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The sign &, today so poorly understood, is in Portuguese usually known as the commercial "and" and is even part of the computer keyboard. Research into the verses of the Centuries to discover how the author used this & and the "equivalent" et, reveals its rigid application: in those hundreds of verses from the 16th century, the et only exists at the beginning of the lines while the & only appears in the inside. We do not know if this point has already been studied in the hundreds of works on the Centuries.
To better understand this sign, there's nothing like starting with the dictionary. In "Le Petit Larousse Illustré - 1996", et is a conjunction indicating a connection between two words or two propositions of the same function and expressing addition, opposition or consequence. And according to the same dictionary, the "&" is only a typographical sign representing the word "et". The first is a synonym of the second. It does not tell us if there is any slight difference between the two. The reason behind the old need for this duplication has therefore been lost. And if there was no significant difference at the time that the Centuries were written, its use would not have been justified. Aesthetics seems to be insufficient reason. Therefore, at that time this sign must have had another tone or a somewhat different meaning that faded away over the centuries.
What was its technical name, its origin, its value in the writings of that time? As far as we were able to discover through the English language, the ampersand (&) - as this is its name today - reaches us from very far in time. Richard A. Firmage in "The Alphabet Abecedarium" (Bloomsbury - 2000) explains, although in a somewhat confusing manner: "It is said to originate in the close to 500 Tironian Notes of the stenography system of Marcus Tiro (63 AC), slave of Cicero." According to William Mason, it is a cross between the letters e and t of the Latin word et (and). This et in its ancient form, , distinctively contains the two letters. This current name of the sign in English is the abbreviated form of its meaning "and per se and…" meaning "and by itself, which is and".
We could perhaps freely translate this last expression into "so and so, by himself and so and so", as we understand it in the name of a company. In fact, the ampersand of the English language is practically universal in the European languages closer to us, such as Spanish, Italian and German. It appears in Portuguese dictionaries without a translation and does not exist in the Dicionário da Academia published a few months ago in Portugal. The notorious exception in its name is in French, where it is called the Esperluète or Esperluette, a word which etymology we were unable to determine.
Therefore, et being the link between two words or two propositions of the same function, expressing addition, opposition or consequence, as the dictionary says, we can deduce that in old times the function of the & was complementary in the sense of two different and autonomous things (de per se, as we used to learn some decades ago in Portugal), but necessary to express a complex idea or set of ideas. And this is the meaning generally understood in the Centuries, although not the only one. Within this line of reasoning, what is the possible difference between this geographic five & forty? One of the numbers represents a line, the other an area. From the values, we easily understand the five as area and the forty as a line. The first line of the verse would therefore be explained as follows: "In the area comprised by parallels five degrees apart, centred on the line of forty degrees, the sky will burn", identical to "Between 37º 30' 00'' and 42º 30' 00'' the sky will burn."
And we say centred on and not from the line of 40º to the North, for two reasons: the first has to do with a certain logical feeling that tells us that the function of the sign "&" is to establish a kind of balance between the two connected parts; the second is directly related with the events (see map): all of the action takes place in an area almost limited by two parallels five degrees apart and centred on parallel 40º. It is on parallel 40º that Shanksville is located, the small town south of which flight 93 crashed, only about 2 km north of line 40º 00' 00''. We do not know the exact point of the crash but it must have been very close to 40º.
And ciel bruslera - The sky will burn (the rest of the 1st line) does not mean fires but the flames coming out of the exahust nozzles of the various planes flying in irregular patterns.

2nd line - Feu approcher de la grand cité neufve

"Fire to approach the great new city" - This line does not present difficulties in its interpretation. Planes probably come near New York, the great new city in the interior of New York State. But is this line as simple as that? And is there anything indicating the name New York in the text?
We have at least one word (approcher) that stands out from the rest of the line. The verb tense is incorrect. It should be "approchera" as in V-80, so as to agree with "bruslera" in the 1st line, "sautera" in the 3rd line and "voudra" in the 4th. In fact, we have examples of this verb in the correct tense in the following lines:

I-16 - "approche"
II-32 - "S'approchera"
IV-91 - "n'approchera"
V-80 - "approchera"

In a different direction, let us look at the etymology of York. We have to go to the ancient English names of York and Yorkshire. At the origin of York was the most powerful and numerous of the British tribes. In short, in 79 DC, Agricola conquered and founded Eboracum or Eburacom (similar to Ebura = Évora, in Portugal, known as "a Branca" (the White) probably because of the word "ebur=ivory"), which became the centre of Roman military domain in the islands. At the beginning of the 7th century, the ancient Roman capital became the capital of the reign of Northumbria with the name Eoforwic.