– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

[Music]

[Music]

Heat.

Heat.

According to legend, in 1819, a group of

men bury a fabulous treasure in the

Virginia

countryside of gold and silver and

jewels worth tens of millions of

dollars.

Their leader, Thomas Beal, writes down

the treasur's location in a secret code.

He entrusts an inkeeper with its

safekeeping, vowing to

return. But then Thomas Beal vanishes.

Not only does Thomas Beal disappear, his

whole party disappears. It's complete

mystery. Years later, two brothers,

George and Clayton Hart, take up the

challenge of cracking Beal's mysterious

code to recover his glittering

treasure. During their 50-year quest,

they turned to the world's most famous

code

breakers and even the supernatural.

[Music]

But when someone is hot on the trail of

a treasure, they will use every possible

means at their

disposal. In the 19th century, a seance

was science. He genuinely believes that

mesmeriism will uncover the location of

this treasure.

Theirs is an extraordinary quest to

unravel the mystery of Thomas Beiel's

lost

[Music]

[Music]

treasure. The story begins in southern

USA in 1897.

at the offices of the Norfolk and

Western Railroad Company in Rowanoke,

[Music]

Virginia. Clayton Hart, a 25-year-old

Clark, spent his working day

transcribing documents for his

employer. A man like Clayton Hart, his

life is rather humrum and boring. I

think a lot of wrote clerical work. And

I can imagine that he is looking at the

world and saying there must be something

more than my work a day

[Music]

existence. One summer morning a senior

colleague asked Hart to make copies of a

document. It was a routine

request but this document was far from

ordinary.

Clayton Hart looks at the papers and

they've got sets of numbers on them.

There's no context, no clues, no

history, no nothing. It's just numbers.

What are they for? Where does this

lead? Clearly, these numbers are meant

to signify something. They can engender

that spark of curiosity. I must find out

what this means.

Hart's colleague explained that he

believed the numbers could reveal the

location of an extraordinary

[Music]

treasure. Buried for almost a century

under the Virginia

soil. As far as he knew, the treasure

still lay undiscovered out there

somewhere.

this clerk in this big office can just

suddenly imagine a completely different

world and can imagine an adventure that

is seeming to stare him right in the

face. So you could see how that would be

very exciting, a very exciting prospect

and and the opportunity to break out of

his humrum existence.

[Music]

So Clayton Hart doesn't know at this

particular moment, of course, that this

is going to be his life's work. He's

going to dedicate his entire life to

discovering the location of this

treasure horde.

Clayton Hart made his own copies of the

numbered pages and from his family home

in Rowanoke began work to decipher the

strange and puzzling

codes. The question is, does Clayton

Hart have a chance of solving this

cipher? He's an amateur, but it's not a

big mathematical cipher. There's a trick

to it. Maybe you can solve this.

Clayton scoured the code for clues. He

tried to identify patterns and establish

relationships between the

numbers. But after weeks of effort, he

had got nowhere.

He desperately needed to find a new

lead. If he had any hope of getting his

hands on the buried treasure.

So if you can't figure out the code, you

can at least figure out who was the

author of the code. What kind of a

person was this author?

He begins to speculate that perhaps if

he had some biographical information,

some knowledge about where they came

from, then he could begin to try and

unpick these

[Music]

codes. Hart made

inquiries and soon received his first

clue.

[Music]

He discovered that a man named James

Ward had published a strikingly similar

code in a pamphlet printed 12 years

earlier in Lynchburg,

Virginia. When Clayton Hart finds out

about a pamphlet that was written only a

decade before that, very similar

sounding to what he's got, he's very

excited. He has to go and see it. This

is the only real clue he's got that

isn't a number.

[Music]

Hart set out for Lynchber, 50 mi away to

the

east. He scoured the city's bookshops

for the mysterious

[Music]

pamphlet. Eventually, he found it.

A small 20page booklet published in

1885 by a James B.

Ward. What he reads is the Beal

papers containing authentic statements

regarding the treasure buried in 1819

1821 near Bufords in Bedford County,

Virginia.

On closer inspection, Hart noticed that

the pamphlet contained three sets of

numbers. The same numbers that have been

puzzling him for

weeks. You can almost feel his heart

start to pound as he recognizes that

this is the very same material that he

has, which must have convinced him,

well, this is too much to be

coincidental. There must be something

true. This must be true.

What an exciting thing. What's been a

set of numbers is now treasure. Actual

treasure. Could it get any better than

that? Clayton Hart had hit the

[Music]

jackpot. But who was the be referred to

in the

title? And where was the mysterious

treasure buried?

