“Ain’t it too amazin’!” exclaimed our conductor, the attendant Oscar. “Was just a coupla-three weeks ago we had the obsessitor of all obsessitors in here: Jeremiah Chivery. Down in this hole for all of two day and two night, and lookee what he done wrought!”
I remembered when Chivery had been admitted to the asylum. Though the mental infirmity that so characterized him had taken hold many years earlier, it was only in recent months that the affliction had been marked by a disturbing acceleration in its progression.
“Now I don’t know what all them mathematical scratchings adds up to,” Oscar continued, happy to play the role of our cellar cicerone, “since it spilt itself out of the most lunaticky brain as ever was squeezed inside a human head. But could be they add up to some earth-shaking theory or such. Could be all them madman’s numbers and symbols hold the very key to the whole blooming universe! But they ask me to erase it all away when they take him upstairs from this temporary lodging. And I aim to do it. I do. But just not yet. It’s too pretty I think. Look it all over, gentlemen. It’ll cost you only half a florin for the privilege. It’s quite a picture. I’ll wait for you outside.”
Sir Dabber and I nodded to young Oscar, appreciative of his only marginally-avaricious generosity in allowing us to inspect (for a small price) the walls that had once enclosed the “obsessitor of all obsessitors”: one Jeremiah Chivery. Until his conventional life came to an abrupt end with his transportation to Bedlam, Chivery had been professor of mathematics at the College of Dingley Dell (informally denominated “Oxbridge” and sometimes “Camford” to conflate the names of those two illustrious English institutions of higher learning, neither of which bore any resemblance whatsoever to the CDD).
Professor Chivery was a peculiar gentleman, driven to put down numerical equations that may have had some importance or may only have been the pencilled (and chalked) ravings of a genuine madman through the medium of mathematics (at least these were the competing perceptions at the time). Chivery’s colleagues at the college were never able to decipher any of the notebooks he had left behind — had been unsuccessful in making any sense of anything that he put into mathematical formula, outside the equations that the school’s curriculum required him to impart to his students. It was concluded by most that this obsessitor was everything that Dr. Towlinson had concluded him to be: a certifiable lunatic who spoke his own language of numbers — numbers that had no bearing upon anything practical and could never be translated, for they lived only within his abstruse thoughts.
Yet standing before this most extraordinary display of numerical graffiti, one could not help being impressed by the sheer beauty of its presentation. There was poetry in chalk upon those walls, and it should be a sad day, I thought, when Oscar would finally have to accede to the wishes of his employer and scrub it all away.
Sir Dabber stood looking at the walls in silence, and thinking, I have no doubt, nothing at all about the unrestrained numerical ravings that had been inscribed upon them, but about his son and the possibility of having him back, hail and hardy and restored to full sanity. It was I who gave the walls full scrutiny and in doing so came to see in one small corner at the bottom of the wall that ran to my right, something that did not resemble a mathematical formula at all — something that was quite different from everything else round it: a sequence of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
“I cannot believe it!” I exclaimed.
“Cannot believe what?” replied Dabber, shaken from his reverie.
“This — in the corner here. There are no numbers here, nor mathematical symbols. The markings are all in hieroglyphics. I recognise these ideograms from my own childhood interest in this most exotic language art.”
“And what do you make of it? Can you decipher it?”
“I’ll certainly try.” I sat myself down upon the dirty stone floor to give the sequence a closer examination.
The first symbol in the progression sent a chill throughout my hunkered frame. I could not help shuddering, and Sir Dabber could not help noticing my astonished state.
“What is it, Trimmers? You look as if a ghost has just passed before you.”
“I presume the first ideogram to be some form of salutation. The glyph here is a man with a long beard. It generally means an august person, a person of some rank, a god or demigod, if you will. This ideogram has always been my rather comically self-important way of signing my own hieroglyphic missives to my nephew Newman, who took an interest in the ancient art when a pupil at the Chowser School.”
“One might think, therefore, Trimmers, that the hieroglyph is addressed to you. Read on.”
I studied the next symboclass="underline" a rectangle with an opening at the bottom, which generally stood for “abode” or “a place” as if it were the simplest form of an architect’s floor plan. I continued to muse and decipher aloud for Dabber’s benefit: “Here is then a reference to a place — it is a specific place, I warrant.”
“What place?” asked Dabber, finding himself helplessly drawn into the mystery.
“The next glyph should give us more information. Here we have a representation of stairs, which is exactly what it purports to be: stairs, or the locomotive act of mounting stairs. Now I should think that the symbol in connexion with the previous term should refer to someplace with stairs— someplace of more than one storey.”
“There are quite a few such places in Milltown,” said Dabber.
“But note that the writer has made the stairs taller than the symbol generally allows. He is telling us, I’m certain, that the place to which he refers is a place with quite a number of stairs.”
“There are only two such places that come readily to mind, Trimmers. The All Souls campanile — which is nothing but stairs and quite a few of them — and this very hospital. Could it be that the writer is directing us up those very stairs we find beyond that door?”
I nodded effusively. “I wager that he is telling us of his next anticipated address. For note that he is no longer here within this cell.” That thought which I had not hitherto allowed myself to think now cast itself most impertinently upon my brain: that this hieroglyphic sequence had, in fact, been chalked by my nephew Newman. For who else could have done it, and what would have been the odds that another author would have addressed his message to me?
There was now quite an urgency to Dabber’s wheezing voice: “What do the other glyphs mean? There are five more.
“The last is a closing. The writer is identifying himself here.”
“What is that?”
“Can you not tell? It is a wing: the symbol for flight. It is how Newman signed his own hieroglyphic letters to me when we would write back and forth. Newman always said that he should be a bird in some other life: a bird of some majesty.”
“And you’re certain of this?”
“It simply cannot be mere coincidence, Sir Dabber, especially when coupled with the salutation.”
“And the other four symbols?”
“A roll of papyrus, indicating writings or books or…oh, let me think… there is another meaning: yes, yes. Thought. To know. And now, this one is easy: it is the crocodile, which stands for concealment. Then the symbol for a tie — the tie that holds a papyrus roll together. This means, again, writings or books or knowledge of some sort.”
“And again the crocodile. It is most impenetrable, Trimmers. I cannot see how you can possibly make heads or tails of it.”