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Updated: May 24, 2025
I cannot better commence my relation of the episodes associated with the Zagazig's cryptogram than from the moment when I found myself bending over a prostrate form extended upon the table in the Inspector's room at the River Police Depôt. It was that of a man who looked like a Lascar, who wore an ill-fitting slop-shop suit of blue, soaked and stained and clinging hideously to his body.
"This is what is called a cryptogram, or cipher," he said, "in which letters are purposely thrown in confusion, which if properly arranged would reveal their sense. Only think that under this jargon there may lie concealed the clue to some great discovery!" As for me, I was of opinion that there was nothing at all, in it; though, of course, I took care not to say so.
"The divine afflatus and the same whereby Petrie solved the Zagazig cryptogram!" "But," concluded Forsyth, "I am indebted to you for an opportunity of meeting the Chinese strangler, and sending him to join the Burmese knife expert!"
Judge Jarriquez took off his spectacles and wiped the glasses; then he put them back again and bent over the table. His special alphabet was in one hand, the cryptogram in the other. He commenced to write under the first line of the paragraph the true letters, which, according to him, ought to correspond exactly with each of the cryptographic letters.
If the commencement of the word was written in a woman's hand, the last word had evidently been added by a man. But why should a cryptogram have been used? Was it because the demand was of so dangerous and compromising a character that it was impossible to put it in plain language? If so, why was the last word not in cipher?
Look here! 423 423 423, that is to say, of repetitions of the numbers 423, or 234, or 342." "Yes, that is it!" answered Manoel. "You understand, then, by this means, that in calculating the true letter from the false, instead of the false from the true, I have been able to discover the number with ease; and the number I was in search of is really the 234 which I took as the key of my cryptogram."
"Of course," I answered, readily, and sat down to scribble the few lines necessary to introduce Hewitt. When I had finished, Hewitt, who had been examining the cryptogram meanwhile, remarked: "This cypher is something out of the common, Brett. I certainly don't expect to be able to read it in the cab-journey perhaps not in a week of study.
"Now," remarked Roger, "you will notice that the lines of figures are far enough apart to allow us to write the letters corresponding to each group of them directly underneath, and that will be a great help to us; but we will write nothing until we are quite certain that we have hit upon the correct method of solving this cryptogram.
After a while, however, they found a deep crack between the cell wall and the floor, partly concealed by slime and dirt; and into this crack they pushed the remnants of the cryptogram, and then hid the small aperture again by covering it with more dirt scraped from the cell floor.
It might even be the initial of the person who had penned the instructions. Without knowing where "A." was, Orme could make nothing of the cryptogram. For that matter, he realized that unless the secret were criminal it was not his affair. But he knew that legitimate business information is seldom transmitted by such mysterious means.
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