Into the Green Prism Read online

  "Hmm, perhaps an emerald," I suggested, half-jokingly.

  "No, it is not beryl,"* he replied, his eyes still squinting through his glass. "It is exceedingly light—much lighter than aluminum, I should judge. But," with a deep sigh of disappointment, "it is far too small to be of any use."

  * Beryl is the mineral, specially fine samples of which are called emeralds

  .

  I laughed. "What use did you hope to put it to?" I asked.

  He looked up, a surprised expression in his fine eyes. "Use?" he repeated. "Why to experiment with, to be sure! This might prove to be the material these prehistoric people used for making lenses. It would be almost perfectly transparent—if it were not roughened and worn by the action of water and sand."

  I could not refrain from smiling incredulously. "Hardly," I declared. "I do not think that even primitive man would select material of that color when there is plenty of clear transparent quartz in the country hereabout. No, Ramon, if these people ever did use lenses, I'll wager they made them from transparent quartz."

  "No use arguing," he said with finality in his tones. "But somehow, by some sort of premonition or hunch or something, I have felt all along that we are going to make an epochal discovery here. Perhaps that is why I am over elated and interested at everything unusual. And this bit of green mineral is unusual. I wonder whence it came."

  Leaving him still pondering on this matter, I returned to my peons, who, the instant my back was turned, had promptly quit working.

  Busy at the excavatory work, I thought nothing more of my friend and his bit of green mineral, until the men stopped work at noon and I went to my lunch and found the Professor had not returned. Even then I was not troubled for I assumed Ramon was still busy washing out gravel and searching for fragments of the green stone. I sent Louis, our camp-boy, to summon him, and went ahead with my midday meal. When Louis returned and stated that he could not find Ramon, I did become, a bit anxious. In fact I was about to start off to search for him myself, when he appeared, arriving from the opposite direction from which he had been going when I had last seen him.

  "You may be an expert archeologist," he announced; with a grin, as he came into camp, "but you've made a great mistake in wasting time digging here. What do you think of this?"

  As he spoke, he reached in his haversack and produced a beautifully sculptured figurine of lapis-lazuli. I was speechless with surprise. It was the most perfect piece of prehistoric American stone-carving I had ever seen. It was far superior to any Maya, Aztec or Inca work: a human figure about ten inches in height and showing a squatting man, his hands resting on his knees, his head topped by an elaborate headdress of unique design.

  "Where on earth did you find this?" I cried at last.

  He chuckled as he helped himself to the food Louis set before him. "Up the stream a way," he replied as he gnawed at a wild turkey's leg. "I suggest,” he continued, "that we move to the spot after lunch, and abandon this wasteful digging of broken cook-pots. The locality where I secured the little idol is the spot whence the gold beads came. There are quite extensive ruins there. I found a number of stone columns projecting above the earth and sticking out of the bank, and I picked up the little blue god from where he had tumbled down to the beach. I do not claim to know anything about your line of work, amigo mio, but if I am not mistaken, the place I found was a temple or something of the sort. It seems to me that there we will have a much greater chance of coming upon the key to the puzzle—perhaps the very lenses these people used. And," he added as if in afterthought—"if you will examine the little god with your pocket-lens, you will discover that the apparently uniformly smooth surface of the stone is completely covered with intricate carving, invisible to the unaided eye."

  Ramon was right. To my utter amazement, I found that the most beautiful and delicate ornamental pattern had been deeply engraved over the surface of the lapis lazuli, although, to my naked eye, the surface seemed scarcely roughened. It was even more astonishing than the almost microscopic gold beads. I could not imagine any human being with eyes and touch that would enable him to carve the refractory stone in this manner, even had he possessed a lens.

  But the indisputable proof was before me, and, I plied Ramon with queries about the new site he had so fortunately discovered. He could add but little to the meagre information he had already given. But from that little I was convinced that the new site was most promising and, lunch over, orders were given to break camp and move upstream. This was slow work and the sun had set in a blaze of glory behind the palm trees in the west before our camps, Ramon's laboratory and equipment and all our paraphernalia had been moved to a delightfully situated spot on a low hill above the river some five miles from our first location.

  My friend had not exaggerated! Rather, he had understated the importance of his discovery. Everywhere, over an extensive area, there were the extremities of great stone columns projecting above the earth; some were plain, others sculptured, and as we cleared the jungle away, we came upon numerous masses of cut and sculptured stone, and not a few monolithic stone images or idols.

  As Professor Amador had thought, the place had obviously been used as a great temple or place for ceremonials, and here, if anywhere, we might expect to come upon archeological treasures and—I might add— the means by which the ancient occupants had manufactured their microscopic beads and engraved their invisible designs on stone.

