Lost Empire (37 page)

As though playing a slow-motion game of musical chairs, the group walked around the table, eyes fixed on the drawing, heads tilting this way and that, until finally Sam said, “You’ve stumped us.”

“Do you see the
tr
notation in the upper right-hand corner and the numerals near the curve at the bottom left?”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“That’s my handwriting, of course, but they were also inscribed on the inside of the bell. I suspect it means ‘top right.’”

Sam and Remi looked at him in surprise. “We missed that,” Remi said.

“Don’t feel bad. They were minuscule. Without my magnifying glass, I would have overlooked them, too. The
tr
notations were on the very edge of the bell’s mouth.”

“You said ‘notations,’” Remi replied. “As in plural.”

“There were two. I have a second sketch, but aside from the order of the symbols, each is identical to the other. When I saw the two
tr
notations, I assumed they were intended as both orientation points and end points for a pair of spirals. As to why there are two spirals . . . I suspect that answer is hidden in the rest of that poem of his. As you can see, each X mark is accompanied by a designator; each represents a different glyph. I have a legend with all this written down.”

“Amazing,” Sam said. “Imagine the patience all this took.”

Milhaupt smiled and rubbed his hands together. “And now I’d be happy to tackle Mr. Blaylock’s poem.”

Selma read it aloud.

“Well, I agree with your assessment of the first two lines,” Milhaupt said. “As for the other lines . . . I may have some ideas. First of all, this fellow’s a very abstract thinker—which is especially strange for a mathematician.”

“He was a character,” Sam agreed. “We also think he may have been a few sandwiches shy of a picnic.”

“Ah, I see. That puts things into perspective. Well, the third line—‘From above, the earth squared’—suggests to me a pair of spirals that are to be viewed from overhead. The notations I found within the bell tend to validate that. Agreed?”

Everyone nodded.

“The fourth line—‘From praying hands my day is quartered, the gyrare once, twice’—is a bit trickier, but as we’re fairly certain about the overhead view issue, the ‘praying hands’ may represent two hands of a clock, pointing toward midnight. I suspect the words ‘my day is quartered’ mean Mr. Blaylock has divided his ‘clock’ into four sections—midnight, three, six, and nine. And finally, following this logic, the line ‘the gyrare once, twice’ probably means we’re to rotate our first spiral to the three o’clock position and the second spiral to the six o’clock position.”

Milhaupt demonstrated, rotating his sketches, the first on top with the open end of the spiral pointing to the right; the second below that, the open end of the spiral pointing downward. He looked at each member of the group in turn. “Thoughts?”

No one spoke up.

“Me neither,” he said. “How about the last line of the poem?”

Selma recited it:

Remi said, “As for the first part—‘Words of Ancients’—we have a hunch what Blaylock means.”

“You’re referring to those Aztec glyphs inside the bell?” Milhaupt asked with a Cheshire smile. “I have no idea of their translation, of course. I assume you do?”

Sam nodded. “They’re from the Aztec calendar—thirteen months, thirteen corresponding symbols.”

“Clearly Mr. Blaylock was absorbed with the Aztecs, yes?”

“‘Absorbed’ isn’t the word we’ve been using,” Remi said.

Sam said, “The second part of the line—‘words of Father Algarismo’—has us stumped.”

“I am happy to say I have your answer. At last, my love of obscure mathematical history has come in handy. There is no Father Algarismo, you see. It’s another one of Mr. Blaylock’s tricks. Algarismo is the Portuguese derivation of the word ‘algorithm.’ Quite simply, it means digit.”

Remi said, “Then, translated, the last line reads, ‘Words of the Aztecs combined with numbers.’ Sam, you’re the cryptography guy. Is any of this ringing any bells?”

Sam nodded. “Maybe. I seem to remember a page in his journal that was nothing but dots. Did I imagine that?”

“No, I remember it,” Wendy said. “I’ll find it.” She disappeared into the archive vault.

“I can see the gears turning in your head,” said Remi. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t think we’re meant to combine Aztec words with numbers. I think we’re meant to translate them. For example, take the symbol for ‘flint’ and replace the letters with corresponding numbers.”

Remi was jotting along on her pad:

“A simple substitution code,” said Milhaupt.

“Right,” Sam said. “I think Blaylock’s spirals are just window dressing. Look at the two rotated sketches. If you straighten out the ends of the spirals, you get a horizontal line of glyphs and a vertical line of glyphs.”

“Essentially a grid,” said Remi.

Wendy’s voice came over the intercom. “Sam, I found that page you mentioned. It’s on the screen.”

Selma grabbed the remote and switched on the TV. As Sam had described, the page consisted of nothing more than groupings of seemingly randomly placed dots—row after row, column after column.

“How many clusters?” Sam asked.

Remi was already counting. “One hundred sixty-nine. Thirteen down and thirteen across.” She smiled. “Same number as your spiral grid idea, Sam. And the same number of months in the Aztec calendar.”

Milhaupt said, “We have a winner. Now you just need to plug your dots into the grid and figure out what it all means.”

 

 

HAVING CHASED BLAYLOCK’S RIDDLES for what seemed like months, Sam, now certain he was closing in on his quarry, attacked the “Blaylock Dot Grid Mystery” with a gusto that took him through the evening and into the early-morning hours of the next day.

Translating the Aztec-Nahuatl glyphs first into their Anglicized meanings and then into numbers was straightforward but time-consuming. Once done, he began plugging the dot clusters into their corresponding rows and columns until he had what looked like an LSD-inspired Sudoku puzzle on steroids. Next he began experimenting with various cryptographic methods, hoping to stumble upon something that clicked. Shortly before midnight, he found just that: a binary-type system where the dots’ positions determined which numbers in the grid were used.

