and then pricking letters upon the skin, and waiting till the hair grew again. This accordingly he did; and as soon as ever the hair was grown, he despatched the man to Miletus, giving him no other message than this: ‘When thou art come to Miletus, bid Aristagoras shave thy head, and look thereon.’ Now the marks on the head were a command to revolt.”—(Bk. v. 35.)
In this case no cypher was employed; we shall come, now, to the use of cyphers.
When a despatch or communication runs great risk of falling into the hands of an enemy, it is necessary that its contents should be so veiled, that the possession of the document may afford him no information whatever. Julius Cæsar and Augustus used cyphers, but they were of the utmost simplicity, as they consisted merely in placing D in the place of A; E in that of B, and so on; or else in writing B for A, C for B, &c.
Secret characters were used at the council of Nicæa; and Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda, and Archbishop of Mayence, in the ninth century, has left us an example of two cyphers, the key to which was discovered by the Benedictines. It is only a wonder that any one could have failed to unravel them at the first glance. This is a specimen of the first:
.Nc.p.t v⁝rs⁙s B⸬n.f:c.. :rch. gl⸬r⸬s.q⁙⁝ m:rt.r.s
The clue to this is the suppression of the vowels and the filling of their places by dots,—one for i, two for a, three for e, four for o, and five for u. In the second example, the same sentence would run—Knckpkt vfrsxs Bpnkfbckk, &c., the vowel-places being filled by the consonants—b, f, k, p, x. By changing every letter in the alphabet, we make a vast improvement on this last; thus, for instance, supplying the place of a with z, b with x, c with v, and so on. This is the system employed by an advertiser in a provincial paper, which we took up the other day in the waiting-room of a station, where it had been left by a farmer. As we had some minutes to spare, before the train was due, we spent them in deciphering the following:
Jp Sjddjzb rza rzdd ci sijmr, Bziw rzdd xr ndzt
and in ten minutes we read: “If William can call or write, Mary will be glad.”
A correspondence was carried on in the “Times” during May, 1862, in cypher. We give it along with the explanation.
WWS.—Zy Efpdolj T dpye l wpeepc ez mjcyp qzc jzf—xlj T daply qfwwj zy lww xleepcd le esp tyepcgtph? Te xlj oz rzzo. Ecfde ez xj wzgp—T lx xtdpclmwp. Hspy xlj T rz ez Nlyepcmfcj tq zywj ez wzzv le jzf.—May 8.
This means—“On Tuesday I sent a letter to Byrne for you. May I speak fully on all matters at the interview? It may do good. Trust to my love. I am miserable. When may I go to Canterbury, if only to look at you?”
A couple of days later Byrne advertises, slightly varying the cypher:
WWS.—Sxhrdktg hdbtewxcv “Tmwxqxixdc axzt” udg pcdewtg psktgexhtbtce.—QNGCT.
“Discover something Exhibition-like for another advertisement. Byrne.”
This gentleman is rather mysterious: we must leave our readers to conjecture what he means by “Exhibition-like.” On Wednesday came two advertisements, one from the lady—one from the lover. WWS. herself seems rather sensible—
TYDEPLO zq rztyr ez nlyepcmfcj, T estyv jzf slo xfns mpeepc delj le szxp lyo xtyu jzfc mfdtypdd.—WWS., May 10.
“Instead of going to Canterbury, I think you had much better stay at home and mind your business.”
Excellent advice; but how far likely to be taken by the eager wooer, who advertises thus?—
WWS.—Fyetw jzfc qlespc lydhpcd T hzye ldv jzf ez aczgp jzf wzgp xp. Efpdolj ytrse le zyp znwznv slgp I dectyr qczx esp htyozh qzc wpeepcd. Tq jzt lcp yze lmwp le zyp T htww hlte. Rzo nzxqzce jzf xj olcwtyr htqp.
“Until your father answers I won’t ask you to prove you love me. Tuesday night at one o’clock have a string from the window for letters. If you are not able at one I will wait. God comfort you, my darling wife.”
Only a very simple Romeo and Juliet could expect to secure secresy by so slight a displacement of the alphabet.
When the Chevalier de Rohan was in the Bastille, his friends wanted to convey to him the intelligence that his accomplice was dead without having confessed. They did so by passing the following words into his dungeon, written on a shirt: “Mg dulhxcclgu ghj yxuj; lm ct ulgc alj.” In vain did he puzzle over the cypher, to which he had not the clue. It was too short: for the shorter a cypher letter, the more difficult it is to make out. The light faded, and he tossed on his hard bed, sleeplessly revolving the mystic letters in his brain, but he could make nothing out of them. Day dawned, and, with its first gleam, he was poring over them: still in vain. He pleaded guilty, for he could not decipher “Le prisonnier est mort; il n’a rien dit.”
We noticed in a back number of “Once a Week” some verses, or a story, we forget which, signed Azile Nostaw. Did the writer really intend concealing her name by simply inverting it? It was readable at a glance, and she might just as well have signed in the way of ordinary hum-drum folk. If, however, you invert a message, and then turn it into cypher, the difficulty of reading it is greatly enhanced.
Another method of veiling a communication is that of employing numbers or arbitrary signs in the place of letters, and this admits of many refinements. Here is an example to test the reader’s sagacity:
§†431452+9+§514=8732+287452+9†¶=+
We just give the hint that it is a proverb.
The following is much more ingenious, and difficult of detection.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | |
| A | a | d | g | k | n | q | t | z |
| B | b | e | h | l | o | r | u | y |
| C | c | f | i | m | p | s | w | z |
