ninety-seven, or ninety-eight?
I understand there is some debate over whether K4 is comprised of the last 97 or last 98 characters of Kryptos, or some other variation, seeing as how K3 ends in sort of a strange way. The last phrase of K3 is
“X CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING Q ?”
I would assume that because of the Q at the end of the sentence, it is hard to be sure if K3 really ends after the question mark, and not somewhere before. Obviously, I think that there are 97 letters, because I felt pretty confident naming this blog after them. Hopefully I don’t change my mind since I’m all set up here, but anyway- let me explain why I think this.
Yes, it is weird to have that stray Q there. But you know what else is weird? That X at the beginning. K2 had X’s between every sentence (probably because it was supposed to read like a telegram), but that is the only X in K3, and so I don’t think that Sanborn was trying to seperate sentences with X’s like he was in K2. I think that it is supposed to read “Can you see anything between X and Q?”
Recently I bought a copy of “Tomb of Tutankhamen” by Howard Carter, which is the source of the plaintext in K3 (augmented a little, of course). In any case, after being asked if he could see anything, Carter replies “wonderful things.” Maybe we are supposed to see the phrase “wonderful things” between an X and a Q somewhere?
I am positive that this has been observed by plenty of people in the past, like many things I am going to observe / try/ write about on this blog, but give me a break because I am only a college senior and just found out about this thing a few months ago, and plus, I thought that since I titled my blog with the number of letters I think are in Kryptos, it should be one of the first things I write about.
Lastly, I just added a link titled “Some Very Telling Quotes” to a list of quotes I put together to the sidebar under “Important Posts.” It’s only a handful right now but I plan on adding to it over time.
