----- Original Message -----

Subject: Re: verse 1 the secret

Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 12:58:49 EDT

In a message dated 5/18/04 12:06:52 PM, wilhouse writes:

<thx wilhouse>

there is a treasure in houston. that's all i can tell you.

  Before he died in 2005, Byron Preiss, the developer and editor of The Secret, had an e-mail exchange with a member of the Q4T website who goes by the username of "wilhouse."  The e-mail explicitly confirmed that there was a casque in Houston. 

(For the sake of clarity, the words written by Preiss are shown in blue text.  The snippet he included from wilhouse's original email is inside the < and > brackets.)

The clues up to this point make it very clear that we are looking at a treasure location in the Houston metropolitan area.

2) Cold as glass

  Downtown Houston has many tall, glass-covered skyscrapers that give it a cold, "fortress" appearance.  If these buildings are the "fortress" to the north, it would make sense to look south of the downtown area for an place where the treasure could be buried.

  Anyone examining a map of public parks in the Houston area would likely notice the strong resemblance between the two shapes shown on the left.  The column topped with a sphere is a very good match for the rectangular reflection pool beside the circular Sam Houston monument in Hermann Park.  (The image even makes the comparison more obvious by giving the shape the same orientation as the map and by putting the north star at the top.)

  Hermann Park is almost due south of the downtown Houston area and it is at the southern tip of Montrose Blvd, just two blocks south of the Glassell School of Art, so it works with either interpretation of the "fortress north" clue from the verse.

3) Friendship south

Photo by Flickr user Xiquinhosilva.  Used under a Creative Commons license.

  The connection to this particular park is also indicated by the verse.  In 1981 Hermann Park had a "Taipei Friendship Pavilion" that was a bicentennial gift from the City of Taipei to the City of Houston in 1976. 

  Notably, there were two such pavilions given to U.S. cities in that year as part of the same project.  One pavilion went to Houston and plays a role in this puzzle.  The other pavilion went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where it appears to be involved in the solution to the Image 1 puzzle.

  At this point both the early lines of the verse and the prominent features of the image are steering us to Hermann Park.  But the park itself is enormous.  The representations of the camel and the rhino are there to narrow it down.  We should head to the entrance of the Houston Zoo.

4) Take your task

5) To the number

6) Nine eight two

  The verse confirms the same directions as the image.  An antique Southern Pacific steam engine numbered "982" was on display in Houston's Hermann Park for half a century, and these lines of the verse are a very strong reference to that.  The engine was moved around a few times before it left the park in 2007, but in 1981 it was located at the southeast corner of the lake beside the entrance to the zoo.  Most of the engine and its tender were painted black, but the "nose" of the engine, where the front smokestack was located, was painted a brilliant silver and was pointing to the west.  (For full details on how we reconstructed the locomotive's location, see the Hermann Park history page.)

(Image from SteamLocomotive.com; photo credit: Brian Flint)

Here's a large-scale map showing us the steps that have brought us to the southern edge of McGovern Lake.

At this point in the search, a treasure hunter following the clues would be expected to get out of the car and start a walking tour of the park. The starting point for the tour is Engine 982, beside the entrance to the Houston Zoo.  (All features on this and the following maps are shown as they appeared in 1981.)

8) No lion fears

  In the 1970's and 80's the Houston Zoo had a series of water fountains shaped like lions.  We don't have any definite evidence of placement, but it seems very possible that one of the fountains would be just west of Engine 982 outside the circular Visitors Services building for the zoo.

  (This interpretation is, admittedly, only a guess and will probably never be confirmed unless someone discovers an old photo taken in exactly the right spot.)

We are now west of Engine 982, at the southern edge of the lake.

  In 1981 there was a fountain near the western edge of the lake that shot a single column of water straight up.  (The wind probably blew it to one side so it "veered.")

  Preiss is directing our attention to the fountain as we pass by because the view from this spot (in 1981) would have given us a powerful visual confirmation that we were in the right spot.

  The Miller Outdoor Theatre in Hermann Park has a distinctive design, with two dark, triangular sides that spread upwards to meet in a ridge with an upper point at the front.  The dark area under the turban of the man in Image 8 seems to represent the same shape.

