Two hours had passed since this first discovery, but we had remained at a standstill. We tried everything we could think of in an attempt to find some kind of a pattern: looking for hidden ratios, measuring the length of each line, and even looking for hidden words, all to no effect. After a couple of hours of experimentation we had to admit failure.
‘Guess we’re just not good at solving puzzles,’ said Maria. She looked tired as she put her hands on her waist and swung her upper body left and right. She hadn’t really been occupied with the puzzle before. Perhaps she was starting to think it was out of our league.
In an effort to encourage myself, I said: ‘It’s a puzzle leading to five hundred million yen that many have tried to solve and failed. We can’t just expect to do it in a couple of hours.’
‘I guess you’re right…I wonder how Mochi and Nobunaga are doing back in Kyōto now? They don’t even know the directions the statues are facing, so perhaps they’re still struggling with the points.’
‘Ah, that’s too bad. We at least have advanced to the dimension of lines, but they are still wrestling with the puzzle because they don’t have enough data. Racking your brains over a puzzle where you haven’t got enough data... Doesn’t that just seem to symbolise the drama of human life?’
‘All they do is read crappy whodunit mystery stories anyway.’
‘By the way, neither of them will be in Kyōto at the moment. Mochi’s probably gone back to his parents’ home in Wakayama and is fighting with the instructor of his driving school, while Nobunaga’s back in Nagoya for his sister’s wedding.’
‘Ah, so they’ve escaped Kyōto’s torrid nights.’
We’d moved away from the puzzle to simple chatter. Maria suggested we all go to bed.
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s continue in the morning.’ Maria threw the cookie crumbs into the waste basket, threw the empty cans away and took the bag of cookies with her.
‘If I find a pit viper or a tarantula under my bed, I’ll come running back. So let me in then, okay?’
It was midnight when Egami and I crawled into our beds and turned the light off.
This was the fourth night on the island. My ears had become accustomed to the lullaby of the waves. Why had bloody murders been committed in a place like this? The tide sounded as if it was laughing at the foolishness of us humans.
I woke up once in the night and saw that Egami was still up. He was sitting on his bed, still dressed in his shirt, studying the map while smoking a cigarette. I saw the grim expression on his face thanks to the light of the stars beyond the window. The rising smoke dancing in the darkness was beautiful. I hesitated as to whether I should call out to him, but decided against it and went back to sleep.
The next time I woke up, it was morning. It was past seven. Egami was already awake, lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling. On the night stand stood the ashtray full of butts and a crushed case of Cabin cigarettes. I said ‘Good morning’ to him, to which he only replied ‘Yeah.’
‘Did you start on the puzzle this early? Don’t tell me you got up in the night to solve it?’
‘Hmm? Oh, well, yeah. Did you see me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But this case of Cabins is empty, so I guessed you’d been up.’
‘Haha, sharp one, eh, my dear Watson. Without some other clue, we won’t be able to solve the puzzle.’
‘If you’re like this already, I can’t begin to imagine how Mochi is doing. Fiddling around with a map that only has dots, and with a copy of The Origin of Species.’
‘The Origin of Species. Evolution theory. A puzzle which evolves. “The person who will solve the evolving puzzle, will inherit the diamonds.” Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals. Snakes are reptiles…but that has nothing to do with it. A puzzle that can only be solved in stages. One, two, three. Or A, B, C.’ Egami started to mumble to himself. We hadn’t considered the hint of the “evolving puzzle” last night.
‘Ah, so that’s it. An evolving puzzle is one you can only solve in stages. That does sound about right,’ I commented.
‘But we can’t get this puzzle to evolve. Or can we? Maybe we did evolve one stage. We connected the facing directions and got this strange figure.’
Egami sat up straight and faced me.
‘Remember what you said yesterday. “We’ve at least advanced to the dimension of lines.” We advanced from points to lines. So what’s next? After two dimensions….’
He reached for the map and I sat down next to him to get a better view.
‘One, two, three…eleven. There are eleven closed surfaces here. Nine triangles, and two squares. What are we supposed to do with them? It seems as though there are a couple of them with the same angles…What’s it telling us to do?’
Egami let his thoughts run freely again.
‘What comes after two dimensions? A solid body. In mathematics, it’s zero dimensions, one dimension, two dimensions and three dimensions. That’s what you might call “an evolving puzzle.” What do think, Alice?’
‘I’m with you so far. But what does three-dimensional mean?’
‘That we’ll have to put this thing together. Have you any scissors? Wait, No need.’ Egami searched his toilet bag and produced a safety razor. He removed the blade and, holding it carefully between his fingers, he placed the edge against the map.
‘Pass me a ruler.’
I handed him my ruler and he carefully cut along the lines, during which time I could hear our breathing. When he was finished, we had eleven surfaces.
‘The moais were just the base data we needed to extract the surfaces. Now we can connect them together and make a three-dimensional figure.’
‘Mr. Egami, going three-dimensional is a very surprising step, but if this is supposed to be a clue to the hiding place of the treasure, shouldn’t it be pointing to somewhere on the map?’
