This is from “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll, Chapter II, The Garden of Live Flowers.
We know that there were at least eight squares. We know that the pegs were probably placed one yard apart. Alice said the Red Queen, “took a ribbon out of her pocked, marked in inches, and began measuring the ground, and sticking little pegs in here and there”.
So Alice did not initially know where the pegs were but the Red Queen had a design for them or she would not have measured them in inches.
We know the Red Queen put a peg in at the end of two yards.
At the end of three yards the Red Queen was going to repeat the directions and at the end of four yards she was going to say, “Goodbye”. At the end of five yards the Red Queen would disappear.
It appears that the pegs were in a row (even though Alice said “here and there”). “The Red Queen returned to the tree, and then began slowly walking down the row.”
The Red Queen then tells us about the squares and says that “the pawn goes two squares”
The Red Queen then tells us that there are at least eight squares because on the eighth one “we shall be Queens together, and it’s all feasting and fun!”
At the end of three yards the Queen repeated the directions, “……and remember who you are”.
At the fourth peg she turned and said “goodbye”. So we know that this was the end of four yards. Yet there were at least eight squares.
So how long is each square? What is the square root, of the sum in inches of the length, of these eight squares?
This can be solved by mathematical means. But there is a greater mystery that even I cannot solve. What was in the last two squares? Were they the same size as the others? Why did the Red Queen traverse them? She told us what was either going to happen or what was in most of the squares but not the last two. In fact she does not even tell us that there are squares between the fourth and fifth peg. We do know that there was a yard between the fourth and fifth peg.
There is even a mystery at the beginning. What was in the first square? We assume it was Alice. I cannot find a clue as to what is in the second square because the Queen just passed through it but Alice did have to traverse it.
The Red Queen did have a watch, “..the Queen said, looking at her watch..” Alice’s experience in the garden hints of time travel. Carroll did play with it in other works. In The Gardener’s Song Carroll wrote;
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek.
He looked again and found it was
The middle of next week.
“The only thing I regret”, he said,
“is that it cannot speak!”
If you know the solutions to the Red Queen’s Mysteries email me a dapoets@bright.net.