ClarkeĪn adventurous geology professor chances upon a manuscript in which a 16th-century explorer claims to have found a route to the earth's core. This particular word quest may lack plausibility, just as the rest of their adventures, across underground seas and giant mushroom forests inhabited by long-extinct creatures and culminating in an eruption which saves the travellers from certain death by ejecting them out of the volcano at great speed on a jet of lava, perched as they are on a flimsy wooden raft… But that’s not to say that some aspects of the Professor’s approach can’t be applied to decipher other coded texts."The reason Verne is still read by millions today is simply that he was one of the best storytellers who ever lived." - Arthur C. … which, if you ignore the poor spelling, means:Īudacious traveller, if you go to Sneffels and descend the crater of Yokuls, touched by the shadow of Scartaris just before the July calends, you will reach the centre of the Earth.
In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende,Īudas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges… Kod feci. As it flits backwards and forwards in front of his face, as if via an optical illusion the meaning appears clearly to this fluent Latin speaker: the text was written backwards! This is how it should read: The young man’s speculation becomes feverish, and he gets so worked up by his efforts that he feels the need to fan himself, using the piece of paper he has been working on. What can the connexion between these words be? It’s tempting to see a link between ‘ice’ and ‘mer’ in a document written in Iceland. From French, ‘mer’ (sea), ‘arc’ (arc/arch), ‘mère’ (mother).From Latin, ‘rota’ (wheel), ‘mutabile’ (changeable), ‘ira’ (anger), ‘nec’ (neither) ‘luco’ (sacred wood) and ‘atra’ (black).By following this idea, his long-suffering nephew obtains the following result:Īt this point, several clues seem to present themselves, as words from various languages emerge from the magma: The Professor’s instinct leads him to ask Axel to rearrange the letters, first taking the first letter of each sequence, then the second letter, etc. Since medieval scientists commonly communicated in Latin, this must be Latin.įurther observation reveals that these letter sequences, with punctuation, capitals and brackets can’t be part of a natural language in its normal form, and therefore the message was written in code: a key must be found. The consonant to vowel ratio (79 to 53) makes it highly likely that it was not after all written in Icelandic but a “Southern” language, because “Northern” languages contain even more consonants.This message concerns “some astonishing discovery”.
He then (somewhat improbably?) immediately sees that:
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