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The message was regarded occasionally with slithers of interest and then almost forgotten about. Until, that is, my brother and I decided we could try and decode it. Each symbol obviously stood for a letter of the alphabet and the odd word was clearly recognisable as not all of the symbols were very far removed from the letter they were replacing. So words such as 'cross', 'commands' and 'and' were instantly recognisable. Those gave us translations of several letters which we could then apply to other words and begin an arduous process of elimination and common sense application, a la Sherlock Holmes in 'The Adventure of the Dancing Men' (you can imagine my glee at this task already). So, where we already had, for example, the letters for 'cross', we could apply the 'R' symbol in the first word alongside the likelihood that this was a letter, then we had the word 'dear' and as such all the letters in that word which we could again apply to other words, and so forth. Words were deciphered based on the letters we had already cracked, using those letters we would work out the most likely word with educated guesses and then obtain more letters. The process inevitably became easier with each deciphered symbol and as we gradually translated paragraph by paragraph, we ultimately found ourselves reading the letter as though we were familiar with the language all along.
A couple of symbols throughout the letter don't seem to correspond and as such render the words they appear in nonsensical. We put this down to simple error and suspected it a possible reason for the note being discarded.
The theme of the letter was the most striking aspect and that also helped us in the translation, as we could assume the next word simply by association. For example, as the writer talks about 'Knights of The Cross', we filled in gaps in the sentence 'We all know that we live by the commands of ___ and the teachings of _____ the ______' with 'God', 'Jesus' and 'Christ' respectively. Translation ultimately took about forty-five minutes. The translated letter reads as follows (the spelling errors are the author's own mistakes);
Life in the Spirit of a Knight of the Cross
Dear fellow knights of the cross, shalom and God bless you all.
I have been asked to speak to you all about the spirit of a knight of the cross.
We all know why we were formed all those centuries ago.
We all know that we live by the commands of God and the teachings of Jesus the Christ.
We all know that there well be times when a knight may look at what we had to do to Sadam, Bin Laden and Gadafi.
We know that we work behind the scenes.
Unfortunately, it reads as an unfinished piece of work and we were all slightly underwhelmed by the abrupt ending, assuming that the author decided to rewrite it and discard the first draft. Either way, it is quite an eery piece of work, and while some of us think it may well be the idle scribblings of a bored fantasist, we have not put to bed the possibility that these knights of the cross were actually on our premises, conspiring the imminent assassination of a public figure. If only we had a finished document.
Researching 'knights of the cross' brings me two main findings, the first is a 1900 historic novel by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, and, more intriguingly, an order of knights who wield one of three 'swords of the cross', swords which are supposedly imbued by a nail from the holy cross.
Neither of these findings seem to completely correspond with what the author has written, which means that either there is a secret too big even for the internet, or if I dare apply Occum's Razor, there really was just a lunatic writing religious nonsense on a piece of scrap paper after a few pints.
Either way, my short spell as the bastard child of Sherlock Holmes and Robert Langdon is at an end.
