“The nigger and his wife were damn grateful when I proposed taking the boys off their hands. But now, when you see the lads in the sumptuous duds designed by the Ladies Mulrooney, prognosticating and pontificating in their mumbo-jumbo, who can but conclude that they are emissaries and apostles from some distant kingdom of celestial grandeur far beyond our ken?”

This assertion prompted more clicking and grunting from the Ambassadors, and the showman observed how closely the boy was listening.

“You look like you understand them.”

“I think I could, with a little time,” Lloyd replied.

“Balderdash! You can’t tell me there’s anything to their doggerel. Or if there is, only they know it!”

“No,” Lloyd answered. “I think it’s a real language-a spoken one, anyway.”

“Oh, they write, too-if you can call it that,” the professor remarked.

“Could I see?” Lloyd cried, unable to hide his interest.

“My boy, you’re as curious a specimen as they are in your own way,” the professor replied. He went to a trunk, which made Lloyd wince with the recollection of Miss Viola, and produced a large handful of paper scraps all covered with a tiny but precise cuneiform-like writing. Holding the dense lines of unknown symbols together was a repeated icon that resembled the spiral shape of a tornado.

“Now don’t be telling me you can read this!” the professor scoffed.

“Well, not yet,” Lloyd agreed. “But maybe…”

“Son, all the clever men in the world would be a long while in unraveling the secret of this doodling. And it may well be that there is no secret-that they’ve just scribbled and scrawled to please themselves and what looks good is good enough.”

Lloyd noticed a wooden matchbox, or what he first thought was a wooden matchbox, edging out from under the Ambassadors’ bed. It was in fact triangular in shape, rather like a hand-size metronome, and when he picked it up he was surprised by the almost total lack of weight. Its surface, which had the smoothness and hardness of metal, not wood, had been covered, but here the writing had been engraved. The weird ciphers flowed in their swimming lines, but the lines took on a larger shape of the cyclonic spiral.