According to Greek mythology, the caduceus was the staff carried by Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and guide to the underworld. It was a short staff entwined by two snakes, sometimes surmounted by a pair of wings.
Hermes was the son of Zeus, and was the patron of boundaries and of the travellers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, thieves, orators and wit, literature and poets, athletics and sports, weights and measures, invention, and of commerce in general.
Some might identify the caduceus as a symbol of medicine, or medical practice. However, it is said that this association may have arisen out of confusion between the caduceus and the traditional medical symbol, the Rod of Asclepius, which has only one snake and no wings.
The listed coordinates will lead you to an object that resembles the caduceus. The cache itself is not at these coordinates, however, it is somewhere nearby.
To locate the cache, you need to decrypt the following cipher text:
27242 22865 37370 92822 29100 82043 60350 20445 34054 24414 80620 14806 62293 43627 44521 87102 64646 16150 6270
I have used a cipher that not many people might be familiar with. I stumbled upon this cipher on the Internet while trying to solve mickeydv's Playful Vigenere puzzle (GC2F5FF), and the name of the cipher is on his page. However, it is not my intention to make this puzzle too difficult to solve. Therefore, I decided to provide the following clues to guide you along the way.
The cipher I used is named after a ‘fish’ that is more likely to lure you down the wrong path if you’re not careful.
Please note: While there was a site on the Internet that showed how the cipher worked, and provided worksheets to help in solving the cipher, mickeydv has alerted me to the fact that this site is down.
So, if you would like to solve this puzzle, please contact me with the name of this cipher, and I can e-mail you the instructions and blank worksheets. These are essentially three PDF documents of no more than 40KB in total.
You will also need two other things to decipher the message.
- Firstly, you will need a second set of numbers with a total of 94 digits (the same number of digits as the cipher text above). These digits need to be entered into one of the lines on the blank worksheet.
To construct a list of numbers that others should also be able to work out, I asked my brother (duncdonut73) if he could tell me what the first 41 prime numbers are in ascending order. In hindsight, I should have been more specific, as I discovered that he is not only the smart one in the family, but he can also be rather witty. He told me what the numbers are in ascending order, only they weren’t sorted in numeric order.
- Secondly, you will need to create a legend. In the legend I used, the letter ‘A’ was assigned a number that equals the sum of the two cantos in Dante’s Inferno that describe the ‘bolgia’ (ditch) where thieves end up. If you don’t have a copy of this book, Google and Wikipedia can be useful.
With these clues, you should be able to decipher the message and determine the location of the cache. The cache itself is a small container with just a log and pencil.