Answers: Astronomy
The front page was just a nice illustration, showing a comet over Paris. No deliberate clues here.
Red Herring
The page showing Atlas holding up the heavens was a red herring designed to lure you to The Globe in Leighton Buzzard [8].
The panel at the bottom contains a word-by-word anagram of Saturday Night Beneath the Plastic Palm Trees, the sole hit for the Leyton Buzzards. Cimabue’s Madonna is the name of a painting by Lord Leighton, which shows the Madonna painted by the old master Cimabue being taken in a procession to be hung in a church in Florence. Bueto is the genus of the buzzard family. Stoke Road is where the Globe can be found.
I am told by Matt that it is a pleasant canalside pub, which I hope provided consolation to everyone who visited it. Most unlucky was a team who better remain nameless, who set off from The Globe armed with the instructions that were supposed to be applied when starting from The Falcon in Fotheringay (see Mary Queen of Scots section). Naturally everything fitted, especially if he assumed the 'monument' to be St Mary's church instead of Fotheringay castle. They even found a likely-looking oak tree beneath which was concealed... an empty jar of Hellman's mayonnaise.
The (admittedly vague) clue to this being a red herring is that the picture shows the ancient view of the heavens, with the planets revolving around the Earth. The remaining two pictures show the Sun at the centre. So, you were supposed to choose fact over fiction - the Sun instead of the Globe. The question "Fact or Fiction" is repeated so you ask yourself whether this sheet is one or the other.
Pub Clues
The pub to be found was the Old Sun at Ampthill in Bedfordshire [8].
There were several clues to Masquerade by Kit Williams. This 1979 book was the pioneer for treasure hunting, the author burying a solid-gold, jewel-encrusted hare and giving clues to its location within a beautifully-illustrated story. This location turned out to be Ampthill, near the monument to Catherine of Aragon in the grounds of a nearby park.
The ‘green’ and ‘blue’ pages in our clue sheet are laid out in the same way as the illustrations in Masquerade, although no one mentioned this [14].
The 'Green' Page
The phrase "I am as old as earth, as cold as earth, and in the earth am I" is a direct quote from the first major illustration in Masquerade, and the reversible picture of the sun is also from the book (and a hint at the Old Sun pub). [8]
We omitted the rest of the initial quotation "One of six to eight", which in Masquerade was a reference to Catherine of Aragon. As she was not relevant to our Treasure Hunt this was replaced with "I will mask it", an anagram of Kit Williams [8].
The gold bar and the illustration of the constellation Lepus suggest the golden hare [6]. Nihal and Arneb are the names of the major two stars in Lepus, while M79 is Messier Object 79, a globular cluster also in that constellation [8].
ISBN 0 224 01617 2 is the International Standard Book Number for Masquerade (now of course out of print) [3].
Psalm 104.24 reads "O Lord how manifold are thy works! In wisdom hast thou made them all. The Earth is full of thy riches". An appropriate sentiment for a Treasure Hunt but more significant in that it is inscribed on a small plaque near where Kit Williams buried his golden hare (by a religious organisation which specialises in leaving uplifting thoughts at beauty spots). A bonus for anyone who made the pilgrimage to the park [9].
Clues on the 'green' page not relevant to Masquerade were...
The words around the picture of the Sun are those of Fat Old Sun by Pink Floyd (again). This is from the Atom Heart Mother album whose cover had appeared, somewhat incongruously, among the ‘punk’ clues. Of course this was a major clue to the Old Sun pub [8].
H.8 4.1.28 was deliberately meant to be confusingly similar to the ‘monarchs’ clue in the ‘Jack the Ripper’ section. In this case H.8 was meant to be Henry VIII but the remainder was not a date but a reference in the play Henry VIII by Shakespeare. The act, scene and line numbers yield the middle of a speech by a ‘Gentleman’
"…The Archbishop of Canterbury, accompanied with other learned and reverend fathers of his order, held a court at Dunstable, six miles off from Ampthill, where the princess lay, to which she was often cited by them but appeared not;"
A confirmer for Ampthill [12].
MDXXXI – MDXXXIII were the years during which Catherine of Aragon lived at Ampthill [6].
12.30 – 2.00 were the times to be at the Old Sun, on the dates specified on the ‘blue’ page.
