| | Bernhard Levin reviews QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN HARE by Bamber Gascoigne. |
| | |
| | Buried treasure fascinates us all, whether it is concealed in the earth, the sea, the past or the |
| | imagination. There are, no doubt, good sub-conscious reasons for the fascination exerted by the |
| | theme, and the extraordinary story told with lucidity, wit and unconcealed amazement in this |
| | book badly needs them. |
| 5 | | It needs them because the obvious conscious motive that drives treasure-hunters - the hope of |
| | enormous gain - was absent from the hunt in th is case; the object, a figure of a hare made of gold |
| | and decorated with rubies, was undoubtedly valuable, but only to the extent of a few thousand |
| | pounds. Yet, as Mr Gascoigne relates, the search was joined by hundreds of thousands of people |
| | all over the world, some of whom risked their livelihoods, their marriages, their sanity and even |
| 10 | | their necks. And there is no exaggeration in that; nobody was killed in the attempt, but one man |
| | had a narrow escape when climbing a cliff in Cornwall and some seem to have crossed the line of |
| | madness in the course of their pursuit. |
| | Directions for finding the hare were given in a book called MASQUERADE, by an |
| | artist-craftsman named Kit Williams. Tom Maschler, head of a publishing firm, had asked him to |
| 15 | | do a children's book, and the initially reluctant Williams conceived the idea of a series of |
| | paintings illustrating a text about a hare's adventures; the paintings would provide clues which, |
| | when deciphered, would lead to one, and only one, place, beneath which the treasure would be |
| | found. |
| | It was claimed at the beginning that the puzzle could be worked out by an intelligent child of |
| 20 | | 10, an assertion that ought to have had author, publisher and Mr Gascoigne (as accessory - he |
| | witnessed the burial of the treasure) behind bars for a flagrant breach of the Trades Description |
| | Act, for in fact the puzzle was almost incomprehensible. Only one solution among the tens of |
| | thousands submitted was right, and it was the only one to show any understanding of the puzzle |
| | and how it worked. |
| 25 | | This leads to the depressing part of the book. Mr Gascoigne gives a selection, presumably |
| | representative, of what he calls 'Case Histories'; accounts, based on his interviews or |
| | correspondence with them, of the treasure-seekers' quests. The sad truth is that none of them |
| | shows the smallest understanding of what evidence is or how it should be sought, none has |
| | managed to discover even the basics of the method necessary for the riddle's decipherment. |
| 30 | | It all ended in tears. The man who found the hare, in Ampthill Park, did so almost by accident; |
| | he had not cracked, or even understood, Kit Williams's code, but had put together one or two |
| | guesses and stumbled upon the truth without knowing why. But when he began to dig he found a |
| | large, fresh hole hard by his own chosen spot. It transpired that this had been dug by the two |
| | men who had jointly worked out the puzzle in full; they had failed to find the treasure on their |
| 35 | | first expedition, and were proposing to return a few weeks later, because, as they had discovered |
| | from their perfect solution, the treasure was buried at a point indicated by the shadow cast by the |
| | top of a stone monument at noon on one of the two equinoxes.* |
| | The solvers' disappointment can scarcely be imagined, but worse was to come. The man who |
| | found the treasure would not reveal his name, would not be interviewed, would not even let the |
| 40 | | Victoria and Albert Museum exhibit it; 1 dare not dwell upon thoughts of what Mr Maschler's |
| | face must have looked like when he learned that an immeasurable amount of invaluable world-wide |
| | publicity was about to vanish before his very eyes. |
| | Mr Williams is now at work on another puzzle. Despite the adage about lightning never |
| | striking twice in the same place, I suspect that it will be at least as big a success as the 'Masquerade' |
| 45 | | one. And at any rate it will give a new sense of purpose to those hare-seekers - a good many, it |
| | seems - who refused to believe that the hare had been found, and are still obstinately looking for |
| | it. |
| | |
| | The Observer, June 5, 1983 |
* The equinoxes: the two times in the year (about March 21 and September 22) when all places in the world have day and night of equal length.
