1926: Of That Certain and Unspecifiable Obscurity Beneath Mallard House; Or, On the Symbolical Conveniences of a Luminous Stone Thought to Whisper Its Own Antiquity
In “The Monthly Register of Probable Facts”
It is a curious circumstance—indeed, one that invites more than a little reflection in these enlightened days of comparative civilisation—that the British climate, so rarely generous with the sun, should still produce luminous phenomena of geological character, and particularly such as resist the administrative categories of respectable Science. I allude, of course, to that uncommonly radiant object unearthed in the year 1847 beneath the respectable foundations of Mallard House, in consequence of an extension to what was referred to—not without aristocratic diffidence—as the “contemplation basin.”
The stone was found, if memory serves, during a period in which Gothic improvement had become synonymous with the domestic subterranean. It is said that the mason responsible for the excavation, one Ephraim Cole of Battersea, observed his spade “striking a bell made of night.” His remark, faithfully recorded in The Builder’s Companion (June 1848), was dismissed at the time as rustic figure, though subsequent events have obliged the sober historian to re‑evaluate the phrase with caution, or at the very least with mannered prudence.
It was Cole, too, who first noticed the delicate tracery incised upon the surface—marks which, under lamplight, appeared to undulate rather than merely shine. Experts of the period (and experts, I venture to note, are almost wholly creatures of their period), declared these etchings to resemble certain “hieroglyphic tendencies of the Egyptian persuasion,” though later and more opinionated authorities—among them the unflagging Professor Jabez Twilcroft, whose Introductory Glossary of Imaginary Scripts (1875) remains as unread as it is indispensable—insisted upon a proto‑Mesopotamian irregularity of line. “Not Egyptian,” wrote Twilcroft in one of those marginalia which prove that scholarship is, above all, a form of handwriting, “but that region of writing which precedes intention.”
It is perhaps redundant to observe that no two scholars have agreed upon its meaning; nevertheless each successive interpreter has enjoyed that moral ecstasy which accompanies the correction of another’s labours. The Reverend C. Sempronius Havers, delivering his celebrated paper to the Royal Antiquarian Society in 1891 (“Remarks Upon a Possibly Ethical Pebble”), translated the inscription simply as—“Secret.” It is tempting to regard this monosyllable as disappointingly reticent, though Havers maintained, with a gravity almost sacerdotal, that “to write the word secret upon a glowing stone was to prove the Maker’s integrity.”
By 1902, however, the pendulum of theory had swung toward cosmological enthusiasm. The Chronometric Gazette published a short and somewhat excitable piece by Dr. Elinor Bate‑Rydon proposing that the stone was an early attempt at “psychometric storage,” a notion popular among readers of electric fiction and among those who, having touched the object, reported “a mild sense of expectancy.” Bate‑Rydon suggested the light was not inherent but responsive, a mimetic luminosity produced by “mental residue.” The editor, wisely if unhelpfully, added a note of caution: “The Royal Mail reports no such phenomenon; hence it remains probable.”
The ensuing decades provided neither confirmation nor restraint. During the Great War, an earnest young officer of Engineers (later Sir Aubrey Firth, Keeper of Diluted Truths at the British Museum) was permitted to view the stone under protective glass. His memorandum concludes: “Appears self‑illuminated; translation ‘secret’—possibly a warning or invitation. Recommend non‑interference in times of national stress.” It is precisely this form of patriotic moderation that has so often shielded our civilisation from discovery.
Having consulted both the inspected object (now, regrettably, mislaid during the postwar reshuffling of local museums) and a set of reproductions in bottled light kept by the custodian of Mallard House, I may report without exaggeration that the inscriptions remain of that peculiar class which suggests intelligence only to the degree that it forbids comprehension. The lines appear to cross but never meet; each curve promises a conclusion only to dissolve at its midpoint, resembling nothing so much as a moral paragraph by Carlyle.
Modern investigators (one hesitates to name Dr. Phineas Greel’s Radium and the Runes, published by The Electric Folio, 1924) have attempted to measure the stone’s faint halo, claiming it “fluctuates at emotional proximity.” Though I remain sceptical of Greel’s numerical conscience, his tables are arresting: the glow reportedly intensified during recitations of the Psalms, diminished under classical Latin, and vanished entirely at the mention of financial stability. These data, improbable to the rational mind, nonetheless illustrate a fundamental principle of our age: that the absence of evidence remains a particularly compelling kind of evidence when printed handsomely.
It has been remarked—and I confess I incline to the remark—that the phrase “probably pre‑Sumerian” carries a moral dignity still lacking in the sciences. It suggests not only remoteness in time, but also a decorous ignorance which, far from humiliating us, compels us to draw nearer in clean gloves. The pre‑Sumerian, after all, is by definition that which cannot be accused of error. One is relieved of proof precisely because it precedes the obligation to prove.
Nevertheless, it would be dishonest in a publication devoted to Probable Facts if I did not record certain correspondences lately proposed between the Mallard Stone (as the offending object has come to be fondly misnamed) and the so‑called “Whisper Pebbles of Khataban,” a set of phosphorescent relics described in The Himalayan Courier (Vol. III, 1899) as “possibly fabricated from melancholic basalt.” When pressed, the author of that brief communication—an anonymous “traveller of modest veracity”—admitted that his entire report was based on a conversation overheard in Karachi. Yet, in such delicate matters, one must recall that absence of location is no reason to doubt occurrence.
The unbroken persistence of the Stone’s legend must be attributed less to its appearance than to its insistence upon being interpreted. Members of the Psychical Gentlemen’s League—whose annual luncheons are renowned, if not intelligible—still report that the object induces minor auditory illusions: footsteps where none are; the faint sound of an envelope being resealed. “The past,” as Mrs. Adeline Pritt‑Davis observed so appositely in her once‑popular manual Domestic Metaphysics for the Unhurried, “is nothing but attention carried backwards by too many servants.” I quote this not for its veracity, but for its poetry; though the distinction, in our present century, is fast becoming decorative.
When last I visited Mallard House—by then a minor convalescent home under the charitable supervision of the County Board—I was permitted to stand above the basin where the luminous discovery had lain. The matron, a lady of candid scepticism, informed me that in certain weather “the cement shines just there, as though remembering something.” She pointed, and it did. “Phosphorescence,” she said. “Possibly fungus.” Yet I could not help observing that her remark, though practical, was uttered in a whisper suggestive of a pact.
There are those, of course, who will demand closure: an origin, a date, an author in stone. But in the present state of patriotic finance, even truth must be economical. The Mallard inscription, whether Egyptian, pre‑Sumerian, or purely conversational, continues to occupy that comfortable middle distance where British discoveries distinguish themselves—not quite material and never quite metaphor. It may, as Reverend Havers maintained, mean only “secret.” And there, perhaps, lies its very candour: a testament to the national virtue of saying less than we mean, but with admirable emphasis.
Should posterity uncover the truth (as it has often promised and seldom delivered), I trust they will approach this luminous record with the same mixture of diligence and decorum that has preserved so much of our ignorance in perfect condition. Meanwhile, let us admit the possibility that the Mallard Stone was neither a relic nor an omen, but merely—as the late Sir Aubrey, in one of his more lucid moments, confessed to me over port—“the damp behaving philosophically.” It is a conclusion whose dignity requires no confirmation; and, in scholarly circles, that has always counted as evidence enough.
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