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"I don't know. He says he will eat no more, neither shall I. My uncle
has determined to fast and make me fast until he makes out this
abominable inscription," I replied.

"You will be starved to death," she said.

I was very much of the same opinion, but not liking to say so, sent her
away, and began some of my usual work of classification. But try as I
might, nothing could keep me from thinking alternately of the stupid
manuscript and of the pretty Gretchen.

Several times I thought of going out, but my uncle would have been angry
at my absence. At the end of an hour, my allotted task was done. How to
pass the time? I began by lighting my pipe. Like all other students, I
delighted in tobacco; and, seating myself in the great armchair, I began
to think.

Where was my uncle? I could easily imagine him tearing along some
solitary road, gesticulating, talking to himself, cutting the air with
his cane, and still thinking of the absurd bit of hieroglyphics. Would
he hit upon some clue? Would he come home in better humor? While these
thoughts were passing through my brain, I mechanically took up the
execrable puzzle and tried every imaginable way of grouping the letters.
I put them together by twos, by threes, fours, and fives--in vain.
Nothing intelligible came out, except that the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and sixteenth made ice in English; the eighty-fourth, eighty-fifth,
and eighty-sixth, the word sir; then at last I seemed to find the
Latin words rota, mutabile, ira, nec, atra.

"Ha! there seems to be some truth in my uncle's notion," thought I.

Then again I seemed to find the word luco, which means sacred wood.
Then in the third line I appeared to make out labiled, a perfect
Hebrew word, and at the last the syllables mere, are, mer, which were
French.

It was enough to drive one mad. Four different idioms in this absurd
phrase. What connection could there be between ice, sir, anger, cruel,
sacred wood, changing, mother, are, and sea? The first and the last
might, in a sentence connected with Iceland, mean sea of ice. But what
of the rest of this monstrous cryptograph?

I was, in fact, fighting against an insurmountable difficulty; my brain
was almost on fire; my eyes were strained with staring at the parchment;
the whole absurd collection of letters appeared to dance before my
vision in a number of black little groups. My mind was possessed with
temporary hallucination--I was stifling. I wanted air. Mechanically I
fanned myself with the document, of which now I saw the back and then
the front.

Imagine my surprise when glancing at the back of the wearisome puzzle,
the ink having gone through, I clearly made out Latin words, and among
others craterem and terrestre.

I had discovered the secret!

It came upon me like a flash of lightning. I had got the clue. All you
had to do to understand the document was to read it backwards.

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