053 SMITH JOURNALMASQUERADEKit Williams isn’t your average children’s author.
An English artist with a passion for puzzles, he
sent Britain into a frenzy in 1979 when he released
Masquerade, a picture book that over the course
of 16 lavishly detailed paintings told the story of a
rabbit transporting a treasure from the moon to the
sun, only to lose it on the way. Whatever its narrative
achievements, the book’s popularity arguably had more
to do with the fact that Williams also handcrafted a
real, jewel-laden, 18-carat gold medallion and buried it
somewhere in England. To fi nd it, all you needed to do
was decipher the message hidden in the book’s images.
Masquerade was a runaway success. Still, it took three
years before someone calling themselves “Ken Thomas”
fi nally sent Williams a crude map of the treasure’s correct
location: a tiny section of Ampthill Park, where the tip of
a monument’s shadow would rest at noon on the equinox.
Williams confi rmed the solution and Thomas dug up his
prize. Then, six years later, it was revealed that Thomas
was actually Dugald Thompson, an acquaintance of
Veronica Robertson, who was Williams’ girlfriend when
he wrote Masquerade. While she didn’t know precisely
where the treasure was buried, Robertson knew enough
to guess it would be Ampthill Park, which Thompson
then scoured with metal detectors, cheating his way
to the solution. A potent reminder, yet again, that
humanity does not deserve nice things.EL DORADO
When the Spanish fi rst arrived in the Americas,
the promise of gold hung heavy in the air. The native
populations adorned themselves with the stu , yet
seemed to have no understanding of how valuable
it actually was. (Technically this is only half true:
the metal had great religious and cultural value to
indigenous Americans, but that wasn’t really front
and centre in the calculations of the conquistadors.)
Stories grew, as they do, and soon boat after boat of
musket- and smallpox-wielding Spanish explorers were
risking life and limb in pursuit of El Dorado – literally
“The Golden One” – a vast kingdom supposedly hidden
deep in the forests of South America, where gold and
precious jewels ran like water. The quest for El Dorado
has become synonymous with human foolishness, yet
the hunt was not entirely misguided. It turns out that
what the early Spanish arrivals were describing was not
a city, but a person – the leader of the Muisca, who, in
an annual ritual, would cover himself in gold dust and
wash it o in Lake Guatavita, near present-day Bogotá,
while his attendants threw gold and emerald trinkets
into the water. While various attempts to drain the
lake have been made over the centuries, these have
all resulted in fi nancial and physical disaster. In 1965,
the Colombian government banned any further
dredging or draining of the lake, ensuring that
the treasure, if it does exist, will never be found.