Hungry for more clues, Clayton Hart read

the pamphlet from cover to

cover. Its pages contained a tangled

story of mystery and intrigue.

Hart learned that in

1821 a mystery man was a guest at the

Washington Hotel in

Lynchburg. He gave his name as Thomas

Beal. He entrusted the hotel's

proprietor, Robert Morris, with a locked

box for safekeeping.

This seems strange to us, but actually

this was quite common at this time. An

inkeeper is actually one of the most

trustworthy people that you can hand

documents to. So many people would hand

documents and private possessions to an

inkeeper for

safekeeping. Be then disappeared without

a trace.

But several months later, Morris the

inkeeper received word from his former

[Music]

guest. There's a letter from St. Louis

instructing Morris that if Beal does not

return after a certain period of time,

10 years, that Morris is to open this

mysterious locked box.

[Music]

Heart read that Morris waited 23 years

before opening the

box. Inside he discovered a stack of

papers, one of which is a letter

addressed to him. And in it is this

fantastic account of how Thomas Beal

came by this vast amount of gold and

treasure while he was journeying in the

[Music]

west. The story goes that in

1817 Beal and a group of companions set

out into the west to hunt buffalo.

They journeyed from their home in

Virginia across country towards the

Rocky Mountains of

[Music]

Colorado. Whilst exploring the rugged

terrain, some of Beiel's men made an

amazing discovery.

So he tells the story that as they are

hunting these

[Music]

buffalo. They stumble on a gold

mine. The men abandoned the buffalo hunt

and began extracting the gleaming ore.

[Music]

[Music]

They spend 18 months, the 30 of them,

toiling away, pulling out thousands of

pounds of gold and silver, and they

debate what it is that they want to do

with this. How do they want to store it?

How do they share it with their

families?

Clayton Hart read that Beal and his men

had decided to take their wealth back to

Virginia. On route, they stopped in St.

Louis. There they traded the ore for

gold coins, silver bars, and precious

jewels.

[Music]

They then transported their booty back

to Virginia in two separate trips. One

in 1819 and another in

1821. At that time, banks were not

considered to be safe. So they stashed

their fortune in a top secret location

in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

[Music]

The pamphlet explained. Beiel then

encoded the treasure's hidden location

in an inciphered

message. Hart was captivated. Could this

treasure really be buried in the

Virginia mountains?

Heart read that along with the letter,

Morris, the inkeeper, had found three

sheets of paper inside the mysterious

box. On each was written line after line

of what seemed like random

numbers. The pamphlet explained that

these numbers form three inciphered

messages written by Beal.

Paper one contained the exact location

of the

treasure. Paper two was an inventory of

the

treasure. And paper three was a list of

to whom the treasure belonged.

This is the moment where it all links

together. It's perfect. It's a treasure

hunt and he's on the treasure hunt. It's

his treasure.

The question was, could this code be

cracked to reveal the treasure's

location? Clayton Hart turned the page,

searching for more

[Music]

clues. He read that the inkeeper Morris

spent nearly 20 years trying to crack

the

codes, but the challenge defeated him.

He passed the codes and Beiel's letters

to an unnamed

friend. That friend then wrestled with

the problem for

years and eventually made a breakthrough

on paper, too.

Morris's unnamed friend makes a really

good

guess that what he's looking at in these

ciphers is a dictionary cipher where

each number tells you the index of a

word in a book or paper or something.

And by looking at the first letter of

that word, you can decrypt the

message. He tries lots of different

books. He tries the Declaration of

Independence and wonderfully,

marvelously, it comes out.

Starting by consecutively numbering the

words of the declaration, the inkeeper's

friend began to decode the second

paper. He referenced the code's numbers

to the first letters of the numbered

declarations words and amazingly Beiel's

cipher began to unravel.

[Music]

So using the Declaration of Independence

and going through these numbers, you

might end up with the letters from the

beginning I H A V E D E P I have

deposited and then the rest of the

message comes out in that way.

The pamphlet contained a full

transcription of the decoded second

paper. It was as though Thomas Beal was

speaking to Clayton Hart from beyond the

grave.

[Music]

I have deposited in the county of

Bedford about four miles from Bufords in

an excavation or vault the following

[Music]

articles. The first deposit consisted of

1,14 lb of gold and 3,812 lb of silver.

The second consisted of

197 lb of gold and 1,288 lb of

silver. Also jewels obtained in St.

