Then, taking the document, he ran through it from beginning to end, without understanding it in the least.
The document contained a hundred lines, which were divided into half a dozen paragraphs.
“Hum!” said the judge, after a little reflection; “to try every paragraph, one after the other, would be to lose precious time, and be of no use. I had better select one of these paragraphs, and take the one which is likely to prove the most interesting. Which of them would do this better than the last, where the recital of the whole affair is probably summed up? Proper names might put me on the track, among others that of Joam Dacosta; and if he had anything to do with this document, his name will evidently not be absent from its concluding paragraph.”
The magistrate’s reasoning was logical, and he was decidedly right in bringing all his resources to bear in the first place on the gist of the cryptogram as contained in its last paragraph.
Here is the paragraph, for it is necessary to again bring it before the eyes of the reader so as to show how an analyst set to work to discover its meaning.
“P h y j s l y d d q f d z x g a s g z z q q e h x g k f n d r x u j u g I o c y t d x v k s b x h h u y p o h d v y r y m h u h p u y d k j o x p h e t o z l s l e t n p m v f f o v p d p a j x h y y n o j y g g a y m e q y n f u q l n m v l y f g s u z m q I z t l b q q y u g s q e u b v n r c r e d g r u z b l r m x y u h q h p z d r r g c r o h e p q x u f I v v r p l p h o n t h v d d q f h q s n t z h h h n f e p m q k y u u e x k t o g z g k y u u m f v I j d q d p z j q s y k r p l x h x q r y m v k l o h h h o t o z v d k s p p s u v j h d.”
At the outset, Judge Jarrizuez noticed that the lines of the document were not divided either into words or phrases, and that there was a complete absence of punctuation. This fact could but render the reading of the document more difficult.
“Let us see, however,” he said, “if there is not some assemblage of letters which appears to form a word—I mean a pronounceable word, whose number of consonants is in proportion to its vowels. And at the beginning I see the word phy; further on the word gas. Halloo! ujugi. Does that mean the African town on the banks of Tanganyika? What has that got to do with all this? Further on here is the word ypo. Is it Greek, then? Close by here is rym and puy, and jox, and phetoz, and jyggay, and mv, and qruz. And before that we have got red and let. That is good! those are two English words. Then ohe—syk; then rym once more, and then the word oto.”
Judge Jarriquez let the paper drop, and thought for a few minutes.
“All the words I see in this thing seem queer!” he said. “In fact, there is nothing to give a clue to their origin. Some look like Greek, some like Dutch; some have an English twist, and some look like nothing at all! To say nothing of these series of consonants which are not wanted in any human pronunciation. Most assuredly it will not be very easy to find the key to this cryptogram.”
The magistrate’s fingers commenced to beat a tattoo on his desk—a kind of reveille to arouse his dormant faculties.
“Let us see,” he said, “how many letters there are in the paragraph.”
He counted them, pen in hand.
“Two hundred and seventy-six!” he said. “Well, now let us try what proportion these different letters bear to each other.”
This occupied him for some time. The judge took up the document, and, with his pen in his hand, he noted each letter in alphabetical order.
In a quarter of an hour he had obtained the following table:
| a | = | 3 | times |
| b | = | 4 | ” |
| c | = | 3 | ” |
| d | = | 16 | ” |
| e | = | 9 | ” |
| f | = | 10 | ” |
| g | = | 13 | ” |
| h | = | 23 | ” |
| i | = | 4 | ” |
| j | = | 8 | ” |
| k | = | 9 | ” |
| l | = | 9 | ” |
| m | = | 9 | ” |
| n | = | 9 | ” |
| o | = | 12 | ” |
| p | = | 16 | ” |
| q | = | 16 | ” |
| r | = | 12 | ” |
| s | = | 10 | ” |
| t | = | 8 | ” |
| u | = | 17 | ” |
| v | = | 13 | ” |
| x | = | 12 | ” |
| y | = | 19 | ” |
| z | = | 12 | ” |
| Total | … | 276 | times. |
“Ah, ah!” he exclaimed. “One thing strikes me at once, and that is that in this paragraph all the letters of the alphabet are not used. That is very strange. If we take up a book and open it by chance it will be very seldom that we shall hit upon two hundred and seventy-six letters without all the signs of the alphabet figuring among them. After all, it may be chance,” and then he passed to a different train of thought. “One important point is to see if the vowels and consonants are in their normal proportion.”
And so he seized his pen, counted up the vowels, and obtained the following result:
| a | = | 3 | times |
| e | = | 9 | ” |
| i | = | 4 | ” |
| o | = | 12 | ” |
| u | = | 17 | ” |
| y | = | 19 | ” |
| Total | … | 64 | vowels. |
“And thus there are in this paragraph, after we have done our subtraction, sixty-four vowels and two hundred and twelve consonants. Good! that is the normal proportion. That is about a fifth, as in the alphabet, where there are six vowels among twenty-six letters. It is possible, therefore, that the document is written in the language of our country, and that only the signification of each letter is changed. If it has been modified in regular order, and a