  I would like to describe in detail the progress of our work, the finds we made, the remarkable artifacts we secured. But that has no place in this record of Professor Amador's discovery and disappearance. Suffice to say that we had stumbled upon an archeological treasure-house, the very nucleus of the prehistoric civilization of the Manabis, and daily, as my work proceeded and my specimens accumulated, matters which hitherto had been puzzling and mysterious were explained. The strange carved stone seats typical of this culture were numerous and of all sizes; stone idols and the remarkable carved stone slabs described by Saville were innumerable; we came upon countless numbers of the peculiar elliptical, beautifully-wrought pottery vessels known only from this culture, and, in addition to these objects already well-known to science, we secured priceless specimens in the form of wrought and carved beads, ornaments and figures in precious and semiprecious stones. Agate, carnelian, jade, lapis-lazuli, malachite, quartz, garnet, amethyst, beryl, topaz—even a few emeralds and sapphires had been cut, perforated, polished and covered with microscopic engraving by the Manabis, and, judging from their abundance, with almost as little effort as though the refractory minerals had been so much soft limestone. Also, and most interesting of all to me, were many objects of copper and silver plated with gold. How the ancient artizans coated the baser metals with gold was a mystery, and Ramon was almost as deeply interested in solving this riddle as in his quest for his theoretical lens. In his search for this he was tireless. From the very commencement we had found the microscopic gold beads, as well as others equally small, made from the hardest stones, and in several instances we had found hundreds and thousands of these cached in pottery vessels. I truly believe that Amador averaged less than an hour's sleep a night for weeks. At the close of the day's work he would go to his laboratory, and throughout the night, would devote himself to making intensive studies and working out long and involved calculations based upon the beautiful specimens of miniature handiwork we had obtained. His idea, as he explained it, was to determine how great a magnification the artizans must have secured in order to have engraved and perforated the objects by hand.

  "If I can determine that point," he declared. "I will know whether they had any knowledge of advanced or rudimentary optics, and, possibly, I may be able to establish the type of lens they used and even the material from which it was made. Given the magnification it is not impossible to work out the size, curvature, and other details of a lens."

  I must confess, it seemed a hopeless waste of time and energy, from my point of view. If the Manabis ever used lenses,
then, I felt sure, we would find them eventually. And if they did not, then all of my friend's labors would have been for nothing. I am afraid I have little patience—or rather I should say, I had little at that time—with abstract theories based wholly upon assumptions. Had we found a lens I could have well understood Ramon wishing to work out its details and properties, but I could not understand his point in determining details of a lens which very possibly, in fact probably, had never existed. But that was Professor Amador's affair, not mine, and I suppose he saw just as little use in my accumulating thousands of specimens and in my endeavoring to reconstruct the lives, customs, religion and what-not of a long extinct race of fellow men and women.

  Then, one morning, he appeared with an elated, triumphant expression on his face.

  "I have made a great discovery," he announced. "I have completed my calculations and I am convinced that the lens—or apparatus—used by these people was totally different from anything known to modern optics or physics. No known material and no known form of lens would magnify an article sufficiently to enable a human being to execute work as minute as we have found."

  "Hmm," I muttered, "I cannot see, my friend, how that helps matters—even if you are right. Unless you can ascertain what they used—if they used anything— you haven't come any nearer solving your problem. And I admit I am a bit skeptical. How can you be sure that it is not possible to grind a glass or quartz lens to magnify to any desired extent? We have microscope objectives that will magnify hundreds-thousands of diameters."

  Ramon smiled. "You forget, amigo mio, that such high-powered objectives have an exceedingly short focus. Your knowledge of optical laws are, I fear, very rudimentary. The greater the magnification, the shorter the focal length, or to reverse the equation and to point out the truth of my argument, the closer the lens must be to the object to be magnified. My calculations prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that, to enable human beings to incise the carved designs upon these precious-stone objects, the surface must have been magnified at least two hundred and fifty diameters. Now, my good friend, any known form of lens that is capable of a magnification of that amount would have a field of less than one-eighth of an inch diameter—approximately three millimeters. In order to focus such a lens sharply, it would have to be placed within one one-hundredth of an inch of the surface to be magnified—in fact it would have to be an oil-immersion lens—and hence it would be absolutely impossible for any human being to use a tool between the lens and the surface upon which it was focussed. And," he added with finality, "even assuming that a lens could be made to fulfill the requirements of the case, you must remember that the tip or edge of the tool used in cutting the stone or metal would be equally magnified and would appear gigantic and coarse. It would in fact be somewhat similar to using a pickaxe for engraving a copper plate for a visiting card."

  There was nothing I could say in rebuttal. If his statements were correct, and I knew him far too well to question them, then it would seem that his deductions were logical. I was accustomed to using a microscope myself, and although in my work I had never been obliged to resort to very high powers, still, when I came to think of it, I remembered that even a comparatively low power objective did have a short focus and a small field and had to be most carefully adjusted to within a very short distance of the object being examined. And I also remembered that I had been warned by my biology professor at college to use great care not to crack the microscope slides by screwing the lens against them. Ramon, then, must be right, at least in some of his conclusions. But, to my mind, he was still working on false or at least unsubstantiated premises.

  "Even so," I objected at last, "it isn't necessary to assume that the Manabis possessed lenses of unknown material or design. Their eyes may have been different from ours, or"—I added half-banteringly—"they may have possessed some mechanical device, some machine that would produce the results that are so mystifying. We have machinery that can engrave steel and other materials in much finer designs than any of those we have found here."

