Enigmatic Variations No. 1128: Unknown Destination by MynoT

Hmmm…if you have an UNKNOWN DESTINATION, it might take a long time to get ‘there’ – and so this proved for your correspondent. Every answer must be entered without one letter – wherever it occurs – and these letters make out a quotation (in Brewers) missing a crucial word, which is to be found and highlighted in the grid. The grid also contains a ‘thematic hint’ as to the word’s ‘appearance’.

I have to admit I found this a bit of a slog – albeit an enjoyable, challenging and eventually rewarding one – and with lots of return visits I used up most of the two and a half weeks available.

My initial approach was to identify the actual space available for each clue – as the enumeration gave the full clue answer length – and then to look for clashes and permutations of crossing letters – concentrating initially on answers only losing one letter. In this case then each square could usually only be one of two letters, and if a crossing clue’s two letters only had one in common, then that must be it. Which usually allowed some more of the two words to be entered before or after this. And so on, seemingly ad infinitum!

However, I couldn’t really get a decent foothold in any area, and it took a few sessions to get the grid filling up. Quite early on I got UNDERPAYMENTS, and then UNREWARDING, and mentally filed that away – could the ‘hint’ be that the missing word might be ‘under’ a word for ‘payment’, such as ‘reward’? This certainly looked more promising than the diagonals at this stage! At one point I could see ‘AT THE’ above REWARD and ‘ZOO’ below it, which had me wondering if we were going to the zoo, zoo, zoo…

Enlightenment eventually came as the omitted letters started to spell out ‘IT’S A CURIOUS BIRD…’ at the beginning and ‘MIGHT?WI?E’ at the end – mighty wide? might swipe?

I do own something that claims to be a ‘Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable’, but it doesn’t have an index, and I couldn’t find any help under BIRD or CURIOUS, so in the end a bit of Wiki-oogling gave the quotation as being from ‘The Oozlum Bird’, by W T Goodge:

‘It’s a curious bird the Oozlum, and a bird that’s mighty wise…’, continuing ‘…for it always flies tail-first, to keep the dust out of its eyes!’

A rollicking tale of life in the Outback in the late 19th century, and a mythical bird called the Oozlum Bird, which sounds like a combination of eagle, ostrich, albatross and many more. And a lad named ‘Jock McPherson’ who rides the bird to Sydney to collect some medicine, and then round the rest of the world to come home, thus saving the life of a sick child.

(A note of caution – this link is to a copy of the poem on an academic-looking website, complete with an anachronistic/politically incorrect term for the local/aboriginal people, which I don’t condone, and I am sure MynoT does not either. However it is the only e-copy I could find.)

The Oozlum Bird by W T Goodge.

I was a little confused by the presence of two ‘thematic hints’ in the grid – although the preamble only mentions one. The first hints at the location of the word, UNDER a PAYMENT (REWARD), and the other is a reference to its ‘appearance’ – the TAIL-FIRST flight of the bird, giving it as MULZOO in the grid.

(I don’t think it was necessary to turn the bird around the right way in the completed grid – I have done so above for emphasis – but we will see on Sunday when the solution is published.)

So my thanks to MynoT for a tough challenge: there were some interesting/new words to me, like SIMUL, TRAIPSES, BALNEARY, CALUMNIATIONS and TARANTASES; as well as KET and the obscure meaning of TOW in MARKET-TOWN. Along with some fairly tough clueing and the difficulty of getting reliable crossing letters, I would place this towards the harder end of the EV spectrum.

NB. I couldn’t quite explain the ‘AT’ of NIOBATE at 34A – grateful for any suggestions.