Motivation:
So now we move to the final “action” instruction...
(4) “...the information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location...”
-Jim Sanborn, Kryptos Part Two
There are those in the community that insist that this is a literal description of Jim Sanborn actually burying something on the grounds of the CIA. But consider again this exchange with Ed Scheidt in a WIRED magazine interview:
“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
While it is certainly possible that Sanborn actually did bury something without anyone’s knowledge (including Scheidt’s) my premise of “text as instructions” is consistent with Scheidt’s answer. (In other words, both interpretations could actually be correct: Sanborn and Scheidt utilized this metaphor, but Sanborn also actually performed the action.)
Continuing with step (4) then, this seems like a description of what Mr. Sanborn and Mr. Scheidt did for encoding. First, they “gathered” the information, which may mean they selected the plain text, or it may mean that they also encoded it prior to “transmission”. Either way, the words “transmitted underground” seemed like something I could interpret.
Pre-Step Observations:
We know the following things:
• The current matrix represents “The World”,
• The current matrix references a “layer two”, as in X Layer Two,
• K2 references an “underground” and buried “information”, and
• We have already formed a palimpsest.
This is when it occurred to me that perhaps the formation of the palimpsest (step one) was not just needed to arrive at the right starting point. Perhaps the palimpsest was to be maintained throughout the procedure. In other words, maybe we need to perform the exact same steps that were performed above, but also on “layer two” of the palimpsest. Thus, we will form an “underground” to “transmit information” into.
Step Process:
This process definitely requires a spreadsheet and careful attention to the colors of the different sections of text. I provided the layer two results in some of the earlier steps, and this process is also available in its entirety on a worksheet entitled “Layer Two Manipulations” in the downloadable Excel file, “PathofKryptos.xls”. (On that worksheet, I place layer one and layer two side by side, and then I take each through all of the above steps together.) If you don’t want to follow all of the steps, and you have some faith, you can just look at the result in the figure labeled “Underground” below. This is the array that I have come to believe is the “Original Matrix”. For now, ignore the black borders around some of the characters. This is explained later.
Post-Step Observations:
Note that I did not insert the characters “CANDLE” on layer two. Instead, I inserted the appropriate six characters to keep the sequence of the “Kryptos alphabet” unbroken. Not only was it helpful for avoiding the awkward presence of the word “CANDLE” in the middle of the X-axis (which subsequently gets used for indexing) but it also presented itself as a belated interpretation of the phrase from K3 “… the hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist.” Here, the “candle” is getting out of our way and allowing us to “see” the details of the “room” beneath. The fact that the previous letters just to the left and right of these six characters, (“I” and “V”, respectively) have exactly 6 characters between them in the “Kryptos alphabet” results in a perfectly continuous representation of that alphabet completely across the X-axis, a quality that cannot be found on any other row. This is probably no accident, and it indicates even more constraints on Mr. Sanborn’s process.
This is the potential “underground” that the information was “transmitted” into, and it represents what I believe is the “original matrix”. So, the path to the original matrix was 7 steps long, incorporating “Palimpsest”, the instructions of K1, the locations of the misspelled characters, the instructions of K3, “Abscissa”, the “Earth Coordinates” theme of K2, the first two “action sentences” of K2, and the “Compass and Lodestone” strata art.
But even though we have worked off the “actionable” instructions that I extracted from K1, K3, and K2, we are not quite done with interpretation of K2. I believe that the remaining parts hint at how this “original matrix” was used and what encryption techniques should be considered for K4. In other words, we are now moving from the (right-brained) “interpretation” part of the solution into the (left-brained) “cryptographic” part.
