To this day," I replied, "we who are descended from Ts'ui Pen execrate that monk. It was senseless to publish those manuscripts. The book is a contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts. I once examined it myself, in the third chapter the hero dies, yet in the fourth he is alive again. As for Ts'ui Pen’s other labor, his Labyrinth…” "Here is the Labyrinth," Albert said, gesturing towards a tall lacquered writing cabinet. "An ivory labyrinth!" I exclaimed. "A very small sort of labyrinth…” "A labyrinth of symbols," he corrected me. "An invisible labyrinth of time. I, an English barbarian, have somehow been chosen to unveil the diaphanous mystery. Now, more than a hundred years after the fact, the precise details are irrecoverable, but it is not difficult to surmise what happened. Ts'ui Pen must at one point have remarked, “I shall retire to write a book,” and at another point, “I shall retire to construct a labyrinth.” Everyone pictured two projects; it occurred to no one that book and labyrinth were one and the same. The Pavillion of Limpid Solitude was erected in the centre of a garden that was, perhaps, most intricately laid out; that fact might well have suggested a physical labyrinth. Ts'ui Pen died; no one in all the wide lands that had been his could find the labyrinth. The novel's confusion-confusedness, I mean, of course-suggested to me that it was that labyrinth. Two circumstances lent me the final solution of the problem-one, the curious legend that Ts'ui Pen had intended to construct a labyrinth which was truly infinite, and two, a fragment of a letter I discovered.”