Читать книгу Secret and Urgent - The Story of Codes and Ciphers - Анон - Страница 9

THE cryptographer, however, must balance more delicately than an aerialist between not being distracted by collateral issues and failing to recognize root objections. He may hold so tightly to a main line of theory that he fails to see the facts have been fatally strained; and apparently this is what happened in the case of another famous decipherment.

In 1912 a New York bibliophile and dealer in old documents named Wilfrid Voynich bought in Italy a chest full of ancient manuscripts. Most of them were the material of his ordinary business and as such were catalogued for sale, but one had special interest for him. It was a volume of about eight by six inches, written on vellum in a fine clerkly hand, with its pages ornamented by some extremely curious drawings, the whole being bound in with a later but still very old dedication sheet which declared the volume to be the work of Roger Bacon, the famous medieval philosopher.

Dr. Voynich had handled Bacon manuscripts before. If the handwriting were any indication this was from the same pen as the others, and the materials used established it as being indubitably from the thirteenth century, when Bacon had lived. A long course of investigation which stretched across Europe from Italy to England, via Prague and Vienna, established with practical certainty that the manuscript was the work of the famous friar.

The particularly interesting thing about the manuscript was the language. It was not in clerk’s Latin, in which Bacon had written all his other known works, nor in any of the other six languages with which he was known to be familiar. It was not in any language whatever; it was in cipher. The characters in which it was written were not those of any alphabet ever seen, but a set of arbitrary signs, apparently belonging to the alphabet of a substitution system.

As soon as he had established the work as being genuinely from Roger Bacon’s pen, therefore, Dr. Voynich submitted it to several cryptographers. The discovery of a substitution cipher from the thirteenth century, employing an arbitrary alphabet, excited them greatly for, although ancient historians had mentioned the alphabet of Julius Caesar, no ciphered text of a date earlier than 1500 had ever before been found, and all the known early cipher texts were simple substitutions using either figures or the normal Latin alphabet. When the signs in the Bacon manuscript were copied off and classified, their appearance and number were found to be consistent throughout, both internally and with the idea that the manuscript had been composed in a simple single-alphabet substitution cipher.

But to the dismay of the cryptographers, their utmost resources proved unequal to the task of extracting a sensible message in any language from the text. This was astonishing in view of the fact that some of the same cryptographers had already performed such feats as reading messages which had first been translated into Chinese and then thrown into a complex cipher—and this without any previous knowledge of Chinese. Nevertheless there the fact was. The cipher experts reported they could go no farther without a great deal of time and expense and that, even then, they would not answer for the results.

Dr. Voynich therefore turned to scientists in other fields. The drawings that accompanied the text were partly of plants, roots, seeds and the process of germination; partly of astrological symbols; partly of stars, among which Aldebaran and the group Hyades were readily recognizable. It seemed logical to believe that the captions which appeared under these drawings were descriptions of the objects, and the manuscript was accordingly submitted to several botanists and astronomers, as well as to experts in ancient languages for attack along the lines used by Grotefend and Champollion. None of them was able to make the slightest impression on it; and that simple statement may be qualified by mentioning that they put several years of effort into the task.

At this point it occurred to Dr. Voynich that Roger Bacon had also been an expert in the interpretation of the mystic-symbolical Jewish Kabbala, and that the manuscript might require interpretation in the light of cabalistic lore. He therefore turned it over to Dr. William E. Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the greatest students of medieval philosophy and science. Over the other investigators who had looked into the work Newbold possessed this advantage—that he was familiar with medieval methods of thought and turns of expression.

He knew, for example, that a good medieval thinker who wrote a manuscript in any kind of cipher would be almost certain to include in the manuscript itself a key for reading it; but the key would be couched in symbolic language and its interpretation would be loose and difficult. He began his work by a search for that key.

The last page of the manuscript held a single sentence, and this was the only sentence in the whole manuscript written with ordinary Latin characters instead of the peculiar and unreadable letters of the body of the text. “Michiton oladabas multos te feer cerc portas,” read the sentence. No process of anagramming or regarding this sentence as a simple substitution cipher would make sense of it; but if one supposed the presence of a large number of nulls, and supplied a preposition where a corner had been torn from the page, the sentence jelled out as A mihi dabas multos portas, which is clerk Latin (with an error in agreement between adjective and noun) meaning “Thou wast giving me many gates.”

In his Epistle on the Nullity of Magic Bacon had described seven systems of secret writing. One of them consisted in the inclusion of a large number of nulls in an ordinary text. Furthermore, in cabalistic lore the key to a secret, particularly a written secret, is always called a “gate.” It seemed perfectly reasonable therefore, to believe that Bacon meant to convey in this sentence that the manuscript had been written in a secret method with several keys; that is, that it was a cipher of more than one step, perhaps of several.

