Cycle of Learning - The Enigma Emporium Season Two - Trial by Cipher - Card Five

 We've come now to the final card of the first set of season two of Enigma Emporium's puzzle postcards. Trial By Cipher, and presumably our final task before being granted entry to the Infiniti Institute's hallowed halls. Defending my dinner from hungry cats who have selective amnesia about their own dinners, we begin.

On the front of the card is a picture of water on a beach, and a quote about leaving footprints in the sands of time. I immediately get 'If I go crazy then will you still call me superman' stuck in my head. This is NOT helpful. There is a path of small bird (?) prints on the sand, perhaps connecting the letters but I can't see any message at first glance.

On the back, we have the same beach image. There are two messages, one broken oddly but legible, one a set of four words that reminds me of a Playfair Cipher, but it has repeated letters. The stamps are a picture of a castle or fortress, and an image of an X'd out lighthouse. There are also two lines of sets of numbers, top and bottom, which look like they're some sort of line-word-letter grouping. 

I start looking at the words: absconding - clinandria - paedagogic - fraxinella. I try to 'decode' them as a playfair, using the word sublime as a key - nothing. The other keyed cipher I can think of is a Vigenere - no luck there, either.

Do the words themselves have meaning?

• absconding - leave hurriedly and secretly, typically to avoid detection of or arrest for an unlawful action such as theft.
• clinandria - a cavity or area in which the anther is situated on the column in flowers of the Orchidaceae
• paedagogic - related to teaching
• fraxinella - a Eurasian perennial herb (Dictamnus albus) of the rue family with flowers that emit an aromatic flammable vapor in hot weather.

Not sure that got me anywhere, other than a new desire to plant flaming flowers. 

I'm staring at it, convinced that there's a rail fence in there somewhere, and then I see it. I was even kind of close - in a meandering path like the steps in the sand, we can find ALEXANDRIA. Given the sand references, I'm guessing Egypt, not Virginia.  

Now that we have that, I get a little closer to the stamps - it's the date of the fortress, not the date of the Lighthouse or Pharos of Alexandria. A quick Wiki trip teaches me that the stones of the Pharos were used to create the Citadel of Qaitbay in 1477, which I expect is the year whichever branch of the Institute that we are dealing with, was established. Then I go down a rabbit hole reading about the Citadel while my partner does actual work. 

It turns out that the quote on the front is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's A Psalm of Life. We consider that the numbered lines could refer to quatrain-line-word, but nothing comes of that, nor of quatrain-line-letter. We're still missing the name of the department and its head. While I'm trying to get philosophical, my partner solves the Department. The number sets refer to line-word-letter of the one quatrain on the front, not the whole poem, and, when read, provide PATTERN RECOGNITION. 

Which leaves us with the oddly spaced, oddly font-ed message, from which, presumably we need a name. If we can look at it long enough. Broken kerning hurts, people. There are several standalone letters, seemingly italicized, of which we can make no sense. yuendiw. innuendo? Reading them up and down as we did with Alexandria doesn't yield any more sense. Nor does counting the number of letters in each group and trying to A=01 it into submission. We try rotating the card due to the weird font, but nothing comes from that, either. Banging our head, we take a hint, then bang our heads harder. We were ALMOST there with the counting and pairing. Sigh. Morse... not letter pairs but dots and dashes. SAM PORUS. 

The final department is Pattern Recognition, led by Sam Porus and established in Alexandria in 1477. And we are correct! Officially welcomed to the Institute. I am not convinced that that is all there is on the page, but despite something being titled 'hidden during prewarmup,' I cannot find any further clues. Still, all in a good evening's work. Thank you, Enigma Emporium for all the fun, and I'll look forward to cracking open the next set next week!