With the passage of time many documents buried in the British archives have been released, including some of extreme scientific and scholarly interest, such as the first-
Among the most intriguing episodes of my long association with Mr. Sherlock Holmes is that interval during which he briefly devoted his singular mental powers to achieving mastery of the field of Linguistic Science. Naturally, his was no idle dabbling; rather, he brought to bear the same fierce, methodical application he had turned upon the chemical analysis of tobacco ash or the peculiarities of bicycle tire impressions.
And, for a brief time, his obsession was all-
The incident which I shall now relate occurred late in 1886, when the British Raj found itself confronted with a mutiny of Indian soldiers employed in her Majesty’s armies under what appeared to be malign foreign influences; consequently, Queen Victoria herself intervened to have Holmes dispatched to India on an urgent mission of the utmost secrecy. Of the specifics of this mission Holmes divulged nothing to me at the time except the sole fact that in the future he very much wished to avoid any recurrence of the necessity of adopting the vestments and, more especially, the drinking habits of a Russian military officer.
The outbound journey had been undertaken in tremendous haste on a specially commissioned vessel of Her Majesty’s navy, in well under two weeks. After successfully executing his responsibilities in Lucknow, Jodhpur, and (I surmised) Kashmir, and having ended his efforts with, he admitted, less than complete success in Bengal, Holmes decided to return to England from Calcutta via commercial steerage, as this would afford him the luxury of making brief stops at various points of interest. As it happened, at the time I myself was returning from a visit to India to give testimony in a court case involving my regiment’s former commanding officer, for which I was not permitted to swear an affidavit for transmission through normal channels, given the nature of the case and the adamant animadversion the presiding judge had towards several of the parties involved, whom he wished to afford no leeway for appeal through any legalistic devices. I was thus pleased to be able to join my friend on the voyage, occupying an adjoining cabin.
Such a period of pure tourism was unprecedented in Holmes’ life, and he was dismayed to find shipboard life entirely lacking of amusements or purpose. Indeed, he was (to employ an idiom beloved of certain American tourists who had booked passage on the same vessel) ‘bored stiff’. Bereft of his violin, which the sea air had necessitated leaving behind in England, and unable to shoot holes in the bulkheads, Holmes was entirely beside himself. I had never seen my friend so disconsolate, with nothing upon which to focus his prodigious mental energies, and none of his accustomed diversions. Twice per day he would bolt from his chair as if in anticipation of the post, and then sink again into despondent lethargy.
It was at our first stop, in Madras, that fortune chanced to bring Holmes relief from this unbearable tedium. Our ship, having encountered mechanical problems, was set to be detained three days past its scheduled departure, and even before the assorted noises and unpleasant shocks to the structure were planned to start, all the passengers had sought temporary accommodations ashore. After securing rooms in a creditable establishment not far from the port proper, Holmes and I were strolling along Popham’s Broadway towards the Esplanade to view Fort St. George when Holmes gripped my arm and whispered, ‘The beggars there. Listen!’ We slowed our pace to catch a short conversation between two nondescript mendicants:
– diː raːt kaː paːʊdər viʃəl tʃ͡ʰuhə
– kalamuʃi buzurg dodaʃ xokai ʃab
– nəliː laːʲegaːvusək kəb
– ovardaniʲaʃ naʲtʃ͡ʰa sahargahaton1
Following Holmes’ lead, I paid them no outward heed and walked on with unhurried step despite my internal bewilderment. At the end of the street we turned west, where Holmes stopped in the first open space; looking around, he asked, ‘What do you make of that exchange?’
‘I have heard nothing like it since my time in Kabul. Why bandicoots would give powder is beyond me, and the rest is beyond that.’
Brightening, he asked, ‘You recognise all of it?’
‘Yes, but it makes little sense.’
‘I agree. The half that is Hindustani is quite simply ungrammatical, and the other half is not Hindustani.’
‘The other half was in the Persian of northern Afghanistan, and was no more grammatical than the rest.’
‘And why is either spoken so far from home as Madras, and by beggars at that?’
Try as I might, I could devise no answer that would satisfy even the most complacent questioner, and Holmes’ quickened manner of speech and sharpened mien suggested that he had by happenstance tumbled across a problem to occupy him.
[The following paragraphs are notable for being both detailed and inconsistent in detail, probably due to secrecy on Holmes’ part. The broad outline of the narrative is as follows: Holmes arranges for them to take later passage and then goes with Watson to a meeting with the head inspector of the Madras police, to whom Holmes shows an official letter and introduces Watson. Watson then leaves and is not witness to any further discussions, but he was recognized thereafter by police officers of the port area. After a brief discussion at their rooms, Holmes then vanished for the next three days as Watson followed instructions given him regarding the loan of certain books and documents from local officials and the acquisition of grammars of Persian, Hindi, and Sanskrit, soon joined by scholarly works on Pali, Marathi, and Pashto, as instructed by a note that a policeman handed to Watson.]
That evening, Holmes had returned when I opened the door to our room. Seated in an armchair, he was perusing a thick volume as he referred to a sheaf of notes. As from long familiarity I knew that he was not to be drawn out, I simply welcomed him back and was soon immersed in a charming short story about a weak-
It was after a desultory late lunch on the fifth day that Holmes sat up sharply and wrote hurriedly on a sheet of paper lying at hand. For the next 30 minutes, he referred from one sheet to another, writing on the first sheet at times. Finally he rose and said, ‘Come, Watson, we have little time!’ We rushed to the Esplanade, where Holmes beckoned to a pair of policemen: ‘It is time!’
‘To the Temple, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right, sir.’ As the second policeman rushed off, the first led us north to the Kāligāmbāl Kamadeswarar Temple. As we stood at the gate, the officer nodded and pointed to two lines of policemen rushing into the temple from our left and right, ‘Right, they’re over there. Should we join them?’
‘Let us wait here.’
We heard a sudden shouting and banging from behind the temple. In less than a minute, three men rushed out and ran towards us, but then stopped short as the policeman stepped forward. They looked at each other and rolled up their sleeves when Holmes shouted a sentence in a language I could not identify, causing them to stand still with shock etched on their faces. The police officer in our company announced as several underlings cuffed them, ‘I hereby arrest you gentlemen for the production and export of opium without a licence.’
[There follow three paragraphs of procedural folderol, much of it retailed in cryptic fashion by Holmes and recorded second-
We accompanied the Inspector General to Guindy Lodge, where we were escorted to Governor Duff’s study, largely barren from his preparations to return to England once Baron Connemara arrived. ‘Mr. Holmes, I presume?’ We exchanged greetings, and he motioned for us to sit.
‘I must admit I was rather surprised to receive Lord Salisbury’s communication, as the machinations he hinted at seemed beyond the realm of possibility. However, he does appear to have apprehended the state of affairs correctly. I must say that such a vast conspiracy would have posed a grave threat to the Raj. How ever did you come to uncover it?’
‘I found the first hints of it, Sir Mountstuart, when I fulfilled the task I was assigned in the north. Certain elements of Her Majesty’s army were of rather more dubious loyalty than had been suspected, and the immediate unrest, with which you are no doubt familiar, was settled fairly easily. Yet the origins were unclear. There were hints of foreign ties in the organisation of the moves the units made, but there was nothing that could be brought home to any party.
‘While I had completed my mission within the strict terms of the assignment, it left me uneasy, as if we had only patched over a wound that was already festering. Fortunately, we were detained in Madras by the force of events, for it was on our first day here that we encountered a merest twig of the full conspiracy. As Watson and I were taking in the sights of your city, we heard two lowly beggars speaking, one in Hindustani, the other in Persian. This was unexampled! Why would either be begging in Madras, a city where neither language is native? And how could mere beggars speaking different languages understand each other? Conceivably either might have washed up on the shore in Madras, you might say, in the great tide of events sweeping from north to south, but that they would each understand the other’s language would multiply probabilities to a very fine margin indeed. Yet at the same time, their speech was ungrammatical in the extreme. Both languages are almost tiresome in their uncompromising insistence upon the verb coming last in the sentence, yet in none of the sentences we heard did the verb do so. Nor was this the only error.
‘These were not the errors that the unlettered might make, and they were, if not equivalent, at least parallel in the two tongues. This suggested intent, and that suggested a code. I thus spent the next several days as a beggar penetrating their circle, collecting any unusual utterances, ones with grammatical oddities that could not be explained by mere ignorance.