From this point Professor Newbold turned to the text itself. Under even an ordinary reading glass it was apparent that the wide ink-lines of the letters which composed it were carefully built up of a system of small dots, sweeps and shadings. When these were enlarged it was apparent that a regular system was perceptible in them. Dr. Newbold found twenty-two different signs, or combinations of dots and shadings, in various arrangements. Among these twenty-two he recognized the fifteen signs that composed an ancient Greek system of shorthand.

This system of shorthand was known to Bacon; he had written a Greek grammar with which the scientific world had been familiar for some time in which he described it, at the same time remarking that the Greeks had employed other systems of shorthand. The other seven signs of Dr. Newbold’s twenty-two were unfamiliar, but all were of the same general character as the fifteen shorthand signs, and careful compilation from the entire text of the manuscript showed they were probably Roger Bacon’s own invention, to fill out the Greek shorthand, which was not well calculated to express all sounds.

The Greek shorthand was a known quantity and so were its gaps; it was not, therefore, especially difficult to discover the significance of the seven additional signs, and thus to translate the entire text into letters. It made gibberish; and when every known method of solving these accumulations of letters as a simple or double substitution cipher was tried on them, the result was still gibberish.

But the key had not said merely “gates” or “two gates” which would indicate a two-step cipher; it had been specific about “many gates.” Dr. Newbold interpreted this to mean that whether or not he had been on the right track thus far, he had certainly not gone far enough. In other words there were two and possibly more steps in the cipher still ahead of him. He turned back to Bacon’s Epistle on the Nullity of Magic and examined the ciphering systems proposed there.

He never told what process of reasoning he employed at this stage, but by some process he became convinced that the next two steps in the decipherment were those of unraveling an extremely curious system of two-step simple substitutions. The first step in this process was that of doubling each letter recovered from the shorthand and writing the result in linked pairs, as though one should write the phrase “Come here” as CO, OM, ME, EH, HE, ER, RE. For each of these pairs of letters another pair was now substituted according to a regular system; and for this second pair a single letter, again according to a regular system.

The result was still gibberish. But no more than the great archaeological cryptographers would Dr. Newbold give in. He noted that the final step in these various solutions yielded a Latin alphabet; that is, one without k, w, j or y, and a count on the letters showed that the frequencies were just what they should be for Latin. Now a count of the letters in a transposition cipher has exactly the same characteristic; the count is correct, but the letters do not appear in the right order. It therefore seemed to Dr. Newbold highly probable that he had reached the last of the many gates and he attacked the letters that had resulted from his last step as though they were the elements of a regular transposition cipher.

He was still unable to find any orderly system on which they could be arranged to make sense. On the other hand, the professor knew that anagramming of names, mottoes and even of entire inscriptions was a very common practice in the Middle Ages. It occurred to him that anagramming might be successful in this instance also, and that the drawings scattered through the text were more likely than not intended to furnish a clue to such an anagramming process.

Dr. Newbold therefore attacked the illustrated pages; and now at last he began to get sense, and without going too far afield for the letters of his anagrammed text. Mostly the letters to be rearranged occurred in pairs next to one another in the Latinletter text, either in direct or reversed order. Only relatively infrequently did he have to go as far distant as twelve letters away to find one that would fill out a word, only once in a great while was the letter he needed thirty or forty letters away.

The matter he found in the text when thus developed was sufficiently startling to set the whole scientific world by the ears. It showed that Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century must have discovered and used the microscope which was not reinvented until 1677. The botanical and biological drawings in the text were described as representations of the seminiferous tubes, the microscopic cells with nuclei and even the spermatozoa—details with which modern science has come abreast only recently. But that was not all; among the astronomical drawings was a representation and a description of a spiral nebula, and another of a coronary eclipse—things which had not been rediscovered till the nineteenth century, and then with the aid of powerful telescopes, and which are invisible without telescopes. Bacon must, therefore, have invented the telescope as well as the microscope; and this would place him as the most gigantic intellect the world has ever seen.

Professor Newbold now began to look about for a check on his conclusions. Bacon had written a treatise on alchemy, most of which read like nonsense; and the Professor found it difficult to believe that a man of his intellectual powers could have believed in alchemy or written nonsense unless it were deliberate. He therefore tried his anagramming process on the text of the alchemy book. From it he soon extracted the following note:

February 26, 1273. King Edward ordered the clergy to undertake a systematic inquisition into crime. They began it, but owing to the antagonism of the nobility, soon desisted. At Oxford the knights besieged the friars; long speeches were exchanged: Bacon exploded gunpowder to scare the assailants with the belief that hell was opening and the devils coming out.

Research in old English records showed that such an inquisition had been ordered in 1273, and that afterward there had been a state trial on rebellious nobles who had attacked the brethren at Oxford. Dr. Newbold waited no longer; in a paper read before the American Philosophical Society in 1921, he described his decipherment and its results.