THE SOLUTION TO TREASURE: IN SEARCH OF THE GOLDEN HORSE © This is my original website where I presented what I believed to be the true solution to the TISOTGH puzzle. If you arrived here by mistake and are interested in learning all about the controversial Capt Nemo solution, you can go to that page HERE. Otherwise, I hope you have some fun on this site.

INTRODUCTION After I wrote this desciption of my ultimate solution, I asked Nick Boone, aka Capt. Nemo to read it and give me his thoughts. He said that my solution was like most other incorrect ones, i.e. I had an idea for the solution and then found evidence to support my conclusion. After having read a few other solutions, I know what he means. And like most other seekers, I, of course, think my solution is different and totally logical. I really believe that I was lead on a rather deliberate wild goose chase. THere are simply too many coincidental facts for me to discount. Any way, it is up to the readers to make their own determination. I changed my original presentation so I didn't repeat things from my new web site. I also eliminated those things which were off handed speculation. And here are two cool sites, Treasure and a TISOTGH messageboard at bravenet.com. THE START OF THE JOURNEY I discovered something interesting as I proceeded down my journey to the solution. Things that I thought in the past might be clues or hints actually were what they seemed. I just was not able to put them together or figure out why they were important until I was well along the "real" path. The picture in CAROUSEL shows a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle. I think this best describes the nature of the TISOTGH puzzle. You don't see the entire picture until all the pieces are put together. The pieces are strewn around and not in any particular order. For what it's worth, here's what I believe to be the most comprehensive solution to the search for the golden horse ever presented. Since the clues are not offered in any particular order, presenting the solution will be like spiraling up in a circle just as we were told in TISOTGH. The pieces of the puzzle are not presented in the order in which I discovered them. 1. Let's begin at one of the beginnings - Chapter 5, aptly named FORTUNE. In this chapter, a fortune teller deals Amanda seven Tarot cards and proclaims, "Each card is a door." She removes an extra card because "Seven cards were all a person was allowed." Here are the seven cards. The first card you see is the extra mystery card which was taken away. You'll ultimately see why this card should have been placed at the end instead of the beginning. When Amanda left, she chose the Wheel of Fortune. The word "door" appears many times throughout the book, often in the context of a locked door (or gate or portal) being opened. It is used as a pointer to a clue. It appears that these cards are clues but their meaning is unclear at this point. 2. On page 66 it says, "... she found a book that might have helped. But it was written in the tongue of ancient Rome." The word Italic is commonly used to refer to the people and languages of ancient Rome. Could it be that words in italics provided helpful hints? Yes indeed. THE KEY 3. If you take these words literally in Chapter ROAD on page 34, "Start me to your Journey's End", it seems like a good place to start. Immediately afterward it says, "She sat behind the wheel and turned the key, and it was like opening a door." "Key", "door" and "wheel" are used throughout the book. You'll see that this sentence was also meant to be taken literally. 4. In Chapter COURTYARD on page 74 it emphatically says . "THE MAP IS THE KEY IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE". So if the map is a key (and a wheel/circle too), let's see what happens when you turn it. 5. On page 75 is says, "She had learned the most difficult of secrets: how to see." If you see the map as showing you where to dig in the earth, you hit a dead end. What it is showing you is where to dig for clues. If you look at the map and see the lines as pointers, you go nowhere. But if you look at them to see a pattern, you clearly see smack dab in the middle 14 T H. But the meaning is obscure. Every fourteenth word? Fourteenth street? Route 14? 