Motivation:
While contemplating the symmetry that resulted from the previous step, I had my first full-fledged “Aha!” moment: this arrangement of text (and misspelled characters) conjures the image of a door, complete with hinges and a doorknob. Please see the figure labeled “The Doorway” below. Recall my premise that visual interpretations will be involved and the quote that inspired it:
• “There are lots of doors to go through to get to the meaning of the code. Every time you enter one doorway you might, in the distance, see another door. You go through that doorway and then you go through another doorway. It unfolds as it's deciphered.”
-Jim Sanborn (from November, 2005 CNN Jamie McIntyre video)
Well, I did adopt the premise to watch for some “doorways”, but until this “Aha!” moment, I didn’t really think Mr. Sanborn meant it literally. How cheeky.
But the significance of this is much greater than the appearance of a “doorway”, which could be coincidence if left by itself. There is also the fact that the next passage of text in my rearranged version of Kryptos (K3) begins with a description of a doorway.
Here is the plaintext of K3:
• “Slowly, desparately slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands, I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist x Can you see anything Q”
-Jim Sanborn, Kryptos Part Three (with “E” inserted and some punctuation added)
So, we have Sanborn talking about “Doorways” in interviews, K3 referring to “Doorways” in plaintext, quotes from Sanborn and Scheidt about shifts, misspelling locations, visual aspects and textual interpretations. And now we have a doorway. This is the administrator’s wife.
Considering my doorway, there certainly is a bunch of debris left at the bottom of the matrix, partly consisting of the characters that were moved from the top during the shifting operation and partly consisting of the gibberish that is K4. Note that the beginning of K4 coincides perfectly with the left side of the doorway, so there is a visual indication of what is to be considered the “debris” for removal. This doorway with debris at the bottom may be an “Easter Egg” provided by Mr. Sanborn to let us know we are on the right path.
Pre-Step Observations:
I sought an “original matrix”, and the precedent of “text as instructions” had already been set due to the interpretation of K1. Now, I am literally staring at a “doorway”, which is the subject at the beginning of K3. Consider also the following exchange regarding K2:
“WN: Is there anything buried at the site?
Scheidt: I'm not aware of anything being buried, no.
WN: But within the text that's already been translated it does mention something being buried on the grounds of the CIA.
Scheidt: Well, the idea of encoding a message is not only to encode the externals of a message (the English language), but the message itself. Once it is readable, it may have other encoding that's involved in it. That's something that would show up in secret messages. If I wanted to, for instance, say (that) you and I are going to meet at 1 o'clock on Friday. We may establish a code that 1 o'clock on Friday is equal to "cake." So in my message I would say how about you and I meeting at a convenient place for cake? Then you and I really know that cake means the time.”
- Ed Scheidt interview, WIRED Magazine, Jan 2005
Note that as soon as the interviewer references the plaintext of K2 (regarding burying something at the site) Ed Scheidt’s response immediately leaps to hidden meanings and interpretations.
Given that K1 was a set of instructions, that K3 seems to be relevant to my “doorway”, and that Scheidt’s first impulse regarding the plaintext of K2 was to treat it as something requiring interpretation, I thought it reasonable to introduce a new premise:
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•The entire text of K3 and K2 are instructions that require interpretation.
Realizing that such interpretation could be difficult, I decided to reduce the potential for error by only considering the passages of text that spoke of actions (presumably actions that Sanborn and/or Scheidt followed). Here are the list of “instructions” that arise from that new premise, in the order in which they appear:
(1) “...the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed...”
-Jim Sanborn, Kryptos Part Three
(2) “...I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in...”
-Jim Sanborn, Kryptos Part Three
(3) “...they used the Earth’s magnetic field...”
-Jim Sanborn, Kryptos Part Two
(4) “...the information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location...”
-Jim Sanborn, Kryptos Part Two
So according to this new premise, it’s time to follow these “text as instructions” and see where they lead. Note that since steps (1 and 2) are about a “doorway” and steps (3 and 4) are about the Earth, there had better be some kind of transition that links the two.
Step Process:
Beginning with the matrix of “The Doorway”, remove the “passage debris” at the lower part of the doorway (according to instruction 1) and then insert the word “CANDLE” in the upper left hand corner (according to instruction 2). In order to make room for the new characters, shift all of the other characters 6 spaces to the right. See the matrices labeled “The Doorway”, “Debris Removal”, and “Candle Insertion” in the figure below to follow the process. Note that for simplicity, I have suppressed the display of the corresponding layer two manipulations in this figure, but it is important to note that they are still necessary.
Post-Step Observations:
Now we have “Palimpsest”, the instructions of K1, the locations of the misspelled characters, and the instructions of K3 incorporated into the approach. This is the fourth step along the path of creating the desired “original matrix “.
By the way, some earlier researchers have noted that the Morse Code message “DIGETALEEEINTERPREATU” on the South Strata could be parsed as “Dig Tale Interpretation”, which would resonate very well with the mechanisms of this step. But a clear distinction must be made between my work and that of the earlier efforts. For instance, in one such effort that particular interpretation of the Morse Code was a central premise from which numerous steps were spawned. By contrast, in my work Kryptos clues and quotes are followed as motivation, and the association with “Dig Tale Interpretation” is purely a fortuitous outcome that has possible relevance to just one step out of many. Whether the Morse Code is intended to be parsed some other way and then used for some other aspect of the overall Kryptos mystery does not impact the significance of the peculiarities that I show throughout my approach. I am only dwelling on this issue because one respected member of the Kryptos community is using this particular step as conclusive proof that my work is completely without merit. If you are interested, you can read more about that here.
