***** Vol.3 Chap.51 Carving puzzles *****

Frank did not mean to sleep that long, but when he awoke, he felt refreshed. He did not know how long he has slept. He figured he must have slept for a good four hours and was ready to attack what he hoped to be the last puzzle for the day, if he can call it a day, or was it already night outside?

Before He started, he thought he would be calm and looked at the problem from an objective standpoint. He looked at all the circles in each carving and immediately figured out the number of possible combinations there were in total. There were twenty circles in the first carving, twenty in the second, eighteen in the third, and eighteen in the fourth. It did not take him long on the laptop to figure that there were only 129,800 combinations, pushing one circle into each square.

The number was not astronomically large. If it takes 1 second to punch in a combination, then it only takes 36 hours to run through all the combinations. He sat down. If there were only 129,800 combinations, the combination would have been found a long time ago.

He remembered that back in the college, a favorite trick of the firewall is to put a time lock on the logon so that when there are three wrong attempts, the system would lock up for a predefined amount of time to discourage hackers from continuously entering password attempts.

Therefore, for this combinational lock, if there was a time delay for one minute after three poor attempts, then it would take 30 days to unlock the secrets. That was still not long enough. Perhaps there was a 60 minutes delay between attempts; then it would take five years.

What if one had to push more than one circle in each carving, then that would take a much longer time period? That would be more reasonable. He decided he had to be very careful and select his choices carefully since he did not have years, at most days if even that many, to unlock the secrets.

He was no stranger to encoding and decoding techniques since he had a government contract dealing specifically in decryption before. But this was a very different decryption problem because it was pictorial.

He did not know about the rules of the game. Was this a code or a secret message? Was this a key or a carving and nothing more? He tried to touch the carvings, nothing happened. There must be a message somewhere hidden in these four squares. Gradually, he found that all his computer training was now useless. He was convinced that these were not idle carvings. If not, then what could these carvings mean?

He thought of all the possibilities and wrote them down on his laptop: Insignia of the Pharaoh, ancient hieroglyphics, royal seal, Egyptian writing, and ancient civilization writing… As he pondered on those choices, he eliminated them one by one. Sometimes he would compare the carvings with the murals and was convinced that the carvings were sufficiently different enough from Egyptian culture to be of Egyptian origin.

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If the carvings were not of Egyptian writing, then who put them there? And what was the purpose of these indentations? Could they be there before the Egyptian times?

Suddenly, he remembered the mural at the end of the room. He jumped up and went to the end of the room and almost tripped on the stone slab. Sure enough, the same carvings were on the upright structure. The only difference was that on the mural, the stone structure was upright while the stone slab was now flat on the ground at present. He tried to read the carvings between the mural and what was on the stone stab, but could not deduce any significant differences.

One thing was clear, he thought. The stone slab on the mural was upright with a ghostly figure next to it. Now the stone slab was flat on the ground, but he had dreamed the same ghostly figure with the same clothing holding the same shepherd crook. So perhaps this ghostly figure was trapped inside this stone vault and needed to get out. If so, the lock combination must have something to do with the carvings on the slab.

As he was just about to go back to the stone slab, his eyes caught the hieroglyphics of the poem again. There are four lines to the poem as well. Maybe this was a strange coincidence, but perhaps the hieroglyphics could shed some light on the carvings.

From his limited knowledge, the first line has something to do with the universe, the second line has something to do with the stars, the third line has something to do with the sun, and the last line has something to do with the living things.

Perhaps this was a visit to Pharaoh by some divine deity. Then the universe would be the expanse of the Egyptian empire, the stars would be the various continents, cities or tribes. Maybe the sun was Pharaoh and the living things were the people and slaves. This could be a possible explanation of the four lines of poetry.

How were these four lines applied to the carvings on the stone slab? Perhaps each circle represents a unit, a dynasty, or a city? Or maybe each circle represents direction from the center of the Egyptian empire? Somehow, this interpretation did not seem to fit.

Maybe…

He was thinking hard since he was never one to turn down a tough challenge.

Maybe the universe was not the Egyptian empire. Surely there were other tribes and civilizations existing at that time. So, if the universe was the whole civilized earth, then Egypt would be one circle in the known universe. But who would be at the center of the universe? Or, more appropriately, where would be the center of the known universe? Then who or what were the stars? Perhaps the stars were the wealthy cities and the sun would be the prominent men on earth at that time. That may be another possible explanation for these curious carvings.

He was getting nowhere. He was also getting tired and hungry. His provisions were fast running out. He thought he had barely enough provisions for one more day. He hoped he could figure out the puzzle by then. If not, he was content to die here in the cavern and to spend his remaining moments here in his sarcophagus. At least, he would not be bored, but intensely trying to unlock the mystery of the combinational lock till his last breath.

But somehow, he felt he has been called for more than just a personal discovery of the secrets of the Sphinx. He did not want to die without knowing the deeper secrets of the Sphinx.

He took half of the remaining food in his backpack before he fell asleep. He slept soundly. When he awoke, he felt refreshed and was ready to tackle the problem again. He did not know whether it was day or night outside the Sphinx and he did not really care. He did not even bother to look at his watch. Time had no meaning here anymore.

The outside world would never be his concern anymore. There was only one thing on his mind: solve the mystery of the four carvings or make this his sarcophagus. He was convinced that these four carvings contained the key to opening the gateway of the stone structure. What that gateway would be and where the gateway could lead to, he did not know.