The Hollow Needle by Maurice Leblanc (best book clubs .txt) 📕

An invisible kingdom, in mid-water and at ten fathoms from land! An unknown fortress, taller than the towers of Notre Dame and built upon a granite foundation larger than a public square! What strength and what security! From Paris to the sea, by the Seine. There, the Havre, the new town, the necessary town. And, sixteen miles thence, the Hollow Needle, the impregnable sanctuary!

It is a sanctuary and also a stupendous hiding-place. All the treasures of the kings, increasing from century to century, all the gold of France, all that they extort from the people, all that they snatch from the clergy, all the booty gathered on the battlefields of Europe lie heaped up in the royal cave. Old Merovingian gold sous, glittering crown-pieces, doubloons, ducats, florins, guineas; and the precious stones and the diamonds; and all the jewels and all the ornaments: everything is there. Who could discover it? Who could ever learn the impenetrable secret of the Needle? Nobody.

And Lupin becomes that sort of really disproportionate being whom we know, that miracle incapable of explanation so long as the truth remains in the shadow. Infinite though the resources of his genius be, they cannot suffice for the mad struggle which he maintains against society. He needs other, more material resources. He needs a sure place of retreat, he needs the certainty of impunity, the peace that allows of the execution of his plans.

Without the Hollow Needle, Lupin is incomprehensible, a myth, a character in a novel, having no connection with reality.

Master of the secret⁠—and of such a secret!⁠—he becomes simply a man like another, but gifted with the power of wielding in a superior manner the extraordinary weapon with which destiny has endowed him.

So the Needle was hollow.

It remained to discover how one obtained access to it.

From the sea, obviously. There must be, on the side of the offing, some fissure where boats could land at certain hours of the tide.

But on the side of the land?

Beautrelet lay until ten o’clock at night hanging over the precipice, with his eyes riveted on the shadowy mass formed by the pyramid, thinking and pondering with all the concentrated effort of his mind.

Then he went down to Étretat, selected the cheapest hotel, dined, went up to his room and unfolded the document.

It was the merest child’s play to him now to establish its exact meaning. He at once saw that the three vowels of the word Étretat occurred in the first line, in their proper order and at the necessary intervals. This first line now read as follows:

e . a . a . . etretat . a . .

What words could come before Étretat? Words, no doubt, that referred to the position of the Needle with regard to the town. Now the Needle stood on the left, on the west⁠—He ransacked his memory and, recollecting that westerly winds are called vents d’aval on the coast and that the nearest porte was known as the Porte d’Aval, he wrote down:

En aval d’Étretat . a . .

The second line was that containing the word Demoiselles and, at once seeing, in front of that word, the series of all the vowels that form part of the words la chambre des, he noted the two phrases:

“En aval d’Étretat. La Chambre des Demoiselles.”

The third line gave him more trouble; and it was not until some groping that, remembering the position, near the Chambre des Demoiselles, of the Fort de Fréfossé, he ended by almost completely reconstructing the document:

“En aval d’Étretat. La Chambre des Demoiselles. Sous le Fort de Fréfossé. L’Aiguille creuse.”

These were the four great formulas, the essential and general formulas which you had to know. By means of them, you turned en aval, that is to say, below or west of Étretat, entered the Chambre des Demoiselles, in all probability passed under Fort Fréfossé and thus arrived at the Needle.

How? By means of the indications and measurements that constituted the fourth line:

These were evidently the more special formulas to enable you to find the outlet through which you made your way and the road that led to the Needle.

Beautrelet at once presumed⁠—and his surmise was no more than the logical consequence of the document⁠—that, if there really was a direct communication between the land and the obelisk of the Needle, the underground passage must start from the Chambre des Demoiselles, pass under Fort Fréfossé, descend perpendicularly the three hundred feet of cliff and, by means of a tunnel contrived under the rocks of the sea, end at the Hollow Needle.

Which was the entrance to the underground passage? Did not the two letters D and F, so plainly cut, point to it and admit to it, with the aid, perhaps, of some ingenious piece of mechanism?

The whole of the next morning, Isidore strolled about Étretat and chatted with everybody he met, in order to try and pick up useful information. At last, in the afternoon, he went up the cliff. Disguised as a sailor, he had made himself still younger and, in a pair of trousers too short for him and a fishing jersey, he looked a mere scapegrace of twelve or thirteen.

As soon as he entered the cave, he knelt down before the letters. Here a disappointment awaited him. It was no use his striking them, pushing them, manipulating them in every way: they refused to move. And it was not long, in fact, before he became aware that they were really unable to move and that, therefore, they controlled no mechanism.

And yet⁠—and yet they must mean something! Inquiries which he had made