The Scroll of the Chamber, more formally the Quaerendo Invenietis, was discovered two decades ago in Carthage in a cache of documents themselves rescued from the burning of the Great Library by Aurelian, and it incidentally provides the answer. In fact, it was this answer that made the whole document credible to the faculty and in particular to the masters of alchemy at the time. It was elegant and anti-recursive: it provided a solution to the problem of infinite dissolution, and they were very impressed with it, not least because it pandered to their vanity. If the Chamber of Isis was needed to perform these legendary operations of the craft, then their failure to perform them without it was not their fault, and if the difficulty of making the Alkahest could be overcome, then their whole discipline was once again not only practical—if lacking a crucial ingredient—but also the highest field of military, theological, financial and philosophical endeavour imaginable. They went from being a fringe science to having a claim upon supremacy at the centre, and any court that could have found the Chamber would instantly have had at its disposal a host of learned men and a few women to make full use of its power.