Louis and valued at

[Music]

$13,000. Clayton Hart was

overwhelmed. Here in black and white was

not only evidence that the treasure was

real, but also what it was

worth. A truly phenomenal sum that today

would be worth over $60

million. The pamphlet also included one

vital clue to its location, that it was

buried underground about 4 miles from a

place called Buford's Tavern.

So from the perspective of Clayton Hart,

this is wonderful news because it means

that the codes can actually be cracked.

Hart was stunned. It then occurred to

him if the Declaration of Independence

was the key to the second Beal paper,

maybe other well-known published texts

could unlock the first paper, the one

that contained the precise location of

the

treasure. He was convinced that he was

on the verge of becoming rich beyond his

wildest dreams.

[Music]

Hart headed back to Rowanoke. Keen to

test his

theory, he enlisted the help of his

brother, George, a trainee lawyer with

dreams of opening offices in Washington,

DC.

of the two brothers. He's the more

rational, more skeptical of the two. And

Clayton tells his brother about what

he's found, and his brother becomes

interested. Clayton described his

discoveries, and the two brothers began

trying to trace the vital keys to the

cipher encoded papers.

[Music]

They began to examine paper one that

contained the treasur's

location. What the Hart brothers try to

do now is they try loads of different

books and loads of different strategies

with

[Music]

books. They count words in different

ways. Perhaps it's every word. Perhaps

it's every other word. Perhaps you start

numbering at the end. Perhaps you take

the second letter. So they try many

different methods of trying to solve

paper number

one. The brothers toiled for weeks

hunting for the key text that would

unlock the location of Thomas Beal's

treasure. But there are so many books

and you don't have to start on page one.

You don't have to even start in the

first word of a page. You can start

anywhere. So, where do you start? They

try all kinds of things, but nothing

really bites. Nothing really

works. After weeks of effort, the

treasur's location was still locked in

the

code. It was clear the hearts must

attack the puzzle from a different

angle.

So Clayton suggested a fresh and

unconventional approach to their

[Music]

problem. He proposed that they could

unlock the treasure's location through

the power of

mesmeriism. Mesmeriism is a 19th century

and early 20th century science by a

combination of hypnotism and electrical

currents.

A subject would be rendered into a state

of trance where they could cross over

into another realm and they would

describe what they were

[Music]

seeing. During the 1890s, Clayton Hart

had witnessed these techniques in

practice. It's wonderful and had

subsequently educated himself in the

arts of mesmeriism and hypnotism. He was

convinced that he could mesmerize a

medium and guide them back through time

to Bedford County in

1819. The subject would see through the

eyes of one of Beiel's men and identify

the location of the buried treasure.

Clayton Hart is not an irrational man.

He genuinely believes that this

application of a scientific process of

mesmeriism will uncover the location of

this

[Music]

treasure. One year later in early 1898,

the brothers agreed to conduct a seance.

For this, they required a suitable

medium. Clayton enlisted the help of a

local 18-year-old man who had shown

promise as a clairvoyant and crystal

ball

reader. George Hart sized him up as

mildmannered and seemingly disinterested

in what was about to

happen. Clayton began the mesmeriism

process.

A typical mesmerist will sit an

individual down in a chair and lay their

hand upon the median nerve on the top of

their arm and press hard to make a a

connection. The subject would then be

handed into their other hand a

mesmerist's coin, a piece of zinc wound

with wire, so something like a battery.

Then the mesmerist would rub their hands

up and down this person's arm towards

their head, sending a spasm through the

individual, which would render them

unconscious, insensible, and they would

cross over into another realm where they

would describe their visions.

The hearts could see that the mesmeriism

process was working as the medium gazed

into the crystal ball and as if

transfixed took on an unfamiliar

personality.

He begins to speak like this, you know,

rough huneed backount early 19th century

man would have. He's mouthing words

through a body and a a persona that

seems to have really changed into a

whole new person from the past.

Believing that the medium was seeing

events from the past, Clayton Hart

ordered him to journey to Buford's

Tavern in November

1819 to the day before the treasure was

[Music]

buried. The medium described that he

could see a group of men inside the

tavern building.

He then followed the man who appeared to

be their leader, Thomas Beal,

upstairs. According to the medium, Beal

placed his saddle bags on the bed and

opened one of its

pouches. Inside was a fortune in

precious jewels.

When he sees the treasure, the boy

declares, "I've never seen such a horde

in all my life. It beats any jeweler's

show I've ever

seen." And the the Hart brothers are are

amazed.