  "You are straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel," laughed Ramon. "You are perfectly aware that the prehistoric races had no knowledge of mechanics, no knowledge whatever of the wheel, without which mechanical devices are quite impossible. You simply do not wish to admit that pure out-and-out theories can be right, that mathematical problems can solve matters of which we have no true knowledge, or that anything can be assumed to have existed unless concrete evidences of its existence are found."

  "But," he finished confidently, "I am convinced that before you have completed excavations here, you will find such concrete evidences and that when they are found, they will bear out my theories and my calculations."

  A few days later he again mentioned the matter. This time, he admitted he was merely theorizing. "I have been thinking deeply on this matter," he announced as we breakfasted together. "And I have almost come to the conclusion that there is some connection between the minute beads and microscopic carving and the gold-plated objects. I might even go farther and state that in the back of my mind is a feeling that there is a direct connection between all these and the titanic stone work of the Andean regions. You may recollect that, when I first saw the gold beads, I remarked that they and the pre-Incan stone work were like looking at objects through the two ends of a telescope. Is it beyond the bounds of possibility that the same means these Manabis used for executing work that is invisible to the unaided eye, might not have been reversed to enable the pre-Incans to perform work, which seemingly is that of giants?"

  I laughed outright. "My dear Ramon," I cried, "how would visually reducing a fifty-ton stone affect its physical properties? It would still remain a huge rock and would still weigh fifty tons, even if, to the eye of the observer through 'the wrong end of the telescope,' as you put it, it appeared an insignificant pebble? You might as well suggest that the stones were really small and after being cut and placed were treated by some sort of magic which caused them to expand and remain enlarged, or that these gold beads were cut and made and chased when a foot or two in diameter, and were then —by some occult means—reduced to their present size. No. no, Ramon. I admit the possibility, though not the probability, of a lens having been used—though it was probably a crude, accidentally-made flake of quartz crystal—but I cannot admit, even for the sake of argument, that the prehistoric Americans possessed the power of altering the proportions of non-organic matter."

  Professor Amador merely smiled. "Ten, twenty, fifty years ago, that might have been conceded," he replied thoughtfully. "But today we know of a certainty that non-organic matter—and organic as well—is not the fixed, solid unalterable material our ancestors assumed it to be. All matter, as you are well aware; everything, ourselves included, is composed of protons and electrons; independent bodies, movable, transferable, changeable. Certain combinations or groupings of protons and electrons produce certain effects. Such groupings may remain unchanged indefinitely or they may change constantly. A rock may remain unaltered for countless centuries or, under other conditions, it may completely vanish as a rock in a short time. Why? You say by erosion, by weathering, by some one cause or another. Very true. But it is the alteration of the electronic grouping that causes the rock to vanish even though the weather or the elements may produce, or incite the electronic alterations. A seed sprouts and grows into a tree. Why? Because the atoms which its molecules contain, alter their arrangement and numbers; air, water and sun and their own vitality cause them to change. We can take a huge mass of wood, of leather, of metal, and reduce it to a fraction of its former size and it will remain reduced, merely because we have forced its component atoms to assume a different combination. If we wish, we can increase material in the same manner. It all depends upon the groupings of electrons and upon vibratory waves. What happens when the tobacco in the pipe you are smoking is burned? Do you, a scientist, mean to tell me that the tobacco has actually been destroyed, that by puffing at your pipe you have eliminated a portion o
f the matter of the universe? No, you have merely altered an electronic combination. Your tobacco still exists though in changed form. You have produced ash, gases, smoke, liquids, solids, by forcing, through the medium of fire and air, the protons and electrons of the original tobacco to assume new combinations and forms. Even the human body and the bodies of animals of all kinds are in the same sense indestructible. Upon death the electronic combinations and vibratory waves, which give us our living bodies, become altered. By degrees they take on new and unrecognizable forms. Some become gases, others solids, others liquids, and in time these change still more. They become loam, plants, vegetables. Again they alter and become component parts of new creatures, even of other men and women. For all we know, even our mentality, our spirits or souls, are merely forms of electronic or vibratory wave energy; for all we know these same forms of energy may, either rarely or commonly, reassume their former combinations and produce reincarnated beings having the same thoughts, the same ideals, the same reactions, the same loves and hates as those who died hundreds or thousands of years ago. In the light of present-day science, nothing is impossible, amigo mio. What seems impossible or at least, highly improbable today may be commonplace tomorrow. Is it any more remarkable to imagine a small pebble increased to a gigantic monolith, or to think of a life-sized statue reduced to miniature, than to conceive of the human voice—the living, speaking image of a human being—being transmitted through the empty air for hundreds, thousands of miles? Mind you, I do not say positively that these prehistoric people possessed some power, unknown to us, of permanently altering the proportions of objects. But we must admit, or else discredit the testimony of our five senses, that they possessed some knowledge of which we are woefully ignorant. And I should not be at all surprised if, when we hit upon the secret, we will find that it was along the lines I have suggested."