‘We’ll see when we’ve built the figure. Perhaps it becomes something very obvious.’
We started by numbering the surfaces from 1 to 11, in order of how you reached them starting from the first moai statue. We immediately realised that there were three equilateral triangles 2, 3 and 8, plus a fourth formed by joining 6 and 7 together. We lined them up side by side. The isosceles triangles of 1 and 9 clearly went together as well, but we had to stare for a while at the remaining surfaces 4, 5, 10 and 11 before realising that 4 and 5 formed a third isosceles triangle and 10 and 11 formed a fourth. So we had one set of four equilateral triangles and one set of four isosceles triangles. We were on to something.
We finally put the figure together. It was indeed three-dimensional: an octahedron, elongated as if one apex had been pulled down like a lozenge.
‘What is this?’ cratched my head. The figure looked familiar somehow.
‘Hey.’ Egami suddenly hit my shoulder with his fist. ‘Isn’t that Candle Rock?’
It was a very abstract representation, but the proportions were indeed that of Candle Rock. After four stages, we had finally reached our destination, it seemed.
.’
‘I’ll go get Maria.’
‘Wait.’ Egami stopped me. ‘Maybe you should get dressed first.’
5
We’d barely touched our breakfast before rushing out of Panorama Villa and climbing on the bicycles. Egami and I went so fast, Maria called out from behind us to wait for her. ‘Slowpoke Swimmer Alice, wait!’
But my impatience had me pedalling with all my strength. Even I was surprised at how fast we went, but I guess that the excitement of Egami, who was in front of us, had also taken hold of me. We dropped our bicycles at the foot of the hill and ran up the small path to the observation platform.
We were halfway up when Egami suddenly looked as if he’d remembered something and asked Maria: ‘Getting down to that rock is easy, but climbing back up might be difficult. Could your grandfather have done that?’
‘You mean, could grandfather have climbed back up without anyone’s help?’
Eg
ami nodded. ‘He thought of this elaborate puzzle all by himself, so I’d expect that when it came to hiding the treasure itself, he also did it alone.’
‘Of course. If he’d asked anyone to help, that person might’ve dug the treasure up themselves and taken it with them.’
‘That’s why I asked. Now we’re here, I’m starting to wonder whether it was even possible for your grandfather to have hidden something on Candle Rock.’
‘He hid the treasure and had the moai statues created six years ago, soon after my grandmother died, so he was still quite energetic. I think he could easily have climbed up and down the rock. I doubt he could have dived into the sea, though.’
‘We don’t know how and where he hid the treasure yet, but we can make a good guess as to the limits of where he could have put it. It’s not likely he would’ve dived into the sea and hidden it near the foot of the rock, nor that he would’ve climbed to the top of the rock and drilled a hole there.’
‘No. But up until now, nobody has even considered the possibility it might be hidden on the rock, so maybe it hasn’t been searched. Perhaps there’s some kind of marker there.’
‘That sounds rather over-optimistic,’ I observed.
We continued talking as we walked on up and eventually we reached the observation platform. The wind was strong. We looked down at Candle Rock, towering out of the waves. A white sea bird, an albatross perhaps, was resting on the pointed tip.
We’d spent so many hours on this observation platform, yet we’d managed to overlook this large object right in front of our eyes. I mentally took my hat off to Tetsunosuke Arima. The treasure had been hiding in plain sight all the time.
‘Let’s go.’
Egami went first as we climbed down to the sea. There was no path, but there was no problem finding spots to place our feet. I followed behind him, holding a bag with his and my swimwear and Maria climbed carefully down after me. She probably hadn’t wanted to stand waiting for us at the top of the hill. When we reached the rocky stretch of land, she turned towards the sea as we men got into our swimwear.
It was about thirty metres to Candle Rock. As we stepped into the sea, I realised that the rocky stretch actually extended all the way to Candle Rock itself and the water only reached to my waist. That meant even an old man could have made his way there without having to swim.
Once we’d reached the monolith we checked around it to see if there were any markers as Maria had suggested, but there weren’t. Next, we went around two or three times looking for traces of burial sites or surface disturbances, but again we drew a blank.
‘So? Did you find anything?’
Maria called out to us impatiently. Beads of water flew around as I shook my head. We spread out over a wider area, stretching our backs and arms to the limit, and even tried hitting the rock, but we couldn’t find anything odd. It was a very ordinary tall rock.
I started to have doubts whether we’d actually solved the puzzle. Egami stood still and thought as he sucked on his middle finger, which he’d cut on the rock.
‘Alice,’ he said with his finger in his mouth, ‘do you think there’s anything special about that moai up there on the observation platform? It’s bigger than the others and carved out more neatly, it’s standing on the highest point of the island and it’s the final point on the line when you connect all the statue lines of sight. It stands out so much, there must be something decisively different to the thing itself, I think.’
‘I agree. For example, it’s looking north-west. Perhaps that means the treasure is hidden on the north-west side of Candle Rock?’
‘North-west, eh? But we’ve gone around this rock at least ten times, and there’s nothing on it in any direction. Or does it mean we need to go north-west from Candle Rock?’
