I had not finished my sentence when the Professor broke out into a cry, nay, a roar. A new revelation burst in upon him. He was transformed!
“Aha, clever Saknussemm!” he cried. “You had first written out your sentence the wrong way.”
And darting upon the paper, with eyes bedimmed, and voice choked with emotion, he read the whole document from the last letter to the first.
It was conceived in the following terms:
In Snæfells Joculis craterem quem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm.
Which bad Latin may be translated thus:
“Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the Jökull of Snæfells, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the earth; which I have done, Arne Saknussemm.”
In reading this, my uncle gave a spring as if he had touched a Leyden jar. His audacity, his joy, and his convictions were magnificent to behold. He came and he went; he seized his head between both his hands; he pushed the chairs out of their places, he piled up his books; incredible as it may seem, he rattled his precious nodules of flints together; he sent a kick here, a thump there. At last his nerves calmed down, and like a man exhausted by too lavish an expenditure of vital power, he sank back exhausted into his armchair.
“What o’clock is it?” he asked after a few moments of silence.
“Three o’clock,” I replied.