--- Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote: > > --- mary whalen <marewhalen at yahoo.com> wrote: > > > > --- Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> > wrote: > > > > > > S > > > P > > > O > > > I > > > L > > > E > > > R > > > > > > F > > > O > > > R > > > > > > P > > > o > > > t > > > D! > > > > > Of course, almost all Phoenixes who entered the > > Paths were dead first. > > Quite true, but we don't know that they pass 18 > tests rather > than 17. I have no real evidence for this, but it's possible that each House doesn't really have a "challenging" test. Each other House's test may be formatted to fit the nature and style of the members of the tested's House. Not all the tests were difficult. Many were simply walking along the path without leaving it or being distracted. The test equivalent to the Teckla, for example, was so easy Zerika apparently didn't even know it was a test or have to do anything extra. > Indeed, your quotation (I haven't read > LoCB, and > I'm grateful that you've been careful not to spoil > it) doesn't > say that there's an initial Phoenix test at all. > There's really nothing about Zerika's journey to spoil (that's written in LoCB). Paarfi mentions it only in the preface describing the events of the previous book (which he says was written merely at the urgings of the publisher). On page 17 (of course) of the hardback he says "it is impossible to recreate the elegant metaphorical journey, in which each of the Seventeen Houses was neatly encapsulated and symbolically transcended in a literary exploit of which only modesty prevents the full explication" in a parenthetical aside. Of course, after reading this I had to go back to the end of PotD and try to figure it out. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools