The pendant featured tiny bells which, when jostled, would make a soft jingling sound like a whisper from Faerieland. Kit Williams crafted a true treasure: an intricate pendant/hanging of a hare made from 18 carat gold.
What a brilliant and magical book leading to an equally mysterious and magical clue! And I haven’t even started talking about the treasure itself yet. The longer clue reveals the details: on the vernal or autumnal equinox, the shadow of the “finger” of the monument would fall where the treasure was buried. Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire has a tall cross monument honoring Queen Catherine of Aragon. 73,000 copies in print.The solution to the puzzle, for anyone who solved it, was a sentence: “Catherine’s Long Finger Over Shadows Earth Buried Yellow Amulet Midday Points The Hour In Light Of Equinox Look You.” Although this clue was important, the solver would further have to take the first letter of each word to create “CLOSEBYAMPTHILL” which revealed the location. They are still there to discover, ponder, rediscover. And of course, here are the magical pages that tell the tale of Jack the hare, and his journey to the sun. Williams explains how numbers and colors correspond to the intricate ballet, and how the eyes really do see the answer.
In this paperback reprint of Masquerade, the author supplies an illustrated preface that pulls the strings, finds the goal, and points to what's important: the village chemist's daughter, the atomic weight of the elements, the shadows of the equinox, Henry VIII's first wife. When the hare was finally unearthed by a British engineer, many were left wanting to know exactly how the clues worked out. Williams had devised an unusual guide to the hare's whereabouts: a multilayered riddle that he told in a fairy tale of his own imagining, and presented in dazzling, cryptic, paintings. For three years, treasure-seekers from both sides of the Atlantic sought a fabulous golden hare buried by artist Kit Williams. In paperback, the book that touched off the treasure hunt of the century-with a full explanation of the Masquerade Riddle.
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