Chapter - 4 The Hint

Chapter – 4

The Hint

The next day I was somewhat depressed altogether. Perhaps it was the bitter failure and embarrassment which had occurred in the presence of a prehistoric animal whose name began with the 20^th alphabet of the English grammatical sequence of certain letters beginning with ‘a’, followed by a small hyphen which precedes the word ‘Rex’. Anyway I was depressed. Today it was Bill’s turn to have a go at the previously mentioned task. He seemed to be in uproarious mood today owing to realization that today was the day when he was going to get his turn at doing something. He (as you might have guessed) again suggested, or rather, ordered to look for treasure. It might be observed by our gloomy faces all around that we all were sick and tired of treasure. He set us to work by reminding us that he did work for each of us in turn with his full capacity, so we were bound to do his share of (probably unsuccessful) suggestions. We all set to work in the basement first. Under the guidance of Bill we were all faithfully searching everywhere. Soon I uncovered a deep hole in the ground and put my hand in to see what was in it. As I put my hand in, I touched something hard and metallic in the hole. I drew my hand out and called the others breathlessly. They came soon and I told them about what I had discovered. Soon enough there ensued a long struggle between us to put our hand in the hole. After the aftermath, each of us put our hand in it; none of us bring it up due to lack of grip and extreme presence of excitement. I suddenly got an idea, I said, “You all know that the thing there was metallic, so most probably it would be magnetic too. So what about this, Martha has a small table magnet, we can tie a string to it and bring up the metal, hopefully it will be magnetic.” No one had any objections to my idea. Preparations were duly made and the metal brought up. I was a bit hopeful as to it being gold, but as gold isn’t magnetic, those hopes were shattered. It was a thin sheet of iron and as each of us examined it, we found nothing except Jack, who distinguished a number of small squares; some ‘filled’ while others ‘hollow’. I have given the picture of their appearance here -

                                 

As one might be observed to observe, it is some sort of a code and as me and Martha were the most specialized in that, we set to work decoding it. I will not tell you the time taken by me and Martha to decode it nor will I tell you the other (wrong) solutions either, but I will directly give you the solution- Step 1 Divide the code into 3 groups of 3² (i.e. 9 pieces each) blocks. Step 2 Now it should be distinctly visible, the letters ‘D’ in the first ‘I’ and ‘G’ in the other group(s). Even if you are not able to see it I have given you the answer – ‘DIG’.