"Looks pretty hopeless," he said, after staring at these. "Still, let's
have a try; one never knows till one tries."

Then he went to a cupboard in his muniment room and produced a bottle
full of some straw-coloured fluid into which he dipped an ordinary
painting brush. This charged brush he rubbed backwards and forwards over
the first lines of the writing and waited. Within a minute, before my
astonished eyes, that faint, indistinguishable script turned coal-black,
as black as though it had been written with the best modern ink
yesterday.

"It's all right," he said triumphantly, "it's vegetable ink, and this
stuff has the power to bring it up as it was on the day when it was
used. It will stay like that for a fortnight and then fade away again.
Your manuscript is pretty ancient, my friend, time of Richard II, I
should say, but I can read it easily enough. Look, it begins, 'I, Hubert
de Hastings, write this in the land of Tavantinsuyu, far from England
where I was born, whither I shall never more return, being a wanderer
as the rune upon the sword of my ancestor, Thorgrimmer, foretold that
I should be, which sword my mother gave me on the day of the burning of
Hastings by the French,' and so on." Here he stopped.

"Then for heaven's sake, do read it," I said.

"My dear friend," he answered, "it looks to me as though it would mean
several months' work, and forgive me for saying that I am paid a salary
for my time. Now I'll tell you what you have to do. All this stuff
must be treated, sheet by sheet, and when it turns black it must
be photographed before the writing fades once more. Then a skilled
person--so-and-so, or so-and-so, are two names that occur to me--must be