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The Secret (a treasure hunt) / Hermann Park Time Machine
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Hermann Park Time Machine

Page history last edited by Oregonian 2 months, 2 weeks ago

The image and buttons below will allow you to compare McGovern Lake in Hermann Park at four important times:

  • in 1964, when the four trees on the NW edge of the lake were still young and easier to distinguish,
  • in 1981, as it was when Preiss hid the casque,
  • in 1989, after the locomotive and fountain had both been moved and one of the four trees was gone,
  • and in 2023, after the lake has been reshaped and the miniature train has been rerouted. 

The only three large landmarks that have remained in place over the past 40 years are the train bridge, the Miller Outdoor Theatre, and the Houston Zoo's circular Guest Services building (which can be seen at the bottom of every post-1980 aerial photo).

 

Click on the blue circle in the middle of the split image below and drag it from side to side for comparisons.  As on the Hermann Park History page, the smokestack-fountain sight line is in red and the sight line across the train bridge is in green.  The original train route is in orange and the modern train route is in blue.  To see any image in (much) higher resolution, just control-click on it and open it in a new tab. 

 

Left side:
1964 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines
1981 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines
1989 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines
2023 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines

Right side:
1964 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines
1981 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines
1989 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines
2023 aerial
... with landmarks
... with 1981 sight lines
... with landmarks and lines

 

Viewers will notice that the photos above are centered on McGovern lake, and do not include any of the Houston Zoo apart from the circular Guest Services building.  There are three reasons for that:

  1. Byron Preiss made it very clear that he did not intend The Secret to cause problems.  There is absolutely no chance that he expected searchers to hide a shovel down the leg of their pants and sneak it into any maintained facility.  (This is also why the Elizabethan Gardens in Roanoke and the fenced-off part of the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine should be considered completely off-limits.)
  2. Even if Preiss did expect people to dig in some maintained facility, there is absolutely no chance that he would want people to dig in a zoo.  It takes an amazing amount of underground plumbing and wiring to keep a zoo operating, and the pipes and wires never run in straight, predictable lines.  Any publishing company would be headed straight toward a liability lawsuit if they directed people to dig inside an operating zoo.
  3. The line in Verse 1 that says "small of scale, step across" is one of the most specific and clear instructions in all of the book.  The tracks of miniature trains are A) measured by scale and B) on the ground where people can step.  In the 40+ years since the The Secret was published, absolutely no one has ever identified anything else that meets those two criteria.  This line is very clearly intended to restrict our search to the area inside the 1980 route of the miniature train.

 

 

The full history of the McGovern lake area is given on the Hermann Park History page.

 

The proposed solution for this casque, based on the historical analysis, is given on the Image 8 Verse 1 Solution page.

 

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