Warning Signs

{Photo by rocketlass.}

1 Page 423 (of 765) of The Box from Japan (1932) by Harry Stephen Keeler offers a challenge to the intrepid mystery reader:

Stop!

THIS IS A CHALLENGE TO YOU. At this point all the characters and clues have been presented. It should now be possible for you to solve the mystery.

CAN YOU DO IT?

Here's your chance to do a little detective work on your own--a chance to test your powers of deduction. Review the mystery and see if you can solve it at this point.

Remember! THIS IS A SPORTING PROPOSITION, made in an effort to make the reading of mystery stories more interesting to you. So--don't read any further. Reach your solution now. Then proceed.

2 Page 248 (of 352) of Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop's Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983, translated into English in 2007 by Anne McLean) delivers a gentle warning to the reader who may have been too blithely enjoying the pair's tales of their thirty-day sojourn on the Paris-Marseilles freeway:

Reading these pages
has it not occurred to you
at least once, oh complicit
and patient reader, to wonder whether
we haven't been hidden in some
hotel room in la Villette since
the 23rd of May?

In the cases of both books--full of ignorance in the former, trust in the latter--I ignored the warnings and plunged boldly, not to say carelessly, ahead. And was rewarded.

The cats have demonstrated remarkable patience with the absence of my lap.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

From Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983), by Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop

On one side a line of big black ants climbs up to disappear along hte first branch on the left, while another, less disciplined line descends after a trip that doesn't appear to have afforded them any provisions, unless they'd eaten them where they found them. And what intention guides this blue beetle who advances in a slow spiral like a Buddhist monk on the path to revelation? He disappears behind the trunk to reappear a few centimetres higher; at this pace he'll arrive at the top in two hours and perhaps find illumination. A dragonfly has just discovered an enthralling game: she leaves the open air to dart among the foliage, overcoming obstacles, veering off to one side and then the other while she goes up and down through the levels of the leaves, amusing hersef by multiplying an itinerary that seems to have no purpose other than to make sure she never errs in her distance calculations.

It's good to be back home, my long stretch of too much travel finally over. I enjoy traveling, but I think for a while I'll follow Xavier de Maistre's example and stick to the traveling I can do inside my home, or at most inside my city. Julio Cortazar and Carol Dunlop also offer a good model, their thirty-day trip along the ten hours of the Paris-to-Marseille autoroute a reminder of what discoveries a fresh eye can coax from familiar surroundings. Perhaps Chicago can yield some similar mid-winter surprises.

But even that seems too ambitious for now; today I intend to sit with a cat on my lap and read and watch the birds, with no more solid plans than those displayed by the tiny snowflakes rollercoastering around on the breeze outside.

From Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

This parallel highway we're looking for perhaps only exists in the imagination of those who dream of it; but if it exists (it's too soon to make categorical affirmations, and nevertheless one would say we're there and have been for the last twenty-four hours; let the skeptical reader think, before denying reality to this new route by eliminating the "perhaps" form the phrase, that maybe we'll disappear with it; may he have patience then, at least wait until we've been able to gather the evidence), it doesn't just involve a different physical space but also another time. Cosmonauts of the autoroute, like interplanetary travellers who observe from afar the rapid aging of those who remain subject to the laws of terrestrial time, what are we going to discover when we got at camel speed after so many trips in airplanes, subways, trains? . . . Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, says Julio. The other path, which is, in any event, the same one.

{Photo by rocketlass.}