MDDM Ch. 28 "what else?"

[jbor]

    [ ... ] the essence of Magic is the power of small Magickal Words, to
    work enormous physickal Wonders,-- as of coded inscriptions in Fables,
    once unlock'd to yield up Treasure past telling. [286.26]

Thus Wicks "speculate[s]" about the significance of the "message" sent via
the lead plates planted by the French at the head of each stream in the
American mid-West in the lead-up to the Seven Years War. It seems to beg the
question of what this "Treasure past telling" might be, and the irony of
Wicks's (and his creator's) singular status as story-teller is acute within
this speculation. (It also begs the question of whether such objects
actually existed.)

But it's not the only possibility mooted by the characters. George
interprets them as "Flags", the "Surveyor's equivalent of a slap from a
Glove" (286.22), while Gershom, parodying Cockney/Australian rhyming slang,
refers to them as a "Bunch of Dead Weights". (286.36) And it's Dixon who
introduces the idea of a more sinister "Electrickal Purpose", and George who
refers he and Mason back to Franklin's paranoid theory about a "Jesuit
Telegraph". (287.25)

If Pynchon's Gershom is a stand-in for either or both Sammy Davis Jr (and
therefore George = JFK, Martha = Jackie O, Franklin = Sinatra, Mason and
Dixon = Lee Marvin and Peter Lawford ... where does it end?) and one or
another Kabbalist scholar I do wonder what the "Treasure past telling" the
reader that this *is* the case might be. Just an observation.

best