The Cthulhu Encryption Read Online Free PDF

means of a black stone?”
    “Such is his posthumous reputation,” Dupin confirmed. “In the same way that every great scientist prior to the Age of Enlightenment attracted suspicions of wizardry by virtue of his abstruse intelligence and arcane interests—but with an extra and more vital factor, in Dee’s case.”
    “Which was?” asked Chapelain. He was extremely tired, and seemed hardly to be able to keep his eyes open, now that the brandy and tobacco he had consumed were taking effect, but he was utterly fascinated, and determined to pursue Dupin’s study to the end.
    “Dee and his initial collaborator, Leonard Digges, were the finest mathematicians in England in their day,” Dupin continued, “and were also passionately interested in astronomy and optical science—the keys to successful navigation. Nowadays, of course, we take the instrumentations of navigation—charts, sextants, octants, compasses, telescopes and marine chronometers—entirely for granted, but most of those aids were uninvented in the sixteenth century, and those that were known could not be fully exploited. We do not know to this day how many of them Digges and Dee devised, because all the discoveries they made were secrets of great value, carefully hoarded in order go preserve England’s naval advantages for as long as humanly possible. Digges had the misfortune to meddle too intrusively in politics, and was ruined, but that only made Dee all the more precious, not merely to the Royal Navy but, perhaps more importantly, to the Guild of Merchant Adventurers and the founders of the joint-stock company that became the British East India Company. He provided their manuals of navigation and their training programs, and played a vital role in allowing the British East India Company to overtake and eventually obliterate the rival Dutch East India Company and the Portuguese commercial concerns operating out of Goa. There was no one more vital than John Dee to the maintenance of Britain’s empire of the waves—and England’s enemies knew that, even though most of his own countrymen were ignorant of the fact, and many were stupid enough to fear and loathe him for his education and enterprise.
    “There is no doubt that a mob did attack Dee’s house during his absence, that they overcame the guards posted to look after it, and that they attempted to burn it to the ground—but who commissioned that mob, and what became of those manuscripts that did not perish in the fire, we do not know. Dee was visiting the continent at the time, and immediately went to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor in Prague, probably because he thought the Emperor might be able to help him to discover what had become of the manuscripts, and perhaps to recover some of the most precious ones. He lingered in Prague for some time, but his hopes appear to have been dashed; he returned to England empty-handed, having abandoned any further questing to his associate Edward Kelley—the skryer who supposedly talked to angels. Dee could not possibly go to Lisbon, of course, although Elizabeth doubtless made what use she could of her spies in that enemy capital on his behalf. The books that remained in England eventually ended up in the British Museum, but the ones that did not were probably the most precious of all.”
    “And what were they?” Chapelain asked.
    “They included the core of Roger Bacon’s manuscript collection, which Dee had acquired. That would have included two of the three lost books of Sanchuniathon. numerous alchemical and magical texts, including at least two versions of the Clavicule Salomonis . There was also said to be a copy of a text known as the Necronomicon , which Dee had attempted to translate from Latin into English, although the Latin translation had been made from a Greek translation of a text allegedly first written in Arabic, and was doubtless hopelessly corrupt. In addition to the Bacon inheritance, the lost texts undoubtedly included some