Listen With Others

Trying to solve a Sabre?  Can’t make progress?  Mental block?

If so, then simply write, seemingly haphazardly, BLOCK in one of the Octagons.

Inspiration will then suddenly follow – perhaps it’s a Caesar Cipher, you’ll think to yourself.  [Really??  Ed.]  To test your theory, count the number of dissected squares in the overall puzzle (there are 16) and ‘add’ it to the above letters in the usual way and write the result in the same Octagon:

SABRE immediately appears, again largely clockwise, proving your Caesar Cipher theory.  Apply the same approach to the rest of the empty shapes in this puzzle ‘Wiggles’ and you are sorted.

But I’m getting ahead of myself:

Have you ever re-watched episodes of Fawlty Towers, and early on been wondering if this is the one with the Germans in, or the one where Basil is trying to put up the moose head only to be interrupted by Sybil asking him if he’s going to put up the moose head, or the one with the fire drill and the fire, or the one where Basil gets a bump on the head or the one where he is running around like a mad thing and doing ’the funny walk’, or …

… only to find that all of those happened in the same episode.  I’d go as far as suggesting that solvers may one day look back on this puzzle in a similar way: “Do you recall the Sabre that was that tessellation of the plane in octagons and overlaid squares”, or “the Sabre which intriguingly had clues called Wiggles”, or “the Sabre where the hidden creature’s name was given in both Latin (natrix natrix) and then English (grass snake)”, or “the Sabre where one of the answers had to be created by Caesar-shifting other answers to form a pair” or  …

… only to find that all of those happened in the same puzzle.

And, of course, with any work of art such as this, the artist should always sign their masterpiece, in this case using the 5 pieces required for the dissection of either the square or the octagon, naturally:

For the avoidance of doubt, I loved it!

Cheers,

Tim / Encota