Pillar 8

Pillar 8 contains a cipher comprised of differently sized dots (Decoded/Solved), an alphabetic railfence cipher (Solved) and a series of numbers around the bottom which probably form part of a cipher (Unsolved).

Pillar 8 is 2393mm tall and is the third tallest of the eight pillars.

Bubble Encoding

Bubble or circle encoding on Pillar 8

The 'Bubble' area of Pillar 8 is a grid of circles of two distinct sizes (small and large). The grid is 15 rows by 52 columns. Other pillars use 26 characters so it's possible the circles are paired. However, for now, I will represent the bubbles as binary with a "1" for a large circle, and a "0" for a small circle.

1110111010111011101110011010011010100101011110011011 1101010100010110000100101000101101111110101111110101 0000100000001000001000001000100010101010000000100000 1001000100010000010101000101000101010100011100000100 1101001110110110011010000011000110110110010001111101 1001010101011111010111010101011101101001100101011010 1001101010101111101010101010100101010101111111100101 0110110111010100111000111001111010111110011111001011 0000000000001000000000100000101000101000100010110010 0101010101000100010000010000000001010001010100000000 1110111010011111111011100001000110010111001100101011 1011101101101111010111111111011101111010010101110101 0110101001110010111001111001101010101010101110101001 1101110010011101100010010010100010100100111111010011 0110101010001010000010000000100010101011100010000010

The bubble code has been decoded by Bob Dovenberg who posted the solution to the Nkrypt Facebook page on 21 March 2013.

Explanation: This code is written in standard Braille. Each 2x3 box represents one Braille letter. Therefore this becomes a five line code like many of the others. Lines 2 and 4 must be read upside down. The decoded message is: A Short sighted general with buses to park An old French Barber sitting quite in the dark Tip of a finger, glide of a snail All our great works on the head of a nail Bob's contextual explanation: An early form of Braille was originally developed by Charles Barber to help Napoleon’s soldiers read in the dark. It was never utilized by Napoleon. I suspect lines one and two refer to this. Braille is read by the tip of one’s finger. A recent invention, called a Snail, helps people read Braille faster. The last line is bit of a puzzler. My guess is that it refers to new Braille displays that basically use nails to create readable text in Braille.

Alphabetic Encoding

The bottom code on Pillar 8 is an alphabetic code. It begins with plaintext that is iteratively morphed into a rail fence cipher.

The railfence cipher was solved by Matthew Bienik and posted to the Nkrypt Facebook page on 26 February 2013 with the following result:

A SIMPLE CODE TO HIDE YOUR TALES ITS LETTERS NAILED TO DIFFERENT RAILS A FAMOUS SCHOLAR FROM TIMES PAST WITH COPPER DISCS ENCODED FAST A GERMAN MONK WITH CODES SO STRONG USED KEYS TO SHIFT THE CIPHER ON A FAMILY DOWN THE MOUNTAINSIDE A CABINET NOIR THEY WORKED INSIDE

The lines refer to different cipher systems, namely: Rail fence cipher, Alberti cipher disk, Trithemius's polyalphabetic cipher and the Rossignols' Great Cipher.

Base

A string of numbers run in a circular pattern around the base of each pillar (see notes on the base code). On this pillar, it reads:

10 11 12 14 11 13 15 22 28 30 16 17 11 13 8 10 12 15 22 22 10 13 11 13 9 10 8 8 16 17