‘I was soon fully aware that there were many such beggars. However, it was no mere code but a gradation of codes. It was sheer good fortune that we encountered the code at the lowest levels of the conspiracy, for the higher one rises in the organisation, the more distinct the code used, or rather the language, for that is in fact what was at play here. Consider a French peasant of the Old Regime. He might possibly understand the speech of his lord, but not the speech of the court, for in each case the higher level of speech is in a certain sense older. And so it is with this organisation. Between any two adjacent levels of the hierarchy, the lower can understand something of the higher
‘I thus collected examples of speech at every level that I could, moving up to higher levels as I mastered what I could at each, and checking the new information in the evenings. This was no mere code, nor was it merely a spectrum from peasant to courtly speech. At each higher level, the language used was of an older form of that speech. It was thus necessary to turn to the findings of our comparative philologists to understand the highest levels of speech in the conspiracy.
‘I was at first led astray by the mechanical application of what they have recovered of the earlier forms of the various Indo-
‘It is clear from the testimony of the leaders of the brigade in Madras that the levers of the conspiracy are operated by a divergent sect of Brahmins who have been raised with Vedic Sanskrit as their mother tongue for countless generations, and who seek to restore the mythical realm of the Vedas throughout the subcontinent. To do so, they believe it is necessary to restore Sanskrit to its original purity as handed down to men by the gods, and to this end they have applied the most fiendish intelligence and the most malign cleverness.
‘There is a famous book in Indian thought, the Book in Eight Chapters, that presents nothing but a set of rules applied in order to produce any Sanskrit sentence with complete accuracy and complete grammaticality. Truly it is a great achievement of the human mind, as any number of our comparative philologists have pointed out. The thinkers of this Brahmin sect started with this system and identified all the irregularities and inconsistencies in the word forms from which the system starts, and from that have devised the appropriate forms of the earliest Sanskrit
‘For yes, that elaborate system of languages is only the basis of their code, a grand theoretical system whose practical application is the destruction of the Raj. As I mentioned, the system of the Book in Eight Chapters can be used to produce any sentence in Sanskrit, but that in itself is no use to the conspiracy, for very many of our Indian officials, and not an inconsiderable number of the British, know Sanskrit well enough to catch any messages they might use. Thus, in addition to the usual recourse to a sort of thieves’ jargon, they have modified the parts of the system of the Book in Eight Chapters by which words are ordered in the sentence to express other meanings. In more complex sentences this results in utterances of great ungrammaticality in which certain rules are applied repeatedly to the elements of the sentence; I found that this introduced certain symmetries at a deeper level, for which certain formulations by the mathematician Cayley were useful in analysing what I had recorded. For their Afghan co-conspirators, for yes, there are many such, they apply the same system to the corresponding Old Persian words and fill any gaps by creating the corresponding forms through a system of rules that yield the attested forms in the Avesta and the Old Persian inscriptions
‘Their code is then replicated in the speech of the lower levels of the conspiracy through a sort of parallel construction. To give you one example, let us recall the conversation that first started my investigations. Watson, what is the meaning of sahargahaton?’
I thought for a moment. ‘That would be “your dawn”, “you” plural, I believe.’
‘Do you understand its import?’
‘Not in the least.’
‘Precisely. Persian has a felicitous system of possessive suffixes parallel with a system of possession by full pronouns. This system has been modified and reapplied in a number of different types of expression to indicate numbers, particularly to indicate intervals of time, and a similar system has been developed for Hindustani and all the other tongues of the conspiracy’s members.’
‘But Holmes!’ I interjected, ‘how could you use that to indicate numbers?’ The Governor agreed, and the Police Inspector simply stared.
‘The person and number of the ending together indicate a numeral. The third person singular ending, for that is, after all, the first form used in paradigms in the native grammatical traditions, indicates one of the units of time in the future, and the possessive pronoun form one unit in the past, and so on.’
‘But Holmes,’ I retorted, ‘surely they must count to more than six!’
‘Indeed they do. For the numbers one to three, they use the singular forms. Four to six are based on the dual forms, and seven to nine on the plural forms. For ten, or as a placeholder like a zero, they use the accusative form in Persian.’
‘But Persian has no dual.’
‘That is true, and even in Old Persian it had been rather well eroded. They thus used the forms that would have been expected in modern Persian from a combination of the Old Persian forms that would fit the pattern based upon their sources, which would give an approximation to the first- and third-
‘As one more example, recall the verb in the same sentence, ovardaniʲaʃ. Watson, what does that mean?’
I protested, ‘Holmes, you are quizzing me at the limits of what I know! To the best of my knowledge, that is not a finite verb at all.’