The ‘Blue’ Page
The two crosses are a rough depiction of what lies in Ampthill Park. One cross (pictured) is the monument to Catherine of Aragon while another similar one is a tribute to a nearby military base [11]. "The mournful refuge of an injured queen" is part of the inscription on the base of the monument, written by Horace Walpole [8]. Although meant for Catherine of Aragon the words could equally well apply to the subject of Stage 3 - Mary Queen of Scots at Fotheringay - and so could also be taken as a ‘forward reference’.
The picture of the sun is the pub sign from the Old Sun itself.
Finally the answers to the first three questions are all dates, the dates on which you should have been at the Old Sun to collect the Stage 3 clues.
The Questions
1. On what date was the South Pole first reached? 14 December 1911 by Roald Amundsen [4].
2. When is mumping day? 21 December or St Thomas's Day, when the poor used to go about begging to procure good things for Christmas [2].
3. When is Childermas? Holy Innocents Day, or December 28th [3].
4. What was the answer to the first question ever asked on Mastermind? The question was "Picasso's Guernica was a protest about the bombing of a Spanish village. What was the year in which this event took place?" and the answer was 1937. The more subtle Hunters answered Alan Whitehead, on the grounds that the first question Magnus asked was "What is your name", to the initial contestant. Either was accepted [8].
5. What is the next in the series: 1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211? In this series each term is a ‘description’ of the one before it. So we start with a single 1 or (to put it another way) one ‘one’ – which gives us the next term, 11. This is two ‘ones’, which gives us the next term, 21. This is one ‘two’ then one ‘one’, which gives us the next term, 1211. Thus it continues and the next term after the ones given is 13112221 [5].
6. Other than board members, which Logica employee has the lowest staff number? OR What is the connection between Reuters, poppies and New Delhi?
This was the traditional Logica question or, for Reuters entrants, the first traditional Reuters question. For Logica people the answer is Peter R Smith [6], who has staff number 5, closely followed by Jeremy Tucker with 6 and Keith Southwell with 13. Sadly, it looks as if Pablo will never make the top ten.
For Reuters people the connection is Sir Edward Lutyens, who designed the Reuters HQ at 85 Fleet Street, the Cenotaph in Whitehall (hence the poppies), and much of New Delhi [6].
7. What is the next in the series: 5, 6, 14, 32, 64, 115, 191? This can be answered by studying the following
The answer is 299 [7].
8. What 10-digit number uses the digits 0 – 9 once and has each of its first n digits exactly divisible by n? 3816547290 [5].
9. Where in the Bible is it implied that pi equals three? Two possible answers here: 2 Chronicles 4:2 and 1 Kings 7:23 [6], the text being strangely the same in each case.
"Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about"
10. What is the next word in the sequence: DIG, MINIM, MILITIA, SIEVE, EVE? The even letters are the Roman numerals in sequence: I, II, III, IV, V. So you could have any answer of the form ?V?I?, such as OVOID or AVOID [10].
11. What were the first words ever spoken in Eastenders? "Stinks in ‘ere" as Den kicked in the door of Reg Cox’s flat to find him close to death in 1985 [11]. Several answers here along the lines of "He's dead", but not according to my source. It sounds like later dialogue to me.
12. What does Yahoo stand for? Yet Another Heirarchical Officious Oracle [7].
13. What is the most used noun in spoken or written English? "Time" [11], closely followed by "people", "way", "water" and "words". Some references (I suspect hailing from less politically-correct days) had "man", which was also accepted. The best source for this answer is Pablo's favourite book, Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R Hofstadter on page 630, in the section seductively entitled PLANNER Facilitates Problem Reduction. Hofstadter references The American Heritage Word Frequency Book by John B Carroll et al. and his main point is that we express ourselves in much more abstract terms than we may imagine. You could do worse than spending the time until the next ATH reading this and his latest brain-buster Le Ton Beau De Marot.
14. Arrange the following into a winning sequence: BANANAS, RIDDLER, POSSESS, STUMPER, FREIGHT, SESSION, PUZZLER. To do this you must consider each 7-letter word as a poker hand, in particular regarding numbers of identical letters and runs of sequential letters. So in ascending order of value we have:
STUMPER – nothing; PUZZLER – 2 of a kind; RIDDLER – 2 pairs; SESSION – 3 of a kind; FREIGHT – straight; BANANAS – full house; POSSESS – 4 of a kind.
And that is what we meant by the "winning sequence" [10].
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