Motivation:
So now that we have applied steps (1) and (2) of the “text as instructions” premise, it’s time to see about steps (3) and (4). Here they are:
(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
Thankfully, we are now in possession of an array that can represent the Earth, rather than a door. So let’s try to interpret the sentence “They used the Earth’s magnetic field.” Here’s the image from the previous step...
Pre-Step Observations:
In 1990, Earth’s magnetic north pole was located in the vicinity indicated in the figure above. Note that if a person were to stand at the “T” character (top row, tenth character from the left) facing south and holding a compass such that the compass rose were aligned with “True North”, then the needle would be pointing a bit south of due west in order to point to the magnetic north pole. This presents a nice correspondence with the compass and lodestone depiction that Mr. Sanborn provided at the South Strata along with the Morse Code that decodes as “T is your position”:
Image © Jim Gillogly
For the record, people disagree over whether the Morse Code that is adjacent to this compass is truncated on the front end, so it either reads “T is Your Position” or “What is Your Position”. Either way, the Morse is telling you to consider your location and provides you a picture of a compass that makes sense if you were standing at the indicated “T” character on my “World”. This turns out to be an important observation for some of the later steps. So I am naming the current step “(Wha)T is Your Position”, in order to honor either interpretation of the Morse Code.
The bottom line is that there is a distinct location on my “World” that yields the appropriate magnetic declination, and it just so happens to have a “T” at that position (whether it is meaningful or not). Now that I have made the association between instruction number (3) and the Magnetic North Pole, I decided to perform another shift operation so that the “T” moves to the middle of the matrix. (I figured that when one is hunting for something, one would love to start with a map that is centered on their starting point.) So…
Step Process:
Perform the matrix shift defined earlier repeatedly, left or right at your pleasure, until the “T” makes its way to the center position. Please see the figure labeled “T is Your Position” below.
Post-Step Observations:
Notice that the string “XLayerTwo” has come along for the ride, and it aligns perfectly with the abscissa (much like K2 did earlier). This is another nice Easter Egg, indicating a new X-axis for our consideration.
Now we have “Palimpsest”, the instructions of K1, the locations of the misspelled characters, the instructions of K3, “Abscissa”, the “Earth Coordinates” theme of K2, the first sentence of K2, and the “Compass and Lodestone” strata art incorporated into the approach. This is the sixth step along the path of creating the desired “original matrix “.
