Malenkai wrote (Mar 01, 1997):

ceremoniously spake in tongues the golden frog (to me via the Amulet):

"dk jqigkvcdcv jgogbqtvbk jqigkvcdquv bqtvbk jqigkvcdcv dk dquv
jgogbqtvbk jqigk ugk dquv dcv jqigk bqtvbk dquv jgogbqtvbk jgogtgvbk"

unmiraculously treasure of processing chips shall you find
unless misdirectionally led you have been

breadbox wrote (Apr 02, 1997):

3. Igel urre-ak Euskara hitzegin daiteke?

(Boy, these debates sure do attract the weirdos, don't they?) Why don't you ask the Golden Frog that instead of me? Like *I* could answer that. Zeroa bat bi hiro lau bortz sei zazpi zortzi bederatzi, that's all the Basque I know.

Malenkai wrote (Apr 03, 1997):

ceremoniously spake in tongues the golden frog:
"bmm j dbo tbz jt uibu csfbecpy, zpvs botxfs xbt bnbajoh"
unmiraculously treasure not of Jara shall you find
unless misdirectionally led you have been

breadbox wrote (May 03, 1997):

I am creating a trinket, worth A$50, called Hubert Feathers. Hubert Feathers are small, soft down from an unknown bird. They are said to bless their owner with good timing, and it is believed that whoever possesses them is most likely to win a contest of speed.

I am also burying the Hubert Feathers.

breadbox wrote (May 03, 1997):

> I guess game custom indicates that breadbox should indicate how he
> did it.

It's a twisted tale. I don't think I would have even looked for it if somebody else hadn't figured it out first - and I don't even know who that person is (was?).

I have always had rotten luck with Malenkai's treasures, so I don't pursue them too far anymore. When this one was buried, there was no map accompanying the announcement, so I made no attempt to follow it up. What caused me to look back at it was the last Presidential Debate (which I participated in). Somebody submitted the question: "Igel urre-ak Euskara hitzegin daiteke?" I recognized Euskara as being the Basque word for Basque. Curious as to what it said, I poked around on the web until I found a brief Basque-English vocabulary. With it I was able to obtain a partial translation: "Frog golden Basque speak ***?" Guessing that the missing word meant something like "does" or "why does", I composed my answer along those lines. One of the things I said in reply was "Zeroa bat bi hiro lau bortz sei zazpi zortzi bederatzi, that's all the Basque I know." (These are the digits zero through nine.)

After the debate was over, I hunted around on the Treasures page for Golden Frog statements, but everything I found was encoded English. So I set it aside and forgot about it.

Some time later, while futilely pursuing /dev/joe's treasure, I was looking through the Treasure page again, and discovered that the Golden Frog had responded to my Debate answer. This got my curiosity running again. Eventually, I found the clues and guesses to Treasure 132, wherein the Golden Frog was quoted as saying:

 "dk jqigkvcdcv jgogbqtvbk jqigkvcdquv bqtvbk jqigkvcdcv dk dquv
 jgogbqtvbk jqigk ugk dquv dcv jqigk bqtvbk dquv jgogbqtvbk jgogtgvbk"

Having finally learned some of the habits of the Golden Frog, I was able to tinker with this until I got something pronounceable:

 "bi hogeitabat hemezortzi hogeitabost zortzi hogeitabat bi bost
 hemezortzi hogei sei bost bat hogei zortzi bost hemezortzi hemeretzi"

I recognized several of the words as being one of the ten digits, but got no farther after that. (I wasn't exaggerating when I said that that was the only Basque I knew.) My little vocab list was no help. Since whoever submitted that Debate question obviously knew more Basque than I, I figured that I wasn't going to be beating them to this Treasure - especially if *they* hadn't figured it out yet. Once again, I set it aside....

I returned to it later, though, and it finally occurred to me that perhaps the entire thing was only numbers, and the words I didn't recognize were numbers higher than nine. Guessing that the numbers went from 1 to 26, indicating the alphabet, this allowed me to deduce the prefixes for 10 and 20. Sure enough, the numbers spelled out "bury hubert feathers". Since I had been considering burying a treasure anyway, this provided the perfect opportunity. And so I did.

Malenkai wrote (May 03, 1997):

> Somebody submitted the question: "Igel urre-ak Euskara hitzegin
> daiteke?" I recognized Euskara as being the Basque word for Basque.
> Curious as to what it said, I poked around on the web until I found
> a brief Basque-English vocabulary. With it I was
> able to obtain a partial translation: "Frog golden Basque speak ***?"
> Guessing that the missing word meant something like "does" or "why
> does", I composed my answer along those lines.

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