Masquerade is a children’s book, written and painted by Kit Williams, which sparked a worldwide treasure hunt by concealing clues to the location of a jeweled golden hare, created and hidden somewhere in the British Isles by Williams. It launched the contest genre known today as the armchair treasure hunt.

Contents

1 The book 2 The search 3 The discovery 4 The solution 5 The aftermath 6 External links

The book

Challenged by Tom Maschler, of the British publishing firm Jonathon Cape, to “do something no one has ever done before” with a children’s book, Kit set out in the 1970s to create a book of paintings that readers would study carefully rather than flip through and discard. The book’s objective, the hunt for a valuable treasure, became his means to this end. Masquerade featured fifteen exquisite, detailed paintings illustrating the story of Jack Hare, who seeks to carry a treasure from the Moon (depicted as a woman) to her love object, the Sun (a man). On arriving at the sun, Jack finds he has lost the treasure, and the reader is left to find its location.

Along with creating the book, Kit crafted a golden jewel in the shape of a hare, which he hid at a secret location within the British Isles on August 7th, 1979, and announced that his forthcoming book contained all clues necessary to decode the treasure’s location.

The search

The book’s publication, six weeks after the hiding of the jewel, touched off a frenzy of impulsive searchers, who often dug up public and private property acting on the faintest of hunches. One location in England named “Haresfield Beacon” was an especially popular site for searchers, and Williams was eventually forced to pay the cost of a sign notifying searchers that the hare was not hidden on the premises. Real-life locations reproduced in the paintings were similarly assailed by would-be treasure hunters, including Sudbury Hall in Suffolk and Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.

The discovery

When the unearthing of the treasure was announced in March 1982, countless Masqueraders were driven to disappointment, but the scandal behind the contest victory would not be unveiled for several years.

The finder, using the pseudonym “Ken Thomas,” was later revealed to be Dugald Thompson, whose business partner was in cahoots with Veronica Robertson, the former live-in girlfriend of Williams. While living with Williams, Robertson apparently learned the physical location of the hare, while remaining ignorant of the proper solution to the book’s master riddle. This knowledge was all that was needed to draw a crude sketch of the location, which Williams recognized as the first correct solution mailed to him. Williams immediately phoned Thompson and instructed him to dig for the hare. Only later did Williams discover that Thompson had not solved the puzzle in the intended manner, but appeared at the time to have blundered into a lucky guess. Only after (and very shortly after) Thomas unearthed, and was formally awarded, the prize was the proper solution unraveled by two physics teachers, Mike Barker and John Rousseau.

The solution

Solving the riddle of Masquerade involved an elaborate system, subtly indicated in the book, of drawing lines starting from the eyes of characters within the paintings, proceeding through the tips of middle fingers and big toes of the same characters, and finally pointing to letters which appear on the border of every painting within the book. Decoding and following this method reveals the nineteen-word message:

CATHERINE’S LONG FINGER OVER SHADOWS EARTH BURIED YELLOW AMULET MIDDAY POINTS THE HOUR IN LIGHT OF EQUINOX LOOK YOU

Taking the first letter indicated by each painting, the acrostic “CLOSE BY AMPTHILL” is revealed. Properly interpreted, the message told to dig near the cross-shaped monument to Catherine of Aragon standing at Ampthill Park, at the precise spot touched by the tip of the monument’s shadow at the stroke of noon on the date of either the vernal or autumnal equinox.

The aftermath

Apparently discouraged by the ruckus his first book caused, Williams made his second book and contest a simpler affair with no physically hidden treasure. The (officially) untitled book challenged readers to discover the mysterious title and then express it in the most creative way.

Thompson founded a software company called “Haresoft,” and offered the jewel as a prize to a new contest which took the form of a computer game. The company and its game were unsuccessful, yielding no winner, and the hare was later auctioned for 31,900 pounds to an unknown buyer. The treasure’s whereabouts today are as mysterious as they were during its original interment in the soil of Ampthill.

External links

• Masquerade: The Complete Book With the Answer Explained (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0894803697/qid=1105243273/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9490814-6629605?v=glance&s=books) on Amazon
• A page-by-page breakdown of the solution (http://www.bunnyears.net/kitwilliams/masq.html) at bunnyears.net