  Standing at the southwest corner of the lake and looking to the northeast over the fountain in 1981, one would have been able to see the top of the outdoor theatre over the trees.  The similarity to the image would have told the viewer that he or she was on the right track.

We are now at the southwestern corner of the lake, looking to the northeast over the top of the fountain.  The Miller Outdoor Theater is the purple shape in the upper-right corner of this map.

  Hermann Park has a miniature railroad that takes passengers on a loop through the area.  The train was installed in 1957 and was built to match one of the rail transport modelling scales.  This line is almost certainly telling us to continue our route around the lake and to step across the tracks for that train. 

  The current train route goes all around Hermann Park, but the route in 1981 was much shorter (see the thin grey line in the map above).  If the tracks are a boundary that we should only cross once, the loop formed by the train route at the northwestern corner of the lake significantly reduces our search area.

  This line is crucial.  The mention of "perspective" suggests we need to move into a place where we see objects positioned in the same perspective as in Image 8.  But standing in this spot, just northwest of the lake, a searcher in 1981 would only have 5 things to position:

• the trees,
• the train tracks,
• the lake,
• the fountain, and
• Engine 982.

The lower right corner of Image 8 is filled with a large blue area that could represent a lake.  And coming up out of the lake there is a swirling, vertical shape that could reasonably represent a fountain.  But the shadow cast by the fountain appears to be the smokestack of a steam locomotive.  Most of Engine 982 was black and would have blended into shadows of the woods, but the smokestack was silver and would have been a bright and visible landmark across the lake.  (To get a sense of the enormous size and visibility of the Engine 982 silver smokestack, see this photo.) 

Putting all of these clues together, it seems reasonable that we should be trying to line up the fountain in the lake with the smokestack of Engine 982 on the far side.

We are now at the northwest corner of the lake near where the train crosses a small inlet on a bridge.  We have stepped across the tracks of the miniature train and we have lined up the fountain in the lake with the smokestack of Engine 982.  This progress puts us in the middle of a small group of four trees.

13) In the center of four alike

14) Small, split,

  The directions tell us to step across the tracks for the miniature train and then find four similar ground-level objects, and the most probable "four alike" items in this area would be the four trees where we are standing.  It's possible that they were relatively young ("small") and had breaking branches from neglect ("split").  Sure enough, in 1981 there were four trees forming a tight square exactly where the puzzle predicted we should find them.

The 1981 photo is so blurred that one might question whether there were really four separate trees in the spot.  There seem to be two dark ovals on the north side and two lighter-colored ovals on the south side.  One might suspect that the north ovals are shadows and the south ovals trees (or vice-versa). But compare the layout to the much sharper 1989 aerial.  Three of the trees are still there and are slightly larger, but the southeast tree is gone.  This proves that there were four trees in 1981 (because the upper-right oval would have disappeared along with the lower right oval if the pair only showed one tree and a shadow).

For a tantalizingly brief glimpse of our three trees, see the 7:07 mark in this 1989 home movie posted on YouTube.  Just as the train makes the bend to run northeast (heading toward the bridge), the camera pulls back from a close-up of the Warwick Towers Condos and gives a momentary shot of the three remaining trees before crossing to show the lake on the other side of the train.

15) Three winged and slight

  The aerial photo from 1964 (below) shows the same cluster of four trees beside the train tracks.  The southeast tree (the one closest to the train tracks) was fairly large, but the other three were small ("slight") suggesting that they had been recently planted.  If the new trees were left largely unattended, with no extra water or care, they would still have been significantly smaller than the southeast tree in 1981 when Preiss visited.

  Three of the trees are gone now, but the northeast tree still exists.  It is a post oak (Quercus stellata).  The blades of the leaves (shown below) have a lobe on each side of the midrib that sticks out like a wing.  Each leaf has the outline of an airplane or a bird in flight.  If the three newly-planted trees (NE, NW, & SW) were all the same species and the fourth tree (SE) was a different kind of oak, one would have "four alike... three winged and slight."

  As mentioned earlier, there were five landmarks that Preiss could expect us to put into perspective to find the right spot.  The lake, fountain, and locomotive smokestack can be put into a straight line to get us to the grove of four trees.  But what about the train tracks?

