Die Geometrie birgt zwei grosse Schätze: der eine ist der Satz von Pythagoras, der andere der Goldene Schnitt. Den ersten können wir mit einem Scheffel Gold vergleichen, den zweiten können wir ein kostbares Juwel nennen. – Johannes Kepler (1571-1630).A fortnight had passed and the false neophyte was ready. He had learnt the routine of the temple, spying it out night after night when the officiating priests thought him asleep in his cell, and had fixed on a half-hour soon after two of the morning for the theft, when the central shrine was certain to be deserted and he could work undisturbed. First, though, he would have to ascend to the temple roof and signal his comrades. Accordingly, as he lay in the darkness of his cell and waited for an improvised clepsydra above him to overflow and begin dripping on his face, he clutched a stolen lamp and murmured prayers for success to his true master, the sun-and-storm god Yagdomel.
The clepsydra proved a wise precaution, for he was asleep well before the hour, exhausted by his days of arithmetic and nights of spying; and to judge from the moisture on his face, perhaps six or seven drops had fallen on him before he came fully awake. He rose, laid the clepsydra to the floor, slipped on his sandals, retrieved his bronze stylus from its box of undecorated ivory, and padded silently to the doorway, where he listened hard into the darkness before venturing forth. It was two exactly, and worship would be concluding in the central shrine as he climbed to the roof, flinted the lamp alight, and sent his signal to the eyes that had awaited it for three nights past.
And yes, when he had waved the lit lamp, there came the response, a flicker of light from the darkness below him, somewhere in the valley at whose head the temple was crouched. Now he extinguished the lamp and crept from the roof, thanking Yagdomel for his success thus far. When he reached the central shrine, all was as he had prayed for and planned: it was dim-lit and deserted, and the twenty sacred polyhedra of ΦθχοωοχθΦ were his for the thieving. They were pumpkin-sized and hollow, built of thumb-thick plates of precious metal and gemstone, and one alone of the richest would keep a man in luxury till the end, however protracted, of his days.
He began work at once with his stylus, thankful that at last he was putting it to some good use as he levered the plates apart and stacked them ready by the temple door. The fundamental and derived polyhedra – tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, and their truncations – yielded their pure gold and mixed gold and silver to him, grating softly in the flickering gloom; and then he turned to the cuboctahedron, with its plates of opal and ice-sea pearl, the small rhombicuboctahedron, with its plates of black jade and sapphire, the two snub cubes, with their plates of emerald and ruby or ruby and emerald, and the icosidodecahedron, with its plates of diamond and lapis lazuli. Finally he turned to the great rhombicuboctahedron, the small and great rhombicosidodecahedra, and the two snub dodecahedra, with their plates of metals and gemstones mostly too rare for him to name; and as he was levering apart the last of them he heard with relief a soft whistle through the door-slot.
His comrades were ready. The door of the temple was opened once a year only, when neophytes were brought in or let out to commence or repudiate their provisional year of training, and remained sealed at all other times save for the narrow slot through which the laity of the valley passed food to their priesthood. Through this same slot, he would now pass the treasure of the temple, robbing it simultaneously of its wealth and of its boast that never in the many centuries of its existence had it yielded said wealth to the profane. He dropped his stylus and shuffled to the door-slot with the dismantled plates of the sinister snub dodecahedron, panting a little with their weight.
Having them set them down on one of the piles that waited there, he began to feed the plates through the slot, seeming to feel the life-blood of the temple draining as he did so. An emperor’s ransom was passing through his hands, and perhaps he would not have to wait till the end of his year’s training for liberation. The temple might be forced to dissolve itself, struck a mortal blow by his theft, and his first month might be his last.
He wished it would be so, beginning to accompany each handed-through plate of precious metal or gemstone with a silent prayer to Yagdomel, and when the last plate was passed and he had whispered that this was so, he hurried for his cell convinced that his prayers would be answered. Very soon he would be free to enjoy the fruits of his cunning. Aye, very soon. The thought comforted him, and he fell asleep almost at once, glad that he had remembered to lift his clepsydra to the floor, that it might not soak his pallet in his absence.
He awoke with the grey of approaching dawn in his cell to find two priests bent over him, shaking him gently from sleep, and all hope that their presence had no connexion with his theft was dashed as they stepped back and a murmur of “Come, apostate” reached his ears. His heart hammered in his throat. How had they discovered his theft? How would they punish him? He rose from his pallet and followed them, his heart hammering harder as they led him direct to the central shrine, which he found blazing with light as other priests, to his great dismay, busied themselves with the assembly of polyhedra seemingly identical to those which he had dismantled. Had his comrades been seized and the treasure reclaimed? But now one of the two priests that had awakened him turned to him, ordering, “Choose, then go!”, and pointed towards a panel swung back in one wall.
Confused, he shook his head, and the priest repeated “Choose, then go!” When he did not move, the priest took hold of his sleeve and pulled him forward to the opened panel. And now he gaped in amaze, for beyond it lay a wide many-sided chamber piled high with plates of precious metal and gemstone, from the gold triangles of the tetrahedron et alia to the orichalcum decagons that the great rhombicosidodecahedron alone employed. That which he had stolen was but a fraction of that which lay before him, and he might have repeated his theft ten times over and made no visible impression thereon. “Choose, then go!” the priest repeated in his ear, and a roomy knapsack of sturdy and thrice-sewn camel’s leather was thrust into his hands.
He went forward dazed, wondering whether he dreamed, and began to fill the knapsack with the most precious plates he could see, till at last, when he hoisted it on his back, he could barely walk for the weight of it. Now the two priests assisted him from the chamber, taking him across the shrine to the great door, at a panel of which one of them now busied himself. As he watched, shoulders knifed by the straps of the knapsack, the other priest spoke again unto him in this wise, saying: “Thou fool: hadst thou but held in check thy cupiscence of trumpery metal and gems thou couldst have had a treasure beyond all understanding of quotidian mortality. But thine was the choice, and thou hast robbed thyself of more than the world.”
And with this, a solitary panel of the door was swinging open for him to be thrust forward and through, carrying with him a second emperor’s ransom that weighed on him no heavier than the vast wilderment now waking slowly to inassuageable loss in his heart.