6. Also in ROAD are a front and back view of a mustang car. Its front license plate reads "MLGGS" and in the rear "VCER". This appears to be a cipher. On page 66 in Chapter FOREST, "It is as if everything is in code ... And I do not have the code book." This sent me on a mad dash around the internet to discover all I could about cryptography. When I mentioned needing extra information, a brief history of cryptography and techniques would be included. Here is a link to a particularly helpful site at Encyclopedia2 The info I gathered helped me solve this cipher and much more. An unusual word appears in ROAD. On page 33 it says "the babel of crowds." Here (as well as in other sources) there is a reference to a cipher used in the Old Testament to represent the word "Babel". The babel(also known as Atbash) cipher was a simple backwards letter substitution as follows: plain text: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z cipher text: Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B A If you decode MLGGSVCER using this cipher (M=N L=O G=T S=H V=E C=X E=V R=I) you get NOTTHEXVI. Aha!! Is the Key Louis XIV? This lead me to another mad dash to find out all I could about Louis XIV. You only need a few bits of information about Louis XIV to solve the puzzle, but references to him are all over the book. If I told you that Louis XIV built Versailles, you might say, "Not the Sixteenth?" Ha. Other pertinent things: Louis XIV introduced the carousel to the public in Paris (Chapter 11 is CAROUSEL), Louis XIV furniture uses shell motifs and lion motifs (pictures and references to shells and lions appear many times in TISOTGH). There is a Louis XIV rose (pictures and references to a rose also appear many times in TISOTGH). Tarot cards were new to France during Louis XIV's time and he had a known card reader that he consulted frequently. Louis XIV once danced in a ballet (Chapter REHEARSAL has a picture of ballet dancers). And Louis XIV is a historical figure that used cryptography - The Great Cipher. And lo and behold, the first Tarot card is a king of France. Voila! So Louis XIV must be the key. But to what? THE NEXT STEP What I found amazing in this search was that often clues had more than one meaning and clues appeared in more ways than one. The most amazing was the rule on the "different kind of door" (p. 55): "The way to move forward is sometimes to go back." It can mean to go back in history to find clues. It can mean to go back in the book to look for clues because they are not presented in a linear manner. You'll see two more possible references to it below as well as two more at the very end. 7. Let's go back to "THE MAP IS THE KEY IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE." In Chapter 14 on page 58 you'll see this picture: The 14 from the map appears again and the other piece has a bent corner. If you look at the complete map you'll see that all four corners are bent over. (On the page it says "each drew her further back".) On the same page it also says, "Mickey Never Fails" which appears to be an anagram. Anagrams are referenced on p. 45 - "Things came constantly apart, then together again, but in the wrong order." (On same page "it was a shell of past intentions.") You can rearrange the words to say "Key is in frame". I can't explain the leftover letters C,L,E, and V but in many ciphers there are symbols that are nulls, i.e., they don't represent anything. I got an email from chris offering the clever suggestion that the letters might read CLVE. If the V equals a U, a letter substitution used in Roman carvings, you get CLUE. I looked at the corners of pictures in the book to see what I could see. I found what I was looking for in Chapter 3 KITES on pp. 17 - 18. In the four corners on the frame of this picture were: a sun, a rose, a moon, and a baby face. Important facts about Louis XIV - he was called the Sun King, his wife ("The Queen"? On p 57) was said to be the Moon to his sun, there is a Louis XIV rose, and he ascended to the throne when he was four years old. This must be the place. There is Treasure, between the Sun and the Moon. But where is the clue?? By now a pattern has emerged. Throughout the book there are several references indicating that the solution will be found by "looking". All the clues so far have been found by looking at pictures. Additionally, it appears that the hints in the text are to be taken very literally. 8. At the end of the KITES on p. 19 it says, "To find your Treasure you must first find your father's grave." The next chapter is called CEMETERY. The second Tarot card was Death. Sounds like a good place to look. "First steps" are mentioned several times in the chapter. It says Amanda was thirteen years old - the Death card is number XIII. "Crossing a portal" is also used. Like many others I'm sure, I was drawn to the inscription on the grave marker - KNUTSEN June 11, 1980. Then I realized that I was distracted from the rose on the grave marker. The rose is mentioned a couple of times in the text. When Amanda placed the rose on the grave, it says, "All at once the air was alive with an invisible wave of emotion, the feeling