Angela looked puzzled. “I don’t see how that helps us. All that’s on the stone are those three Latin words.”
“No,” Bronson said. “There is—or at least there was—more than that. Remember what Jeremy Goldman told me. He said that the stone had been cut, that the section cemented into the wall of the Hamptons’ house was just the top half. In fact, that tip was the reason Mark and I started searching the rest of the house. We were looking for the missing lower section.”
“But you never found it, so how does that help?”
“You’re quite right. We didn’t find it, but I wonder if we have now, or at least what was written on it. Think about it. How would you describe the carved letters on the Roman inscription?”
“All capitals, no frills. A typical first-century Latin inscription. There are hundreds of similar examples.”
“And what about the Occitan verses?”
Angela thought for a moment. “Completely different. That was a cursive script. I suppose the modern equivalent would be a kind of italic.”
“Exactly. Now your estimate was that the Occitan inscription was carved at about the same time as the skyphos was made, probably in the fourteenth century?”
“Probably, yes.”
“Now look at the diagram on the side of the vessel, and the letters and numbers. The numbers are Latin—that’s the first thing—and the letters are all capitals. In other words, although the skyphos and the Occitan inscription are probably contemporary, you’d never deduce that just by looking at the two texts. They appear completely different.”
“So what you’re saying is that if the skyphos was made by the Cathars, why is the decoration on the side so obviously Roman? Except that it’s an obvious copy of a Roman drinking vessel, of course.”
“Yes,” Bronson said, “but I think that was quite deliberate. The Cathars made a copy of a Roman vessel to hold the scroll, and the decoration they chose for the skyphos is also Roman. More than that, the diagram is headed ‘HVL’—‘Hic Vandici Latitant’—just like the stone with the Latin inscription.”
“Yes,” Angela said, her voice suddenly excited. “You mean that what we’re looking at here could be an exact copy of the map on the missing section of that stone?”
Bronson nodded. “Suppose the Cathars had possessed this stone for years, but they’d never managed to decipher what it meant. Perhaps the scroll itself refers to the stone, or to whatever was buried, and that convinced them that the map or diagram was really important. When the last of the Cathars fled from France and arrived in Italy, they knew their religion was doomed, but they still wanted to preserve the ‘treasure’ they’d managed to smuggle out of Montségur. So they split the stone in two, left one part—the top section—where it could be easily found, but hid the important bit, the diagram, somewhere else.
“To allow a fellow Cathar, or someone who knew enough about their religion, to decipher it, they prepared the Occitan inscription. The clues in that would lead to the scroll, safely hidden away in the skyphos, and on the vessel itself they left an exact copy of the diagram they’d never managed to understand. I think that map shows exactly where the ‘liars’ are hidden.”
“But this isn’t like any kind of map I’ve ever seen before. It’s just lines, letters and numbers. They could mean anything.”
Bronson nodded again. “If it was easy, the Cathars would have cracked it seven hundred years ago. I’m guessing here, but I think Nero must have insisted that the hiding place be located in an area that would never be found by accident, and that meant somewhere well outside Imperial Rome. Obviously the Emperor—or perhaps Marcellus—decided to make a map showing the location, so that the site could be found later if necessary. But to provide an extra layer of protection, they devised a type of map that would need to be deciphered.”
“I see what you’re driving at,” Angela said. “But this jar is a lot smaller than the stone would have been. What about the scale?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think it matters. I know a bit about mapping and, as long as you know the scale, you can interpret a map of any physical size. That diagram”—he pointed at the skyphos—“isn’t a conventional map because it hasn’t got a scale, at least as far as I can see, and it doesn’t show any features like a coast, rivers or towns. I’ve been trying to put myself in the position of the man who prepared it, trying to work out what he could have done to create a map that would endure, if necessary for centuries.
“If the burial place was outside Rome, he wouldn’t have been able to use buildings as reference points, because the only structures he’d see out in the country wouldn’t have been permanent. I mean, if he’d buried something in Rome itself, he might have guessed that places like the Circus Maximus would survive and used them to identify the location of the burial place. But in the country, even a large villa might be abandoned or destroyed within a generation or two. So the only realistic option he would have had would be to use very specific geographical features.
“I think Marcellus—or whoever made this—picked permanent objects, things that, no matter what happened in Italy, would always be visible and identifiable. I don’t think this diagram needs a scale because it probably refers to a group of hills near Rome. I think the lines show the distances between them and their respective heights.”
For a few seconds Angela looked at the diagram on the side of the skyphos, then down at the drawing Bronson had made, her fingers tracing the letters and numbers he’d copied from the vessel. Then she grabbed a book about the Roman Empire, flicked through it until she reached the index and turned to a specific page. It contained a table with letters and figures, but Bronson couldn’t read it upside-down.
“That might make sense,” she said, her eyes flicking between Bronson’s copy of the diagram and the table in the book. “If you’re right and the lines represent distances, then ‘P’ would translate as passus, the pace step of a Roman legionary and equal to 1.62 yards. ‘MP’ would mean mille passus, one thousand passus. That’s the Roman mile of 1,618 yards. The ‘P’ markings beside the dots would probably represent the heights of the hills, measured in pes, plural pedes, the Roman foot of 11.6 inches, and ‘A’ the actus, 120 pedes or about 116 feet.”
“But would the Romans have been able to produce figures that accurate?” Bronson asked.
Angela nodded confidently. “Absolutely. The Romans had a number of surveying tools, including one called a groma. That had been in use for centuries before Nero’s reign and would have allowed for quite sophisticated measuring. And you should also remember how many large Roman buildings are still standing today. They wouldn’t have survived if their builders hadn’t had quite advanced surveying ability.”
Angela leaned over the keyboard of the laptop, typed the word “groma” into the search engine and pressed the “enter” key. When the results appeared, she picked one site and clicked on that.
“There you are,” she said, pointing at the screen. “That’s a groma.”
Bronson looked at the diagram of the instrument for a few moments. It comprised two horizontal arms crossed at right angles and resting on a bracket that was itself attached to a vertical staff. Each of the four arms had a cord at the end that formed a plumb bob.
“And they also used a thing called a gnomon to locate north—very roughly—and they could measure distance and height using a diopter.”
“So all we have to do now is work out which hills Marcellus used as his reference points.”