The Gold-Bug

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. William Legrand has lost his fortune and retreated to a hut on Sullivan's Island off the coast of Charleston, with only his servant Jupiter for company. When he finds a strange scarab beetle of unnatural weight and colour, his friend the narrator begins to fear for his sanity.

Legrand sketches the beetle on a scrap of parchment picked up on the shore. Held near the fire, the parchment reveals a death's head, a goat, and a long string of figures and symbols where nothing had been before. It is a cipher, and Legrand is certain it leads to the buried treasure of Captain Kidd.

What follows is one of the most famous puzzles in literature: a step-by-step decipherment by letter frequency, then a night expedition inland with a spade, a tulip tree, and instructions that must be followed exactly or the whole thing fails.

First published in 1843 and an immediate popular sensation, Edgar Allan Poe's tale of ciphers and buried gold effectively invented the cryptographic puzzle story and shaped everything from Treasure Island to The Da Vinci Code. This unabridged audiobook edition presents the complete original text.

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Hljóðbók: 4 januari 2024