‘But that’s the sea. If you go further you reach the island. Perhaps that wall of rock over there?’
We yelled out our theory to Maria, who was still standing on the rocky stretch. With a compass in her hand, she searched the rock wall north-west of Candle Rock, but that, too, drew a blank.
‘But I’m sure the process that led to Candle Rock is correct. The process of evolving from points to lines to surfaces and then getting it to stand up from the paper, that can’t be an accident,’ I said.
Egami and I sat down in a shaded part of the rock out of reach of the waves, and Maria sat down on a rock as well.
‘Maybe we haven’t solved the complete puzzle yet. Maybe there’s a further stage.’
As I said that, Egami’s expression changed slightly. He seemed to have thought of something.
‘There’s more? You mean this puzzle will evolve even further? How is it going to evolve beyond a solid body? Zero, one, two, three, four. Four dimensions. Four dimensions in mathematics. Points, lines, surfaces, solid bodies and now the fourth dimension. Time. Hmm, can’t proceed from there. Add time to the process so far... If that last moai is indicating time, then north-west…no, it wasn’t pointing precisely north-west... What time does the angle...Oh, no, this is much simpler of course.’
‘You mean the moai is looking towards Low Tide Cape?’
Egami stared back at me.
‘Precisely. Low Tide. That’s the time dimension.’
I wanted to test the theory immediately.
I called out to Maria, who was looking bored. She looked up at my call.
‘No idea whether it’s high or low water now, but how much of Candle Rock shows above water level when the water is at its lowest?’
If you learned to play guitar on the hill, you should know this. And, as expected, Maria did.
‘I think the water should drop another metre. Why?’
I explained our theory of making the puzzle evolve from a solid body to the fourth dimension. She looked very interested and observed: ‘Luckily, the water’s ebbing now.’
I’d noticed that.
‘What about waiting for an hour or so? Then you can see the Candle Rock at low tide.’
We decided to return to the rocky stretch where Maria was standing and wait for an hour. How I wished we could fast-forward like with a video.
When the water had ebbed, you could walk to the Candle Rock with the water level only reaching your knees. This time, Maria rolled up the legs of her pants and came along.
‘We just focus on the parts that are visible now the water’s gone down, right?’
Maria immediately started touching the rock.
‘So, below this line.’
‘What about this?’ I said, and I put my hand on a part that stuck out of the water now it had become low tide. It didn’t feel strange and there was nothing that moved. But this part of the rock that jutted out had several markings that had been made by being hit by something hard. But I couldn’t yell ‘Eureka’ just because of that. I peered more closely at the rock and carefully observed the surface.
‘You have something?’
Maria looked over my shoulder. She noticed the markings immediately.
‘They look old. What are they? They don’t look natural. As if someone had gone at it with a hammer or something.’
I was about to agree with her, when the rock suddenly made a clanking sound and the short tip of the projection moved a little. Both of us cried out simultaneously.
Egami came over from the other side of the rock.
‘Did you find something?’
‘Perhaps…’
Still not sure, I tried to push it with my hand again, using more force, but this time nothing happened. Just now, the tip had made some noise and moved. It had moved about two centimetres.
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t push it,’ said Maria impatiently. ‘Perhaps you should twist it. Try grabbing the part that moved and turning it either way?’
Following her advice, I used my whole hand to grab the tip and twisted it to the right. It made another clanking sound and the tip moved another ten degrees to the right. The lower part had slid about five centimetres apart sideways. When I looked
more carefully, I could see an empty space through the gap between the two parts.
‘Twist it some more!’
Maria had seen what I’d seen. I twisted it another ten degrees. By that time the lower part had opened about ten centimetres and you could clearly see a cavity five centimetres wide inside. But no matter how much I tried, the rock wouldn’t move any further.
‘That’s it. It won’t budge any more.’
I turned to Maria. She was biting her lower lip but suddenly yelled: ‘You solved it.’
Egami crouched down and inserted his fingers in the little hole that had appeared. ‘It’s wide, but shallow,’ he said, but it appeared nothing was there and, giving up, he pulled his fingers out.
‘Was it empty?’
Egami nodded in response to Maria’s question.
‘Then this has nothing to do with the treasure?’
That was impossible. A good look told me that excellent work had been done on the rock. It looked as though two rocks that had originally been separate had been put together with a bolt. Not only was the construction sturdy, any trace of it having been a construction in the first place had also been expertly hidden. Why go through all that trouble if not to hide a treasure? It had to have been here.
‘Someone got here before us,’ I said, at which Maria looked upset. You can’t blame me for this.
‘We did solve the puzzle…,’ said Egami as he pointed next to the cavity. We saw something written in paint that had started to fade away.
It said: ‘T.A.’ in very small letters.
6
We reset the rock to its original position and waded back to the rocky stretch. With heavy legs we climbed up to the observation platform again. We felt as if we’d been in a marathon and been tackled within inches of the finishing line. To an extent, we’d expected it, but it was still a shock.
We sat down in the arbour with the coconut leaf roof and discussed what had happened up until now and what we were going to do next.
The Moai Island Puzzle Page 20