The Cthulhu Encryption Read Online Free PDF Page A

claimed to be the original or a copy of the cryptogram contained therein. It is the principal Parisian equivalent of the maps hawked to credulous individuals in the Americas, supposedly showing the location of Blackbeard’s loot or Captain Kidd’s. At any rate, legend holds that there is a vast hoard of gold, silver and gems still buried somewhere, in France, the Seychelles, or some other island in the Indian Ocean.”
    “But you doubt it?” I queried.
    “I do. We do not know how much of his fortune Levasseur might have lost to theft, or traded away, while he was still alive, and we would not necessarily know if anyone had found it after his death, if they were wise enough to conduct themselves discreetly. Gold can vanish with surprising alacrity, when the voracious scent it. Levasseur was nicknamed La Buse —the buzzard—but the moment he became rich, he was competing with eagles. Levesseur lived for more than eight years after the capture of the Portuguese treasure-ship, and he must have spent or lost a considerable fraction of his wealth. In all likelihood, he and his crewmen did bury some of it, probably in more than one location—but a further hundred and twenty years has passed since then. Any surviving crewmen surely returned to the sites they knew, and might well have given information to others in a less melodramatic fashion than Levasseur is reputed to have done. The chances of any such treasure meaning where it was buried to this day are, to my mind, very slim. On the other hand…it is not merely the Flaming Cross of Goa and the gold coins that have not been seen again.”
    “What else?” asked Chapelain, who was clearly fascinated by the story. I was enraptured myself, but I got up to close the window nevertheless, having found that the cold draught of night air was becoming irritating.
    “The versions of the legend repeated in the cabarets of the Marais and the theaters of the Boulevard du Temple,” Dupin continued, “naturally make no mention of anything but gold, silver and precious stones—but when their counterparts are whispered by the bouquinistes of the Seine, or among the stacks of Père France’s shop, they take on a slightly different complexion. Money is only money, after all—a game of numbers—but the Bishop of Goa’s book collection is another matter.”
    “Ah!” I said, realizing that we were now getting to the heart of the problem, in Dupin’s view. If, one day, he were ever to stumble upon an iron-bound sea-chest full of gold, silver diamonds and rubies, in some forsaken cranny of the Parisian carrières —it was impossible to imagine him on a desert island in the Seychelles—he would very likely sigh over the inconvenience and distraction that its disposal would cause him; but if, at the bottom of the chest, there were some Medieval manuscript illegibly scribbled in an arcane script…. that would make his eyes shine.
    “The bishop was a churchman and a scholar of sorts, as well as a merciless plunderer,” Dupin continued. “He is reputed to have amassed a collection of Sanskrit manuscripts second to none while he was supposedly in charge of the spiritual welfare of the subcontinent’s Catholic converts—and he is also reputed to have had a substantial quantity of Latin and Greek texts, some of them stolen from the British East India Company, whose burgeoning commercial empire surrounds and threatens Goa. British ships sometimes fall victim to Spanish and Portuguese pirates, of course as well as vice versa —but the most interesting fragment of the rumors attached to the Bishop’s priceless collection concern books stolen from the very heart of England, by a very ingenious Portuguese sneak-thief: from the library of John Dee himself, which was supposedly lost when a mob stormed his house in Mortlake and supposedly burned the bulk of it.”
    “Dee the wizard?” I queried. “The man who was duped by a confidence-trickster who claimed to be able to talk to angels by