Once back home he stopped in the hotel lobby and studied the maps displayed in the gift shops. There were various kinds for sale, almost all different, and he was suddenly confused as to which he should choose. He picked up one at random and opened it out, assuming it would show the city. But he found it hard to orientate himself in it: the streets and squares looked tiny in the densely scrawled plan that entirely filled the sheet and there was no sign of the outskirts of town where estates should thin out, or was this perhaps a map of the inner city only, or of a single postal district? He saw no railway lines, at least none of the thin black lines that normally represented them. Nor was there a river, not at least in the area covered by the map, only a few tiny dots of blue that might have been municipal ponds or the water reservoirs he had seen here and there. In the bottom right-hand corner of the map he found a long narrow light blue band that would clearly have continued on another sheet, the other end of which, however, snaked on until it simply stopped, thereby dashing Budai’s hopes that it might represent flowing water. It must have been at most a minor tributary of some distant river though there was no way of being certain of that. More likely it was a ditch of the kind he walked past near the slaughterhouse.
He would like to have discovered the hotel on it and to work out its relationship to the maps he saw in the underground. But how could he begin to do so when he didn’t even know which way up to hold it? He couldn’t remember which end was the top when he picked it up. He had noted down the name of the metro station nearest the hotel; it was just that he couldn’t find it on the map. He couldn’t even see metro lines, neither the continuous line nor the dotted one normally used to indicate networks that ran underground. There were no single or double circles, empty or full, with or without a single line through them that stood for stations on other maps. Most cities, he recalled, represented metro stops with a capital M. Yes, but what letter was the equivalent of M here? Or could it be that the quarter of town represented had never historically possessed an underground system? Might it be that this wasn’t a local map at all? But then what town was it?
He turned one of the folds over to see what lay there. It contained a dense body of text in various colours and sizes but it was not immediately apparent which of them was the most important, that is to say, the town or district. For even the words in the biggest font might have meant a range of things such as New, or Latest, or Map, or perhaps Cartographic Office. This or that word might be the name of the company, the street, the number of the building, or simply Welcome! or Greetings! or Be Our Guest! or maybe even, Happy New Year, or whatever else could or might be printed on such a document. They could have been advertisements for beer or vermouth or chocolate or perhaps for a restaurant or a hotel… The letters, legends and numbers on the map itself were tiny and covered every millimetre of every street: he’d have needed a magnifying glass to see them clearly. The thought was so daunting he didn’t even want to begin.
He turned to the saleswoman instead and tried, by miming, to get her to point out the name of the city on the map or where the hotel was or, if they did not appear on the map, to direct him to one where they did. But the woman was already looking at him rather crossly, no doubt thinking him picky, intrusive or attention-seeking while others were requiring her attention at the desk. However he tried she was unwilling to engage with him but simply grumbled something and waved him away. Even when Budai rattled his change at her and asked the price of the map she took some persuading to write down the figure 12 on a scrap of paper. Budai paid up and quickly left, mumbling and cursing at the cost.
Having cooled down, he started to wonder whether a map would really be useful. He couldn’t even be certain that the map was of this town, and if it was, of which district. Were the effort and expense worth it? Would they help him achieve his aims? Would they, in any case, be the most direct way of achieving them? Wasn’t there a quicker, more effective, more productive way? Nevertheless he returned to his room to begin a proper, thorough examination, making best use of modern scientific method and his own expertise. He was determined to employ the tools he had to hand, combining them to maximum effect to decode the local language and whatever variants of it existed.
Since arriving Budai had often regretted that he had paid such little attention to the history of writing and even less to cryptography. He had specialised in etymology, the study of the origin of words. However, he now recalled that, as a child, he had read Jules Verne and that Verne gave various accounts of the deciphering of secret messages. In Mathias Sandor it is a grid that helps solve the case, in Journey to the Centre of the World it is the principle underlying a certain rearrangement of a set of letters. More recently, in reading of the two world wars, he had learned that the secret services had developed mathematical and statistical models to produce perfect decoding systems capable of deciphering any given enemy message. Any code, even the most convoluted, was breakable by such methods. The code-breakers were working with languages they knew, of course, languages that had been merely disguised and reordered; that was why they could come up with the keys required to unlock the text. Budai, on the other hand, was faced with a language utterly unknown to him so that even if he succeeded in reading it he would not be able to make sense of it.
It was true that the ingenuity and patience of historical researchers had managed to solve even puzzles of this sort, and not only in the cases already mentioned when they were dealing with a range of languages. There were, for example, two great pieces of scientific bravura this century, the decoding of Hittite script and of the Cretan so-called Linear B, both from the all-but-unknown scripts of hitherto unknown ancient people. Nevertheless the qualifier all-but had offered a starting point, the slightest of nudges enabling scholars to take a first step. The clay tablets of the Hittites contained a good number of ideograms that could be identified with those in the earlier-deciphered Babylonian script. And the solver of Cretan Linear B, the English scholar Ventris, was able to employ these correspondences — clearly verifiable after some examination — by checking them against the long-solved runic of Cyprus. So one thing led to another and, after various speculations and combinations, this first selection of sound-equivalent syllable-characters made possible the working out of the rest. In other cases scholars had good reason to assume the recurrence of certain proper nouns in the various texts, such as the names of ancient Knossos and Amnisos on the Cretan tablets: that was a decisive element in their success.