The Book was proving far more stubborn than Artemis had
anticipated. It seemed to be almost actively resisting him. No matter which
program he ran it through, the computer came up blank.
Artemis hard-copied every page, tacking them to the walls of his
study. Sometimes it helped to have things on paper. The script was like
nothing he’d seen before, and yet it was strangely familiar. Obviously a
mixture of symbolic and character-based language, the text meandered
around the page in no apparent order.
What the program needed was some frame of reference, some central
point on which to build. He separated all the characters and ran
comparisons with English, Chinese, Greek, Arabic, and with Cyrillic texts,
even with Ogham. Nothing.
Moody with frustration, Artemis sent Juliet scurrying when she
interrupted with sandwiches, and moved on to symbols. The most
frequently recurring pictogram was a small male figure. Male, he
presumed, though with the limited knowledge of the fairy anatomy he
supposed it could be female. A thought struck him. Artemis opened the
ancient languages file on his Power Translator and selected Egyptian.
At last. A hit. The male symbol was remarkably similar to the Anubis
god representation on Tutankhamen’s inner-chamber hieroglyphics. This
was consistent with his other findings. The first written human stories
were about fairies, suggesting that their civilization predated man’s own. It
would seem that the Egyptians had simply adapted an existing scripture to
suit their needs.
There were other resemblances. But the characters were just
dissimilar enough to slip through the computer’s net. This would have to
be done manually. Each Gnommish figure had to be enlarged, printed, and
then compared with the hieroglyphs.
Artemis felt the excitement of success thumping inside his rib cage.
Almost every fairy pictogram or letter had an Egyptian counterpart. Most
were universal, such as the sun or birds. But some seemed exclusively
supernatural and had to be tailored to fit. The Anubis figure, for example,
would make no sense as a dog god, so Artemis altered it to read king of
the fairies.
By midnight, Artemis had successfully fed his findings into the
Macintosh. All he had to do now was press Decode. He did so. What
emerged was a long, intricate string of meaningless gibberish.
A normal child would have abandoned the task long since. The
average adult would probably have been reduced to slapping the keyboard.
But not Artemis. This book was testing him, and he would not allow it to
win.
The letters were right, he was certain of it. It was just the order that
was wrong. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Artemis glared at the pages
again. Each segment was bordered by a solid line. This could represent
paragraphs or chapters, but they were not meant to be read in the usual left
to right, top to bottom fashion.
Artemis experimented. He tried the Arabic right to left and the
Chinese columns. Nothing worked. Then he noticed that each page had
one thing in common—a central section. The other pictograms were
arranged around this pivotal area. So, a central starting point, perhaps. But
where to go from there? Artemis scanned the pages for some other
common factor. After several minutes he found it. There was on each page
a tiny spearhead in the corner of one section. Could this be an arrow? A
direction?
Go this way? So the theory would be, start in the middle then follow
the arrow. Reading in spirals.
The computer program wasn’t built to handle something like this, so
Artemis had to improvise. With a craft knife and ruler, he dissected the
first page of the Book and reassembled it in the traditional Western
languages order—left to right, parallel rows. Then he rescanned the page
and fed it through the modified Egyptian translator.
The computer hummed and whirred, converting all the information to
binary. Several times it stopped to ask for confirmation of a character or
symbol. This happened less and less as the machine learned the new
language. Eventually two words flashed on the screen: File converted.
Fingers shaking from exhaustion and excitement, Artemis clicked
Print. A single page scrolled from the LaserWriter. It was in English now.
Yes, there were mistakes, some fine-tuning needed, but it was perfectly
legible, and, more important, perfectly understandable.
Fully aware that he was probably the first human in several thousand
years to decode the magical words, Artemis switched on his desk light and
began to read.

THE BOOKE OF THE PEOPLE. BEING
INSTRUCTIONS TO OUR MAGICKS AND LIFE RULES.
Carry me always, carry me well. I am thy teacher of herb
and spell. I am thy link to power arcane. Forget me and thy
magick shall wane.
Ten times ten commandments there be. They will answer
every mystery. Cures, curses, alchemy. These secrets shall be
thine, through me.
But, Fairy, remember this above all. I am not for those in
mud that crawl. And forever doomed shall be the one, Who
betrays my secrets one by one.

Artemis could hear the blood pumping in his ears. He had them. They
would be as ants beneath his feet. Their every secret would be laid bare by
technology. Suddenly the exhaustion claimed him and he sank back in his
chair. There was so much yet to complete. Forty-three pages to be
translated for a start.
He pressed the intercom button that linked him to speakers all over
the house. “Butler. Get Juliet and come up here. There are some jigsaws I
need you to assemble.”

- Artemis Fowl, Chapter 2