After hearing Sam’s theory, Remi said, “You’ve worked this out? Tested it?”

“I did. Aside from the ‘empty’ clusters, they’re all latitude and longitude coordinates. This is a map.”

 

 

COFFEE IN HAND, SAM AND REMI WALKED INTO THE WORKROOM at eight A.M. to find Selma, Pete, and Wendy standing before a six-foot-wide map of the Indian Ocean tacked to the wall with blue painter’s tape.

Six hours earlier, at Pete and Wendy’s urging, Sam and Remi had gone to bed, leaving them to plot the coordinates on a world map.

“Of the one hundred sixty-nine locations in Blaylock’s grid, eighty-two of them were null,” Pete now explained. “Of the remaining eighty-seven, fifty-three were located in the middle of the ocean, which left us thirty-four latitude and longitude points that matched up with land. That’s what you see plotted here.”

The coordinates were marked by red pushpins connected by white string. In rough, the pins formed a giant inverted V that started near Madagascar, peaked 2,800 miles to the northeast at Sri Lanka, and ended off the central coast of Sumatra, 1,400 miles to the southeast.

“Where are the other pins?” Sam asked.

Selma replied, “We pulled some out, most of them well inland. We wanted you to see this particular pattern first.”

Both Remi and Sam recognized the gleam in Selma’s eyes. During the night, she, Pete, and Wendy had discovered something significant.

“Go on,” Remi prompted.

“After you got back from Madagascar and proposed the east-to-west Aztec migration theory, I started doing a little digging. In recent years a number of archaeologists and anthropologists have been finding more and more evidence that the Malagasy people of Madagascar arrived there in the first or second century, having sailed there from Indonesia—specifically, the island of Sulawesi. I came across a map of the route the Malagasy were believed to have taken.”

Selma picked up the remote and powered up the TV across the room.

The route, depicted as a red line on a map of the Indian Ocean, from the Indonesian Archipelago to the east coast of Africa, was nearly identical to the one on the workroom’s wall.

“Incredible” was all Sam could say.

“So Blaylock beat present-day experts to this theory by a hundred twenty or so years,” Remi said. “That’s impressive, but I don’t—”

“There’s more,” Selma said. Pete and Wendy got up on step stools, removed the pushpins, peeled back the tape, and pulled away the map. Beneath it was a second map, this one spanning from the east coast of Africa to South America. Like the first map, this one was covered in red pushpins connected by white string.

“These are all Blaylock’s?” Sam asked.

“Yes.”

The pushpins began near the coastal city of Lumbo in Mozambique and proceeded across the waist of Africa to the west coast of Angola before island-hopping first up the coastline, then west across the Atlantic to the easternmost bulge of Brazil, where they turned north and followed the coast of South America past Trinidad and Tobago and into the Caribbean Sea.

Remi asked, “Are we to believe Blaylock visited all these places?”

Sam replied, “He captured the
Shenandoah
in 1872, then went treasure hunting for his jeweled bird. Who knows how long he was at sea? It could have been decades, for all we know.”

“This looks familiar,” Remi said. “Pete, Wendy, put the first map up beside this one, please.”

They did as she asked.

Remi stared at this configuration for almost a full minute before smiling faintly. “Do you see it?” she asked.

“See what?” asked Sam.

In answer, Remi walked to one of the workstations. “Wendy’s been teaching me a little Photoshop. Let’s see how good a learner I am. Everybody go sit down. This might take me a few minutes.”

With her upper body blocking the computer monitor, no one could see what she was doing. At the worktable, Sam leaned sideways on his stool, trying to get a peek.

“Forget it, Fargo,” Remi muttered.

“Sorry.”

Twenty minutes later, Remi turned in her seat and addressed the group. “Okay. We all remember the Orizaga Codex?”

Everyone nodded.

“Remember the symbol spanning the upper half?”

More nods.

“Turn on the TV, Selma.”

“I’ll be damned,” said Sam. “We were staring at it the whole time. It wouldn’t win any cartography awards, but all the big pieces are there. Remind me: When did the Malagasy arrive in Madagascar?”

“First or second century.”

“And when did the Aztecs first emerge in Mexico?”

“Sixth century.”

“The Malagasy blaze the first trail from Sulawesi, then a few centuries later, a bigger armada—a hundred ships if the Orizaga Codex is accurate—arrives in Madagascar, but they don’t stop there. They keep heading west until they find Mexico.”

“The journey must have taken years,” Pete said. “The walk across Africa alone would have lasted six months or more. If you figure, conservatively, eight people to an outrigger, we’re talking about as many as eight hundred people.”

“Sam said it before: an exodus,” Remi replied.

“How do we know they didn’t go around Africa’s southern tip?” asked Wendy.

“Two reasons,” Remi said. “First, you’ll notice that area doesn’t appear on their map; second, they may have tried it, but I can’t imagine anybody getting around the Cape of Good Hope in outriggers.”

“Those are some of the most unforgiving waters on earth,” Sam agreed. “Here’s the million-dollar question: On your map, where exactly does the big question mark fall?”

“You’ve got me. Indonesia’s a big place. For Blaylock, it was probably where he thought he’d find his treasure. For the Aztecs, it was Chicomoztoc. When King Cuauhtemotzin dictated the codex to Orizaga, he was trying to show where his forefathers came from, but after centuries of having the story handed down through one generation of royalty to the next Cuauhtemotzin himself couldn’t be more specific.”

Pete said, “What I want to know is why they left in the first place.”

 

 

THAT QUESTION was at least partially answered two hours later when Remi’s old professor, Stan Dydell, called Selma and requested a video conference. The group gathered around the TV in the workroom. Dydell’s smiling face appeared on the screen. In appearance, he was the exact opposite of George Milhaupt: tall, thin, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair.