Initial Knowledge

This stage was haunting us for more than six months. From the very beginning of our efforts we were convinced that this cipher must be some kind of book cipher. As the book cipher was described in The Code Book, this should imply that the numbers given are indices to words in a key text, and the initial letters in these words should give the plaintext. Other versions were proposed as well, e.g. counting backwards, counting every kth word, etc. As the other stages were solved we obtained more clues. The language of the plaintext had a tendency to be correlated with the origin of the cipher. Since book ciphers were exemplified with the Beale ciphers, this would imply that English should be the language of the plaintext.