Clayton ordered the medium to go outside

the tavern and investigate the party's

wagons.

The subject describes looking into the

pots that are on these wagons and seeing

gold and silver within these pots.

Uh this first person commentary seems to

be just so vivid and so true to them

that it provides just another brick in

that wall, that foundation that they're

building to support this this story.

Now convinced that the treasure was

real, Clayton Hart focused his medium on

identifying its secret

location. He ordered him to follow the

men's movements the next day when they

went out to bury the

treasure.

According to the subject in the seance,

he is describing that these two men who

are out in the woods near Buford's

Tavern are digging a hole and that they

are paving it with stones and on these

stones they are placing pots, placing

more stones on top of the pots and this

is matching exactly what is in the bee

papers in terms of what is described

about where the treasure has been

hidden.

All of a

sudden, the medium snapped out of his

mesmerized state,

their mesmerized subject gives them

everything they need except where the

treasure

is. But they he fills out the story so

beautifully, so vividly. It's like he

was right there with Thomas

Beiel. The Hart brothers took stock of

what exactly had just occurred.

George is a skeptic. Clayton is a true

believer. And they are not sure whether

or not this evidence is real evidence or

not. The boy has said something. Is it

debatable? Is it is it up for

questioning? So, they begin to chat with

one another about whether or not they

should follow this lead.

Then the medium spoke.

He told the brothers that he could lead

them to the very spot where the treasure

was

buried. They said, "How can it get any

better?" And they think, "He can lead us

to the

treasure." The hearts really want this

to be true.

[Music]

In the spring of

1899, George and Clayton Hart headed out

into Virginia's Blue Ridge

Mountains. Along with their 18-year-old

medium, they scrambled through the

wooded countryside.

[Music]

They headed for an inn that was once

called Buford's Tavern as the Beal

papers had stated that the treasure was

buried close

[Music]

by. They take the subject of the seance

and he's hypnotized again.

[Music]

He then proceeds hound dog like to sniff

his way back to the spot

where he remembers that this treasure is

[Music]

buried. The three men tramped four miles

through overgrown woodland.

Suddenly, the medium

stopped before darting off into the

woods. He seems to know right where he's

going. He jumps across a stream. He goes

up a hill down into an area where

there's a little depression in the

ground. And and he acts as though he can

see the treasure. Look, there it is.

It's right there.

This had to be the spot where Thomas

Beal had buried his legendary

[Music]

treasure. For 6 hours they shoveled load

after load of moist Virginia soil.

[Music]

They're digging and digging is hard

work, but there's always that hope of

treasure that that keeps them

[Music]

going and they're getting tired. They've

been at it for several hours and then

it's Clayton's

turn and he digs and

clunk. He hits a stone, a big stone.

Tingling with anticipation, the brothers

cleared the dirt from the stone's edges.

[Music]

Treasure hunters live for a moment like

this. They've been working so hard for

so long deciphering the the codes,

mesmerizing young boys, and what they

end up finding is a

hollow stone, and they think, "Wow, this

is this is my moment. This is the moment

where we're going to uncover Thomas

Bele's treasure.

[Music]

But there was nothing

[Music]

underneath. Frustrated, Clayton asked

the medium if they had made a mistake.

Where was the treasure? Then he says,

"No, no, no. It's not there." And he

points to an area that's underneath an

oak tree, saying, "There, there. Can't

you see

it?" George Hart had lost all faith in

their medium. The decision was made to

return home.

[Music]

the next morning. Clayton still believed

that the treasure was within his grasp.

He's clearly bought into this story

locktock and barrel and has devoted I

think so much of his own energy to this

that he just can't accept that this is

the end of the road. So without his

brother he actually then goes back to

the spot to the oak tree but this time

instead of shovels he brings dynamite.

In a desperate last attempt, Clayton

Hart set the charge, lit the touchpaper,

and

ran. When the air cleared, Clayton

frantically started digging.

But again,

nothing. Thomas Beal's riches had eluded

him once

again. The next four years passed

without any progress.

But Clayton Hart remained as keen as

ever to find Beiel's lost

treasure. Clayton Hart is a true

believer. He thinks that one new lead is

all that it'll take for him to uncover

the hidden

treasure. He returned to the Beal papers

and focused in on the pamphlet's

publisher, James B.

[Music]

Ward. He decides to go and find out who

he is and see what he's got to say. If

he can help find the treasure,

Clayton Hart made inquiries. Who was the

mysterious Mr.