of something being released. She knew her Treasure was near." Looking back to the picture on pp. 17 and 18 , what is in one of the four corners? A rose. Next to the cemetery. THE RABBIT CARD Amanda thought, "she looks exactly like me" about Alice. And what had Alice done? She followed the rabbit. "But where is the rabbit?""Perhaps behind the locked door." "Though she did not yet understand, it was a card of many meanings." Ah, yes. The rabbit card at last. The card starts with, "The road to your horse will be found by four things, all concealed and lettered." Using a different way to see the word "lettered", I took this to mean that four clues would be found not in a picture but in the text. All I had to start with was a rose. 9. I looked though the book for every appearance of the word "rose" other than in Chapter CEMETERY. I noticed a pattern - sun rose (p. 26), signal rose (p. 44), music rose (p. 69), and moon rose (p. 79). On p. 56 it says, "the strangest things were connected." On page 66 it says, "she copied only two short words and left the rest behind." On page 74 it says "she began to see how certain things paired with others. And how in all this there was a pattern." Moon, signal, music and sun. "I have become a collector of strange things" (p 65). And finally, on page 75, "How little it takes to be happy.... If you know where to look, the path is always clearly marked." 10. I looked around to find some place where these four items appeared together. The picture on pp. 61 - 62 in the Chapter RIVER looked promising. There clearly was Music in the picture. Hands playing a piano, an old record player, a man playing a clarinet. In the fourth Tarot card there is a woman hiding her eyes. Amanda thought, "That's no way to find clues." So I really had a good look at that rabbit's card. On the card, the four corners were "squared off" in gold and linked by a chain very similar to the frame on this picture. Also on the rabbit card there appears circles, a square, triangles and diamonds. The frame of the picture is made up of triangles and circles with squares in the corners. The path to the locked gate (a hint?) is marked by diamond shaped tiles. There are two circles with pictures in them which will turn out to be very important clues. The picture in the upper left hand corner of the frame is the flag of Louisiana. Louisiana was named for Louis XIV. And the fleur d' lis in the lower left hand corner are clearly a reference to France. Sun. In the upper right hand corner is a back view of the flag of Castilla-León, a region of Spain. Louis XIV's wife was Maria Theresa of Spain. Moon. But where is the signal? Since I couldn't find it on the picture, I looked through the text of the chapter. I found,"the captain rang the ship's bell. Once. Twice." Then Treasure appeared. Running along the shore. Signal!! And from p.44 in THE SIGNAL, "the signal was full of promise." 11. There are many reasons why I believe the next clue is "NATCHEZ", the name found on the paddlewheel boat. If you go back to the Tarot cards, you'll see the Wheel of Fortune, the card that Amanda chose. At the top of that card there is a cross ("+") instead of the "X" for ten which should be there. "X" marks the spot? This is repeated on the map. "X" marks the spot and it is in a wheel. On page 64 "the man played seven more notes and each went through her heart." There are seven letters in "Natchez". The wheel appears between the Sun (Louis) and the Moon (the Queen). And, in the Tarot cards you'll see the Wheel of Fortune also appears between the Moon and the Sun. The last three of the clues. THE ROAD TO YOUR HORSE Another mad internet dash looking for Natchez, Mississippi came up with nothing. I also felt that this would be too obvious. There must be more to it. But what it was escaped me. Remembering the rabbit's card, "The road to your horse will be found by four things". Perhaps Natchez would be the name of a road instead of a city.. The most important and final clue was also found in the picture. It mentioned in the chapter that Treasure was running along the shore. But all that was in the picture was a pig and 10 trees. Going back to the history of cryptography, one name that was mentioned was Francis Bacon. His cipher was a binary code. The code was based on using a sequence of a's or b's. Each letter of the alphabet was represented by a combination of 5 letters. Here's how Bacons Cipher works (scroll down to The Bilateral Alphabet) So we have a big piece of bacon, the pig, next to ten trees. Two letters? This idea is repeated by the hands on the piano - two sets of five. So if the trees are taken as they appear, short trees for a's and tall trees for b's, the cipher text would