Taking these letters as forming the corners of a parallelogram, we can tell ourselves that JX must come on the same line in the diagram either vertically or horizontally; the same with JE, the same with EU, and the same with UX.’
‘But suppose JN follows the horizontal rule or the vertical rule without the two letters actually coming together?’
‘It doesn’t matter; ‘it’ would only mean then that all four of them come on the same line like this;? J E U X, or X U E? J or some arrangement of that kind, So taking all the letters we have got and writing them in diagonals we get this:
J
E
X
U
N
M
G
E
A
R
B
?
Unfortunately there are no side-by-side letters at all. It would be very helpful if there were, but we can’t have everything.
‘Now the first striking thing is this that U and X have to come on the same line. That very strongly suggests that they both come in the bottom line. There are five letters that follow U in the alphabet, and only four spaces in which to put them. One of them, therefore, must be in the key-word. We’ll take a risk with it and assume that it isn’t Z. If it is, we’ll have to start all over again, but one must make a start somewhere. We’ll risk Z. That gives us three possibilities for our last line: UVXYZ with W in the key-word, or UWXYZ with V in the key-word, or UVWXZ with Y in the key-word. But in any case, U must be in the bottom left-hand corner. Now, looking again at our diagonals, we find that E and U must come in the same line. We can’t suppose that E comes immediately above U, because it would be a frightful great key-word that only left us with four spaces between E and U, so we must put E in one of the top three spaces of the left-hand column, like this:
e
e
e
U
Z
‘That’s not much, but it’s a beginning. Now let’s tackle X. There’s one square in which we know it can’t be: It can’t come next to U, or there would be two spaces between X and Z with only one letter to fill them, so X must come in either the third or the fourth square of the bottom line. So now we have two possible diagrams.
e
e
e
U
X
Z
e
e
e