The scanned document opened on her laptop. She copied the image and then attached it to her map program by superimposing the image of the stone tablet over the world map. The red grid lines, representing fifteen lines of longitude and latitude of the stone, lined up identically between the two maps.
“What do you think?” Billie asked.
“Well, if it’s not a map of the earth, I don’t know what it is.” Elise pointed at the prime meridian. “Did you know that the term meridian comes from the Latin word meridies, meaning, midday?”
Billie sighed. She didn’t know and didn’t care.
Elise continued. “The sun crosses a given meridian midway between the times of sunrise and sunset at that meridian. The same Latin stem gives rise to the terms a.m. meaning ante meridiem and p.m. meaning post meridiem, used to disambiguate hours of the day when utilizing the 12-hour clock.”
“That’s really fascinating, Elise… but I’m kind of pressured for time.”
“What do you want to know?”
Billie pointed to the four sapphires that hadn’t been crossed out. “What’s at these locations?”
Elise ran her eyes across the map. “Nothing.”
“Nothing what?”
“I’d need to study a similar map with maritime landmarks and bathymetric imagery of the ocean floor to tell you specifically, but already I can tell you they’re not the locations of any temples we’re looking for.”
“Why?”
“Because if they were, they would all be under water.”
“All of them?” Billie asked.
Elise stared at the four unmarked stars. “Possibly not this one. It might just hug the coastline.”
“Why?” Billie looked at the third empty marker. “Where on earth does this one correlate to?”
“The western edge of Big Island, Hawaii.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sam stepped into the main computer labs on board the Maria Helena. Billie and Elise were staring at the projection wall, where a series of maritime and bathymetric maps depicting the water around Big Island, Hawaii were displayed.
Elise acknowledge his presence with a curt nod, but her eyes remained fixed on the projection.
Billie looked up, and met his eye. “I hear you had an eventful day at the Great Blue Hole?”
“Yeah, you could say something like that. But I lost my attacker, which means we’re back to square one regarding who knows the truth about the Göbekli Tepe Death Stone.” Sam looked at the map of the stone tablet superimposed on the maritime maps. “Tell me you found something on your end.”
“I’ve found plenty of things. This seemingly simple stone is riddled with puzzles and mysteries. But very few answers. Every door I open leads to another three directions.”
“Did you find the locations of the missing temples?”
“No.”
Sam raised his eyebrow. “What have you found?”
“Where do you want me to start?”
Sam shrugged. “The beginning I suppose.”
“The tablet itself is smaller than an A4 piece of paper, with the following dimensions: 11.69 by 7.225 inches, making it a Golden Rectangle.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “A what?”
“A Golden Rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the Golden Ratio of Phi — which is sometimes referred to as the Divine Proportion, is 1.618 — followed by a whole bunch of numbers that only Elise would bother to remember.”
Sam glanced across at Elise.
She nodded and said, “You want them?”
“No thanks.” Then, to Billie he said, “In English, without the calculations, how is a Golden Rectangle any different from every other four-sided shape with straight sides where all interior angles are at ninety degrees?”
Billie smiled as though she was enjoying this. It wasn’t very often she was in a position to teach Sam Reilly something, and she was going to make him pay for it.
She drew a simple square. “Here’s a standard square.”
Sam nodded, but remained silent. He asked the question, now he was going to have to listen to the answer.
Billie drew a line from the midpoint of one side of the square to an opposite corner, and then used that line as the radius to draw an arc that defined the total height of the rectangle. She increased the length of the original square to meet the tip of the arc, thus making a rectangle. Billie smiled triumphantly. “That’s a Golden Rectangle.”
“Really?” Sam wasn’t impressed.
“A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle. That is, with the same aspect ratio as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, in which case corresponding corners of the squares form an infinite sequence of points on the golden spiral, the unique logarithmic spiral with this property.”
He watched the imaginary sequence unfold. It was interesting, but he wasn’t convinced the Master Builders considered it when they’d built the map. He eyes fixed on the real stone tablet. “Billie, it’s a rectangle… don’t you think you might just be over thinking this one?”
Billie shrugged. “Not just any rectangle. A Golden Rectangle, using Devine Proportions, that are aesthetically pleasing in nature and in science at a mathematical level.”
“My credit card looks just like that.”
“And why do you think the banks designed them in that shape?” Billie asked.
Sam shrugged. “It’s not because that’s the shape of my wallet?”
“No.”
“You know who made the Golden Number popular?”
“No… who?” Sam thought about it for a minute. “Wait… I do remember something about this… go on, who?”
“Leonardo da Vinci. He applied the Golden Number to art. Some say that’s why it was considered so perfect.”
“Oh yeah, da Vinci, that’s right…”
“Who were you thinking of?”
“Dan Brown… in that popular book of his.”
“Really?” Billie said. “I once thought you had an IQ off the charts?”
“It’s on the charts — just. People just think I’m smart because I fill my world with people like you and Elise, who answer all my questions.” He sighed. “All right. Let’s assume you’re right about the stone tablet being an intentional Golden Ratio.”
“I am right,” Billie said, emphatically.
“Sure. Now what? How does it help us find where we’re heading?”
“It doesn’t. But what it does tell us is that the Master Builders were very specific about the dimensions of this tablet.”
“What else have you found?” Sam glanced at the sheets of astronomy notes, with dozens of constellations, scattered along the table. “What’s the story with these?”
“Those are kind of a dead-end at the moment. We’re looking for the four temples that might just hold the key to saving the human race.”
Sam grinned. “In the stars?”
“No. I found a series of markings on the stone tablet, written in fluorite.”
“Really?” Sam was intrigued. “Visible only under a black light?”
“Exactly.”
“What did they show?”
“That the shape of the earth has changed slightly since the tablet was first put together, for one thing. We found the meridian lines had shifted, slightly.”
“And now?”
“They still don’t show where to locate the ancient temples.” She pulled out the A4 piece of paper with the UV highlighted image of the stone tablet. “I had Elise do her thing where she blended the old and the new map with a current precision map of the world and it spat out virtually the same answers — the stone by itself doesn’t indicate where the temples are.”