‘Indeed. It is the third singular possessed form of a future participle derived from the infinitive, in this case “to bring”. It is used in the code as a simple future, with a shade of meaning added by its position relative to the subject and object. The possessive ending, whether the Persian form or their idiosyncratic Hindustani form, is used with all verbs when only the third person is involved to indicate which of the noun phrases is the subject, being used when the subject precedes the object or when there is no stated subject, and omitted otherwise.’ (I have taken the liberty of appending a copy of the full analysis of the system that Holmes recorded for local officials.)2
The Police Inspector interjected, ‘That is all quite interesting, but I would be grateful if you could simply tell me what they said. What is “night powder” and who is the bandicoot?’
‘My dear Inspector, in place of “bandicoot”, think of its constituents. viʃəl tʃ͡ʰuhə simply means “giant rat”, as the Persian kalamuʃi buzurg bears out. It took some doing for me to discover, but the full term in their documents is svərṇədviːpə kaː viʃəl tʃ͡ʰuhə.’
The Inspector said, ‘The Giant Rat of the Land of Gold?’
‘Yes, Inspector, svərṇədviːpə is in fact the older name in Sanskrit sources for Sumatra. It is a major source of the “night powder” that they refer to. Similarly, nəliː or “tube” is a rifle. The plan was to buy rifles with the proceeds of their unlicenced sales of opium to the Chinese market with which to strike at the Raj in every city. “Night powder” is cocaine, used to ensure wakefulness and painlessness throughout a long campaign. As you know, besides Germany the major source of cocaine is the Netherlands, and the conspirators have their fellows in Sumatra producing it in the mountains. This sect of Brahmins, while I gather they hold somewhat different ideas, have similar plans to overthrow Dutch rule, and have taken the rat as the symbol of their movement, as it is an animal sacred to Ganesh, the remover of obstacles.’3
The Inspector said thoughtfully, ‘So, the beggars said that the rifles would be delivered eight dawns thenceforth.’
‘And so we had to act quickly, as I urged you in our meeting. Had we waited much longer, the rifles would have been distributed and secreted in a number of places I had not yet identified.’
‘I have sent word’, the Inspector replied, ‘to all the presidencies and provinces providing the information you helped us obtain, and they are taking the conspirators into custody perhaps as we speak.’
Governor Duff stated, ‘So that is why they had so much cocaine. As it is an essentially unregulated substance, we cannot charge them for that, but the sale of opium to China without a licence is almost as serious as the possession of unregistered firearms. The inspector here should have no trouble extracting all the confessions we need.’
As the Inspector nodded, I recollected the many controversies, some boiling over into the House of Commons, over the liberal use of torture in the Madras Presidency, but it seemed politic to say nothing on the matter in their company.
Governor Duff continued, ‘I must say that this has been most edifying. I am sorry that under the circumstances you cannot publish any of your findings, for they would surely greatly advance philology. Perhaps a century hence, when India has become fully civilised and the Central Provinces are as English as Essex, once such primitive creeds have faded in the light of reason...but under current circumstances, it would be much too inflammatory.’
‘Yes, it is a most unfortunate series of events.’
‘Indeed.’ After a short pause, ‘We might of course be able to afford a small fee...?’
The Inspector interjected, ‘That has been settled.’
Surprised, Governor Duff asked, ‘How so?’
‘If you’ll refer to the manifest...’
After a few minutes the governor replied, ‘Ah. I see. So the report will read that 75 pounds of cocaine were confiscated, not 77. Unlike philological researches, I cannot see any danger to anyone in...medicinal studies, I take it?’
Holmes replied, ‘Quite so, Sir Mountstuart.’
1 The original transcriptions have been deciphered and rendered in IPA by MT.
2 [Eds.] Unfortunately, this annex, noted as constituting 274 pages, was filed separately from Dr. Watson’s relation and appears to have been stored in a part of the archives later infested with booklice and purged to prevent the destruction of other sections of the archives; records suggest that it was burnt in 1904. A search of various Indian archives might turn up another copy.
3 [Eds.] We recall here the similarly titled incident referred to in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.” The likeliest explanation for the later mention there is that, as in many respects, official secrecy prohibited Holmes from sharing details of the shipment from the Sumatran group, which only came out in passing, hence Watson’s unfamiliarity with the Matilda Briggs. It is likely that Watson included that allusion in the notes from which Doyle fashioned the story as a way of putting pressure upon the officials in the early 1920s to finally release this account, an effort that the historical record makes clear was until now an utter failure, probably due to the contemporary political situation in India, hence the implicit refusal Doyle included in the published version.