarity and capacity and superhuman retentiveness that he wished.
It was in the reaction of disappointment after his long-sustained efforts had definitely failed, that he turned to the past for aid. Certainly, he had never given a calculated, unbiased belief to the incredible inferences and revoltingly plausible assumptions which had fascinated him during his early studies. But the bitterness of seeing the fulfillment of his cherished dream beyond his reach made him ready to investigate anything that offered even the remotest likelihood of help, no matter how fantastic — or terrible — it might be.
It was in this connection that the nineteenth of the carefully catalogued Eltdown Shards returned insistently to his mind. He had not made a complete translation of this shard during his study of the series; but he had begun one and had never forgotten the all but unintelligible opening with its ambiguous reference to what, freely translated, he believed meant “the Warder of Knowledge.” Now he welcomed the possibility of some long-forgotten material bearing on his problem, entombed in this shard.
That night he assigned his lectures for the next few days to assistants. In the morning he hurried across the undulating campus, drab and grey and swept by the winds of late autumn, to the small redbrick museum, whose ivy-clad walls sat back among ancient, towering oaks in an obscure corner of the grounds. Here, in the musty, half-lit depths of the building, he found the old curator, Doctor Carr, and induced him to unlock the high cabinet of black walnut which held the collection of the Shards. Carr did this with his usual reluctance. For him the contents of the cabinet had always held a peculiar repugnance; and he had occasionally hinted that they were better left alone.
After Carr had left, Whitney ran an appraising eye over the shelves. Arranged along them were the ticketed slabs of iron-hard grey clay, of all shapes, and ranging in size from the fifth shard, an oblong piece about four inches by eight, to the fourteenth, a jagged, roughly triangular tablet nearly twenty inches across. Most of them were incomplete and some were mere fragments. Eons of time, geologic disturbances, and unknowable mishaps, had cracked them and split off portions, some of which had not been found in the early Tri- assic stratum of the gravel pit near Eltdown where the discovery had been made. The nineteenth shard, which Whitney presently selected and laid on a scarred oak table by the window, presented an odd exception to the others. Its lower edge had been sheared away as cleanly as if by the stroke of a scimitar; and the unbroken line of cleavage, differing so markedly from the ragged indentures and smooth, roundly worn edges of the other tablets, suggested a deliberate mutilation when the clay had been fresh and comparatively soft. In other respects the shard, which was roughly a foot square, was in rather better condition than the average. Its smoothly rounded edges were broken only occasionally by unimportant chippings, and none of the writing was obliterated.
The writing or carving — it was useless to speculate regarding the means used to produce it — consisted of intricate, delicately proportioned characters confined within a surrounding margin about an inch wide; a style of delineation followed in all twenty-three of the shards. Fine, symmetrical symbols writhed over the entire space within this border. They stood out sharply under a magnifying glass, and Whitney found it expedient to use one during most of his work. Examinations had revealed that the writing surface was sunk slightly below the marginal level — a circumstance which, together with the extreme hardness of the material, probably accounted for the specimens being found in as legible a state as they were.
Whitney sat at the table and began the translation, a task demanding the most specialized skill. The geologic stratum in which the shards had lain indicated an antiquity antedating by millions of years the earliest inscriptions previously known; and translation was made possible only by the suggestive similarity of various symbols to certain primitive Amharic and Arabic word roots, whose prototypes they appeared to be. But to the best equipped student the task was complicated and difficult; for in an attempt to interpret word roots only the nicest judgment and most scholarly background could serve to discover a close approximation of the original meaning.
Whitney worked through the grey November day. Then he induced the reluctant curator to lend him the piece for a few days, using the plea of convenient access to the reference works in his library. Holding it carefully wrapped beneath his arm, he crossed the dusky campus to the high stone house at the edge; the house he had purchased shortly after beginning his duties at the University. He placed the shard on his flat-topped walnut desk in the spacious book-lined study which opened off the modest drawing-room, and resumed his work.
He had made encouraging progress and had no doubt of achieving a reasonably accurate translation. His supposition regarding the root combination tentatively believed “The Warder of Knowledge” seemed correct — at least to the extent that no other interpretation appeared plausible. But further deciphering had proved disquieting. The character of the eon-old entity, or principle, to which the term was applied was apparently of a most disturbing nature. While the references to it were marked by an ambiguity of expression distinct from the natural difficulties of translation, the only possible conclusions were quite as alarming as his former work on the shards could have led him to anticipate.