pg 83 [important work - Pale Fire Notes] "Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14)" Here the invention of Zembla may (or may not) evolve (or begin), as Kinbote translates the objects in the Goldsworth house into his fantasy. Boyd writes: "'Alphina' and 'Betty' all but embody the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, and the reversed order of daughters and letters implies a deliberate countdown, a comically confident case of family planning. But the girls' names also oddly prefigure the names of the four principals of the Zemblan royal family, in descending order of age, King Alfin, Queen Blenda, their son Charles and his queen Disa. The unique 'Alphina' especially seems to have inspired the equally unprecedented 'Alfin,' to serve as a starting point, as her name implies, for the whole Zemblan saga, and the first character Kinbote introduces in his first long Zemblan note is indeed Alfin the Vague" (Magic of Artistic Discovery, 97).

JM: Brian Boyd's observation about the comic countdown of the Goldsworth girl's names and, as he didn't fail to notice, its translation into the Zemblan royal family's - which should be still open to additions had Kinbote produced an heir, deals with a succession of descendants and ascendants. It occurs to me that the word "descendant" might be a playful clue in this process, should we consider Kinbote as its Zero degree (Gradus, again?) for the series of his "ascendants."

An additional curiosity, obtained from wikipedia: the "Alph River is a small river of Antarctica, running into Walcott Bay, Victoria Land. It is located in an ice-free region at the west of the Koettlitz Glacier, Scott Coast. The Alph emerges from Trough Lake, and flows through Walcott Lake, Howchin Lake, and Alph Lake. It ends in a sub-glacial flow beneath Koettlitz Glacier to McMurdo Sound.[1] The river was named by Thomas Griffith Taylor of the Terra Nova Expedition of 1911–13, who explored the portion north of Pyramid Trough. He took the name from the opening passage in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem, Kubla Khan, as the stream continues north a considerable distance under moraine and ultimately subglacially beneath Koettlitz Glacier to the Ross Sea. The nearby Xanadu Hills are named from the same poem." The entire set about a river that "flows subglacially" fits with Brian Boyd's complementary observation in relation to Judge Goldsworth's wardrobe and the secret passage, also extracted from the Pale Fire Notes:

"See also pg 295 where K hides the manuscript in the Goldsworth closet, and exits "as if it had been the end of a secret passage that had taken me all the way out of my enchanted castle and right from Zembla to /this/ Arcady." Boyd writes, "has the Goldsworth closet somehow expanded in Kinbote's mind to become the Zemblan closet leading to the secret passage that makes possible the King's escape?" (ibid, 98).The "reversed order" also makes me think of the "reversed footprints" (pg 34, 78)**.

* "According to Wilson, "the chief pride of the magician is derived not from exploiting mechanical toys but from putting something over on his audience.[...].andanyone who has deluded an audience into believing that he was doing something which he had merely suggested to their minds, while he was actually doing something else that they were perfectly in a position to notice, will always have a more dubious opinion of the value of ordinary evidence." (Cf. Edmund Wilson's review of John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion, praised by Nabokov in his letter of March 26,1944, addressed to the reviewer. Cf. The Nabokovian,64, 2010,p.19).

** The association the Online annotator brought forward, in connection to the "reversed footprints," is amusing. It indicates Sherlock Holmes, just brought up by A.Sklyarenko in a different context, and also my note in "The Nabokovian" that has been mentioned in the previous footnote. Nevertheless I don't see a true Nabokovian connection between the two "reversed orders" but... who knows? .