Gelio pointed out: “Look! Each bookcase has a big letter
on the top. It starts with 'A', then 'B' – we need to find 'N'!”
They arrived at 'N' and Gelio spotted that each shelf was also labelled with a value. The last element of the code, 19, must therefore indicate the shelf. They found the 19th shelf and eagerly scanned along it, reading the titles. Amartia as the fastest reader was the first to reach a conclusion.
“There's no such book on this shelf,” she reported
matter-of-factly.
But Muko didn't take kindly to the news. “We must have done something wrong,” he said irritably. “Amartia – could you have made a mistake?”
Amartia wasn't in the least put out by this implied criticism. “I remember the code perfectly,” she said calmly. “One hundred per cent. I can see it in my mind's eye. That's the way I remember things.”
Muko turned to Paidia. “You said that one of the symbols in the code is from the Greek alphabet. One is a normal letter, one is a normal number, and there's the compass point. But what's the origin of the second symbol?”