What I write rarely offers the reader any financial advantage. This column is an exception. It provides you with an opportunity to make a huge amount of money, although I should warn in advance that the odds against you are high.

Sending secret messages has a long and honorable history. One of my favorite methods goes back to about 500 BC. Histiaeus of Miletus wanted to get an important message to his son-in-law, Aristagoras. He shaved the head of a messenger, wrote on the bald scalp, and waited for the hair to grow back. (People apparently were not so hurried in those days, and certainly bathed less often.) The hairy messenger finally set off, and when he got to his destination he again shaved his head. The message was delivered.

This was an example of a hidden message, which has the disadvantage that as soon as someone knows how the message is being carried, it can be read. Another technique is the coded message, which only the intended receiver, who knows the key to the code, can understand. Anyone else can see the message but will be unable to make sense of it.

Sometimes no one at all can understand the message, because no one knows the key. The most famous example of this is called the Beale Cipher, and it goes back close to 200 years. In 1820 a stranger who gave his name as Thomas Beale stayed at a hotel in Lynchburg, Virginia, run by a man named Robert Morriss. He remained a few months, then was gone for two years. When he came back he entrusted a locked iron box to Morriss, and a couple of months later was on his way again. But he wrote to Morriss in June of the same year and said that the box contained valuable information. If he did not return within ten years, he told Morriss that he was free to open the box, which contained coded documents. Beale said he had left the key to the code with a friend.

Thomas Beale never came back. Also, no one appeared claiming to have the key to the coded messages in the box. Robert Morriss was a patient man. He waited and waited, until finally in 1845 he opened the box. It contained a letter from Beale, together with three sheets covered with numbers. The letter explained that Beale and 29 companions had gone off west in 1817,and in the course of hunting buffalo they had discovered gold. They mined a large quantity, and also some silver, and brought it back to Virginia. Beale himself hid their treasure in a safe place.

Where? Ah, that was the problem. According to Beale's letter, the information was contained in the three coded sheets within the box. The first sheet described where the treasure was hidden, the second said what it consisted of, and the third named relatives of the discoverers. As 23 years had passed since Beale's last visit, Robert Morriss felt that it was his responsibility to contact the relatives. The problem was, in order to do so, he first had to crack the code. And this he was unable to do.

Nor was anyone else, then or since, although there has been partial success. One page, the second sheet, was decoded in the 1880s, by relating each number on the sheet to that number word in a particular document. In this case the appropriate document was the Declaration of Independence, but this didn't work for the other two pages of numbers. However, the decoded page was enough to keep people working on the other two. It said that Beale had deposited, in an excavation in Bedford County, a total of 2,921 pounds of gold, 5,100 pounds of silver, and some jewels traded for silver in St. Louis. The treasure was packed in iron pots within a stone-lined vault six feet below the surface.

I see from today's newspaper that gold is trading at $273 an ounce. Beale was almost certainly using standard measure of 16 ounces to the pound, rather the jeweler's or troy measure of 12 ounces to the pound, so the treasure would bring over $13 million on today's market.

First, though, you have to find it. The first sheet (no one has much practical interest in the third one) is assumed to be keyed to some other document, in the same way as the second sheet was keyed to the Declaration of Independence. The question is, which other document? Since the 1880's, almost every rational and many irrational choices have been tried, and failed. Numerous holes have been dug in and around Lynchburg, Virginia, and there is a Beale Cypher and Treasure Association, founded in the 1960s, interested specifically in cracking the coded messages.

Given all of this background, is there any reason to assume that you might succeed, when so many others have tried without success? I can give one strong reason for encouragement. You probably have, within your house and maybe at your fingertips as you read, more computer power than was available to anyone in the world twenty years ago. Also, in an increasingly digital world, more and more texts are available in digital form. A program can accomplish in seconds a textual comparison that even 50 years ago would have taken months of laborious human effort.

Tackle the Beale Cipher, by all means. Write, and I will tell you how to obtain the three sheets of numbers that contain all we know about the coded messages. However, I should add one word of warning. It was given to me many years ago by an old friend, Carl Hammer, who has spent a lot of time applying computers to the Beale Cipher. As he put it, "The name of the first one to crack the Beale code will never be known. We will learn only the name of the second person to crack it - the one who follows directions to Beale's underground vault, and finds it empty."

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