DONALD SAMUEL HILL PAMELA SEELY KIRRAGE.
161
Did these have any significance? Then, lying awake in bed early one morning, it suddenly occurred to me to count the number of letters in the names—34! It must be that these names were used as a keyword to rearrange the columns of each block, another standard method [2]. Text written out in block form can be rearranged by changing the order of the columns. The keyword is written over the columns in a block which are then reordered so that the letters in the keyword are in alphabetical order. Reversing the process is simply provided that the keyword is known. Well, it seemed like a good idea until I was again staring at lots of jumbled letters. Still, I was convinced that it was no accident that there were 34 letters in these names and that I had just made a third important step forward.
I was sure that I was now close to deciphering the code. However, time was running out and a new semester with a busy teaching schedule was looming.
Fig. 2: Donald and Pamela on their wedding day in 1946
The Final Step. I returned to the diary and pored over the pages, looking for any small clue that might provide more information. On some of the early pages, some numbers had been ringed. Often these were so faint as to be hardly visible. For each one, I counted the number of characters from the beginning of its block. Some of the positions were
693, 759, 990, 363, 726,