From: m.driussi@genie.com
Subject: (whorl) puzzles
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 97 03:14:00 GMT


[Posted from Whorl, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]

Reply:  Item #1349908 from WHORL@LISTS.BEST.COM@INET#

Lasrach,

I've been puzzling over the numerals in the Seal of Pas for a few years
now and have yet to come to any conclusion, however tenuous.  Even
numerology doesn't reveal much.  As you say, it could be an expiration
date.  Or it could be an inventory.  Or something in "chem language"
that says "Seal of Pas" or something else entirely.  Do the numbers go
from left to right or from top to bottom?  (When Sand is being
repaired, he speaks in two-digit codes . . . )  One big barcode.

Xury,

Chenille is a plant.  In one of the botany books I've plowed through
I saw a listing for a Chenille plant, but I'm not sure if it was the
one also known as burning cattail.  There were no pictures.  Wolfe says
that the flowers of this burning cattail are raspberry in color.

FWIW, yesterday I finally found scleroderma the puffball.  Yep.
On the zoological front I'm still looking for Oosik and Mattak,
though.  And Mamelta, presumably botanical, is still a puzzler.

vizcacha,

"Aye wade leek tow seep they wart are warts Talk sets thud yaw
thanks ere nut royal warts!"

Everybody,

Anybody out there got a medieval/renaissance reference book giving
the language of plants?  It may be presented in the form of a
spellbook for sympathetic herbal magic, or something like that.

=mantis=

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