Goose of Hermogenes by Allen Saddler Peter Owen Ithell Colquhoun Patrick Guinness

from the shining water, softly proclaiming it ‘The Silver Morn.’ Something made me remember the Anchorite; but if this voice were indeed his, it had become greatly etherealised. The sounds were not repeated, and their spell gradually fading, I passed on to the exhibits proper.
    The Book of Lambspring was still in my mind, and remembering its first engraved plate, I recognised that this corresponded with the first chamber; in fact, that the chamber was nothing less than a three-dimensional translation of the engraving. For the entire room, divided from the corridor by a huge pane of glass, formed a tank in which two gigantic fish of the carp family, one incandescent red, the other phosphoric blue, their snouts connected by an all-but-impalpable thread, were swimming languidly round one another in a tireless dance. The water-level reached about two-thirds of the way up the pane, and distant boats sailed across its surface, making voyages to and from the serene landscape that glowed beyond. Suddenly in the sky there appeared, as if inscribed by a lightning-flash, the gnomic words: ‘Be warned and understand truly, that two fishes are swimming in our sea.’ As I passed on, I saw all fifteen plates ultimately thus given a solid counterpart; and I noticed that many dealt with some aspect of duality.
    After this, the compartments changed in character; for it seemed as though my Uncle, hypnotised by the symbolic suits of the Taro, had gathered under their four main categories almost every conceivable object; or rather, that in an attempt to classify specimens of such objects, he had well-nigh lost himself in their diversity. For instance, in the compartment devoted to ‘Wands’ he had assembled and preserved every imaginable species of leafy branch; and not these only, but also everything that might possibly be called a ‘wand’, from an axle to a divining-rod; many varieties of walking-sticks also, pencils, brushes, feathers, hair, wings, bones and even portions of furniture, table-legs, carved pilasters, frames.
    Under ‘Swords’ he had collected innumerable objeots of metal, weapons of course in great variety, tools and pieces of machinery, though never complete machines – spokes, hat-pins, and indeed anything of a piercing or cutting nature.
    In the section for ‘Cups’ was a most heterogeneous collection of vessels in every kind of material, especially in glass or the more precious metals; but not only these, for almost anything that could hold or contain anything else was here included: cases, boxes, boats in great numbers; flowers, too, of approximately cup-like shape; diagrams and models of anatomical structures; craters, lake-bed formations, marine shells.
    According to my Uncle’s morphological studies, crazy if you will, though ardently pursued, there were heaped together under ‘Discs’ not only everything even roughly disc-shaped, including thousands of coins in many different materials and of all sizes and periods; but seemingly everything that he could lay hands on of a flat and extended form. It was before this compartment that I paused; not that it was intrinsically more interesting than its predecessors, for each of them had at first glance given me the impression of an ill-assorted junk-shop, very different from the exquisitely-finished tableaux that brought Lambspring to life; but partly, I suppose, because I had almost traversed the corridor and was nearing the final item in the display. For now, my mind attuned to my Uncle’s uncouth approach, I perceived a relationship between the many examples of Disc he had collected and the Trump Major known as the ‘Wheel’. There had been several volumes in the library treating of Taro symbolism, and from these I had gleaned enough to recognise certain correspondences. My eyes focussed themselves with special intensity upon a dart-board that had once been highly-coloured, and I picked it out of its chaotic heap and began to dust it. Soon I made out