be baaba and abbaa. In Bacon's code these represent a T and an N. TN. Tennessee. Remember the signal? It was two rings. The circle (ring) on the right contains a spinning wheel, pointing to Natchez, and the other circle (ring) points to the cipher for TN. I googled Natchez Tennessee and when I saw the list of searches my heart stopped. The Natchez Trace Parkway which runs from Natchez, MI to Nashville, TN (music city USA). And if I weren't sure, this is a picture of the entrance to the Natchez Trace Parkway in Nashville, TN . Look at the mystery Tarot card - a man on a horse with one front leg raised. All the seven clues lead to that card. Look at the statue of the golden horse - one front leg raised. At last - the road to my horse. And remember the quote about the way forward is to go back? The Natchez Trace Parkway runs along a historic trail used by Indians and settlers. Plus Nashville is really considered to be the terminus of the Natchez Trace Parkway. To get to the treasure you have to go backwards (to the South) down the road. THE END OF THE JOURNEY At last, out of the entire USA, only 101 miles left to cover. But where would I find the final piece of the puzzle? I thought it might be found in one of the clues I didn't understand or others I might not have even seen. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that all the clues lead up to the entrance to the Parkway. A picture of the last piece of some puzzle appears at the end of Chapter FORTUNE. It appears after and apart from the text. So maybe the answer lay beyond. Well, the best place left to look was, not surprisingly, the last chapter, HORSE. As Amanda takes her final steps to her Treasure, it says,"Each step was a discovery. A piece of the final puzzle. A doorway in time." I remembered, "How little it takes to be happy.... If you know where to look, the path is always clearly marked." Another mad dash to find out all I could about the Natchez Trace Parkway. It was amazing. There is a stream running along the Trace, waterfalls, forest with tall trees, and a bridge that could have taken "her across a final chasm". And along a side path to a tobacco farm there is "at the forest's edge... an old barn." Just as described in the chapter. I called the Natchez Trace Parkway visitor center in Tupelo, MS and was told that is the only barn on the parkway. It says that the owl circled the barn. We have arrived! In the tobacco drying barn off mile marker 401 on the Natchez Trace Parkway is a tobacco hook - a piece of "iron curled around in a curious design". And that, I believe, marks where the golden horse was buried. Of course it's now 25 years after Treasure was first published so I'm not 100% certain about the hook. But I believe my solution puts me within a few feet of the burial site. FINAL NOTES All of the clues I have presented were in the book TISOTGH. I cannot speak as to how these clues might appear in the video that was done. The picture of the map you see here is taken from that video. Mary Queen of Scots is another historical figure that used cryptography. On page 70 at the PARTY a man twirls an umbrella. On that umbrella are the birth and death years of Queen Mary. Also a few of the symbols on the umbrella were used in her cipher. But on page 71 it says, when referring to the party guests, "no one offered help." And the book says it was "an umbrella full of nonsense" so I think it means nothing at all. I know almost every puzzler checked this out. Including the first letter in the introduction (a gold S in a blue square), the first letter of every chapter spells out S T I G N O R E S T A T E S H A P E S A T A You can see a few possibilities here S T - I G N O R E - S T A T E - S H A P E - S A T A S T - I G N O R E - S T A T E - S H A P E S - A T A S T - I G N O R E - S T A T E - S H A P E S - A T - A I don't know what this refers to, but it says to ignore it so I will. The only thing I can't figure out is the meaning of the Six of Cups and, most importantly, the cipher on the rabbit's card. I've already shown it marks the page that points to The Road in many ways. And "spell them in order, then order them anew" indicates it's probably an anagram. Even so and with all the other clues at hand, the meaning of the directions to "decipher", "interpret", and "translate" escapes me. I don't have the time to mangage a visitor's comment section but email me at TreasureSolution@aol.com with any comments or information or possible solutions of your own. I'd love to hear from you. ©Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse (book and video) copyright IntraVision, Inc. Tarot cards are from an AG Muller Swiss deck. © copyright Judy C, Las Vegas 2009. All rights reserved.