Ward? Clayton Hart finds out that James

Ward is indeed real person.

and he lives in Lynchburg, not that far

from where they are. So he goes to try

and find

him. He journeyed to Lynchburg to meet

Ward. Hart recounted the brother's

adventures trying to find Beiel's lost

treasure and asked if Ward had any new

leads.

And Ward tells Hart point blank,

"Everything in the pamphlet I published

is true. Everything that you read about

the expedition and the gold and Robert

Morris and the unnamed friend cracking

the code, it's all

true." But Ward couldn't provide any

further

details. Nothing that could help Clayton

find the treasure.

Clayton returned to Rowanoke in

despair. The last living connection to

the mystery had led

nowhere, and the location of Beiel's

riches remained unknown.

[Music]

It was another 20 years before the Hart

brothers got their next

lead. George Hart was by this time a

qualified lawyer living in Washington

DC. In 1924, he read a magazine article

about a Colonel George Fabian and the

work of American codereers during the

First World War.

[Music]

He was the founder of what's effectively

an independent codereing research

facility, a think tank that was of great

use to the American military in the

First World

War. And Hart thinks, "Wow, maybe

Fabian's crew can crack this code."

With Clayton's blessing, George Hart

mailed Colonel Fabian with the story of

the brother's

adventures, together with the codes and

all the information they knew about the

mystery. Intrigued, Fabian wrote back to

George Hart.

[Music]

The problem has my interest and I am

writing in the vain hope that either you

or Clayton Hart can give us further

information because the psychology of it

is about all we have to go on in picking

our point of attack. In the meantime, we

will retain the pamphlet and work on it

as we can find the time to do so.

[Music]

Fabian pointed out what the Hard

Brothers already knew, that in order to

crack the ciphers on papers one and

three, he first needed to discover the

correct

keys. But he said it's difficult, it's

very difficult, if not impossible, to

break a code in a vacuum devoid of all

context that we understand. And so in

some sense, this response, which Hart

hoped would really be uh sort of a magic

key to open this lock, is simply more of

what they already understood, which is

that until you really know more about

how this code was created, cracking it

is fishly

difficult. Fabian's attempts to decipher

the be papers went nowhere.

He decided to enlist the talents of his

two top

cryptologists. William and Elizabeth

Freriedman were both accomplished

codereakers and pioneers of new

cryptographic techniques born out of the

First World

War. William and Elizabeth Freriedman

are two probably of the most famous

codereers in the United States. They

would often look at some of these

unsolved ciphers and sort of crack them

for

fun. The Freriedman's study the Beal

ciphers and applied their expertise to

the problem of breaking

them. Freeman's look at these ciphers

and they use their toolbox. But the

difference between them and other people

is that William Freeman invented the

toolbox. So when he and his wife look at

this thing, they look with incredibly

piercing

vision. The more the Freriedman's looked

at the Beal papers, the more they

suspected they were not what they

claimed to be.

In a letter to Clayton Hart written in

1938, Elizabeth Freriedman gave their

damning verdict.

Such maps, when examined, have almost

invariably proved to be

forgeries forced upon an unsuspecting

public, which thanks to the double lure

of buried treasure and cryptographic

form, have persisted throughout the

years since they first appeared in 1885.

It is likewise believed that the

cryptogram which you forwarded is

nothing more or less than a

hoax. In other words, the Freriedman's

were confident that the hearts had

wasted their time on a wild goose chase.

It is perhaps the the most crippling

sort of blow to the belief of the hearts

and other people that this could

possibly be um an actual story, an

actual true

story, that the codereaking experts of

the time come to the conclusion that

there's no truth in this at all.

The Freriedman's had no doubt that the

story of Thomas Beiel's treasure was a

cleverly written

hoax, probably created to sell

[Music]

pamphlets. But if it was a hoax, who had

perpetrated

it? One theory points the finger at a

Lynchberg newspaper editor named John

William Sherman.

In 1885, John William Sherman purchases

the Lynchberg, Virginiaian newspaper.

Very quickly, the Lynchberg Virginiaian

gets into financial difficulties and

Sherman, who is known as a famous writer

of dime

novels, strikes upon an idea that

perhaps to reverse the fortunes of the

Lynchberg, Virginiaian, he should

publish something that

sells. Some researchers now believe that

Sherman created the Beal papers as a

money spinner.

[Music]

It makes a lot of sense if you think

about it. He certainly had the

experience and the background and had

the motive in uh being in a a difficult

financial position with his with his

newspaper.