  Most of the 1981 miniature train route consisted of curves and loops, but there was exactly one spot where the tracks ran perfectly straight.  Someone looking down that particular stretch of track would see a perfect example of one-point perspective, where parallel lines seem to converge in the distance.  It's the same effect that we see in Image 8 when the lines of the brickwork converge in the distance.  And that one place where the tracks ran straight and where someone could have seen that form of perspective on the train route in 1981 was at the end of the train bridge over the inlet at the northwest edge of the lake.

The aerial photo below shows the relevant landmarks as they were positioned in 1981. (Positions of the tree trunks were determined by other aerial photos taken in subsequent winters, when the leaves were gone.)

Orange - the route of the miniature train, including the straight bridge over the inlet

White - trunks and canopies of the four landmark trees (labeled by compass position)
Red - the line of sight through the fountain to the locomotive smokestack

Green - the line of sight across the train bridge

We know that Byron Preiss took photos at each casque hiding spot and gave those images to John Jude Palencar to be incorporated into the paintings.  In Houston Preiss would have been standing beside the NW tree and he would have been facing northeast with a straight view across the train bridge.  Here's how Palencar incorporated that image into his painting.  The green and red lines are the same as in the map above.  Note how Palencar incorporated the receding train tracks and cross-ties into one-point perspective.

What this means is that Image 8 forms an abstract map of the spot where the casque was buried :

• The blue area at lower right = the lake.
• The checkered area at lower left = the train rails and crossties going off into the distance over the train bridge.
• The curving "fishbone" pattern at lower center = the 1981 route of the miniature train.
• The star at the upper left = the north star, telling us we're facing northeast.
• The fellow with the distinctive peaked hood = the Miller Outdoor Theatre, which would be off to the right from the line of sight across the train bridge.
• The whirlwind with the "trainspout" shadow falling to the right = the fountain that lines up with Engine 982 along a line going to the right (southeast) from where we're standing.
• The central pillar = the NE tree of the four.
• The position of the jewel, down and to the right of the central pillar = our casque location, on the diagonal between the NE tree and the SW tree.

Here's a Google Street View of the same spot (taken in December of 2014).  As above, we've highlighted the line of sight over the train bridge in green and the line of sight connecting the fountain and the front of Engine 982 in red.  The casque burial spot (represented in Image 8 by the gem) is below and to the right of the NE tree (the pillar in the painting).  To match up perfectly with the perspective in Image 8, Preiss probably stood slightly back and a few feet to the left when he took his photo.

  These lines are a modification of a sentence from Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, written by Herman Melville in 1852.  The original sentence is "What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event — the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather."

  This, then, is our powerful confirmation that we are in the right place — standing in a grove of trees in Hermann Park not far from an outdoor sculpture called the Atropos Key.  The quote from the book is talking about the role of fate in our lives, and it is followed by a reference to "those Three Weird Ones, that tend Life's loom" (i.e., the three Fates).  And the oldest of the three Fates was... Atropos!

  Just imagine how incredibly satisfying it must have been for Byron Preiss to find the perfect, obscure, literary reference that ties everything in this puzzle together!
Consider:
- The quote from Herman Melville ties in with Hermann Park.
- The reference to the role of the three Fates ties in with the Atropos Key.
- The reference to "the falling of a leaf" ties in with the grove of trees where the casque was buried.

(Very cleverly done, Byron Preiss!  We salute you.)

22) A whistle sounds.

  The final lines tie in the Melville connection and describe what one can see from the treasure spot.  Moby Dick, Melville's best-known work, is basically a long story of sailors watching the ocean and shouting out when they see the spout of a whale.

  Looking back across the lake to where our walk started, we can see such a spout (the fountain) now lined up with Engine 982 (a steam train that would have had a whistle).  And, of course, we can hear the whistle of the miniature train as it makes its loop.

Here's a closer view of the hiding spot.  The train bridge is still in the same place, although most of the other features have changed.  Of the four original trees, SE was the first to go and a path was installed directly over where it once stood.  The NW tree disappeared soon after that.  The SW only disappeared around 2014 and there's still a depression in the ground, allowing us to find the SW-NE line.  If Preiss buried the casque where the SW-NE line intersected the NW-SE line, the burial spot is now under or beside a very hard path.  Recovery is going to be a challenge.

Final Location: 29°43'03.9"N 95°23'31.7"W

(Latitude: 29.717751, Longitude: 95.392138)