There is another piece of evidence that

supports this theory.

Advertisements for the Beal Papers

pamphlet run a total of 84 times from

1885 and only ever in one

newspaper. The Lynchberg

Virginia. Who on earth would publish an

advert 84 times? Who could afford to do

that? The only person that could really

do that would be the owner, John William

Sherman.

And there's one more startling

connection. Sherman's first cousin was

none other than the man Clayton Hart had

visited in

1903, the publisher of the Beal

[Music]

Papers. James B. Ward

John Sherman cannot publish the Beal

papers under his own name. He's well

known in Virginia as the editor of this

newspaper. And it's known that he's also

in financial difficulties. So he enlists

his cousin to act as agent, James Ward,

finishing the deception and

authenticating the text as true.

In other words, it seems there never was

a be or a

treasure. The whole thing was a

fabrication. But Clayton Hart was

convinced that the papers were real. He

went to his grave, believing that Thomas

Beiel's treasure was out there

somewhere.

Despite the evidence that the be papers

were a hoax, the mystery still continued

to intrigue treasure hunters and

codereers alike.

In the 1960s, a computer scientist named

Carl Hammer entered the quest to

decipher the mysterious be

codes. He put the number sequences

through the most advanced computers of

the

day. He even identified patterns in the

ciphers, but still he failed to crack

the

codes. In the 1980s, a historical

journal from the 1820s emerged that told

of a party closely fitting the

description of

bees. Was this evidence that Thomas Beal

and his men really had

existed? And if Beal was real, was the

treasure also?

We know that Beal and his associates

didn't return for the box that they had

entrusted with

Morris and that Beal disappears after

the 1820s. So what happened to Thomas

Beal? Did something sinister happened?

Did he go and dig up the treasure

himself? There are many possible

outcomes in 19th century America.

One theory is that Beiel and his party

may have returned to retrieve their

precious

[Music]

booty. Another is that before they could

do so, they came to an untimely

end. If that's the case, then Beiel's

treasure could still lie undiscovered.

[Music]

Clayton and George Hart spent 50 years

of their lives trying to solve the

mystery of Beiel's

[Music]

treasure. A mystery that continues to

captivate treasure hunters and codereers

to this day.

The be ciphers, the be papers are a

source of incredible interest to people

and they they continue to be even, you

know, 100 years

later and they will be 200 years later

because and I speak as a literary

critic, they are so well written. I

myself don't think there is treasure

sitting somewhere in Virginia. I think

there is a person who published an

absolutely fantastic adventure story. To

those who do believe the legend, there

is a fortune in gold, silver, and jewels

buried 6 ft under the Virginia

soil. And finding it is simply a matter

of cracking the mystery of Thomas Beal's

codes. If people just forget about the

the

legends, if they can just look at the

numbers, everything you need to know is

in the numbers. For me, the be ciphers

are crackable,

but it's a mystery. It's a great

mystery.

[Music]

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
heat /hiːt/ A1	noun - the quality of being hot
legend /ˈledʒənd/ A2	noun - a story from the past
treasure /ˈtreʒər/ A1	noun - valuable items
code /koʊd/ A2	noun - a system of symbols verb - to convert into code
mystery /ˈmɪstəri/ A2	noun - something difficult to understand
quest /kwest/ B1	noun - a long or arduous search
glittering /ˈɡlɪtərɪŋ/ B1	adjective - shining brightly
supernatural /ˌsuːpərˈnætʃərəl/ B2	adjective - beyond natural laws
mesmerism /ˈmɛzməˌrɪzəm/ C1	noun - hypnotic influence
unravel /ʌnˈrævəl/ B2	verb - to solve or explain
humdrum /ˈhʌmˌdrʌm/ B2	adjective - lacking excitement
pamphlet /ˈpæmflɪt/ B1	noun - a small booklet
speculate /ˈspɛkjəˌleɪt/ B2	verb - to form a theory
clairvoyant /ˌklɛərˈvɔɪənt/ C1	noun - a person who claims to see the future
dynamite /ˈdaɪnəˌmaɪt/ B1	noun - a powerful explosive
cryptologist /kraɪˈpɒlədʒɪst/ C1	noun - a code expert
forgeries /ˈfɔːrdʒəriz/ C1	noun - fake documents
hoax /həʊks/ B2	noun - a trick
fabrication /ˌfæbrɪˈkeɪʃən/ C1	noun - a lie or invention
captivate /ˈkæptɪveɪt/ B2	verb - to attract and hold interest