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By Root 134 0

has been assembled inside a glass bottle. The absence of documentation—in Czech or any other language—is disconcerting. Perhaps the pottery was excavated from beneath the home of a fifteenth-century count. Perhaps the china plate was once used by a Habsburg emperor, the metal stirrups by King Wenceslas himself, but there’s no way to know. Tourism is funny that way: it’s dependent on proper labeling. There is only so much time in a day and people want to make sure they see the important stuff—they haven’t traveled halfway around the globe to look at Granny Horkova’s favorite plate for serving cabbage. In the absence of information it is much safer and time efficient to move on to the next sure thing, and that’s what most people who come to Strahov do: they peer into the barred library rooms and then they leave.

The hallway’s two taxidermy cabinets face each other at one dim end of the hallway, where they are easily overlooked. Crabs, lobsters, and a turtle take up most of the space of the first cabinet. Small sharks, a crocodile, and a manta ray are among the inhabitants of the second, their arrangement reminiscent of a small-town natural history museum. The Czechs being a landlocked people, it seems reasonable to view these two cabinets as eighteenth-century precursors to the contemporary aquarium, their contents addressing intellectual limitations imposed by geography.

Twenty-first-century eyes know crabs and turtles. Presented with their familiar outlines, a twenty-first-century brain can supply the smaller details without deeper scrutiny. Strahov’s Premonstratensian monks were reputed to be a respectable bunch—celibate, honest, and hard-working. The fresco on their library’s ceiling is titled The Struggle of Mankind to Know Real Wisdom. In such a monastery, in the antechamber of one of Bohemia’s most important book collections, the instinct is to trust. And so it would be understandable to accept that the crabs are crabs; the turtles, turtles.

The turtle that dominates the first cabinet is rather handsome. Its deep-brown shell is the size of a human torso and is impressive enough to upstage the four legs protruding from it. But the legs really deserve a closer look. They are slender and serpentine and delicate and to imagine them propelling the massive shell from which they emerge is to imagine a very special turtle. The legs are covered in thick black scales the diameter of silver dollars, the scales edged with real gold, with real gold spots in their centers. The legs end in feet with slender, five-clawed toes, the kind seen on antique bathtubs.

Below the turtle are three ostrich eggs nesting inside wicker baskets. Draped over one of them is an oblong fossilized specimen. The Czech label beside this egg is one of only two attempts at exposition within the taxidermic collection or, for that matter, the entire hallway. It helpfully translates: THE JESTERKA LIZARD SUCKS OSTRICH EGGS. While the length of the fossilized body is certainly suggestive of a youngish lizard, in lieu of legs it has fins. Perhaps the bulk of each leg was broken off in the young Jesterka lizard’s struggle to suck out the insides of an egg so much larger than itself. The only other label in the collection decorates a glass jar containing a long, desiccated eel-like creature the color of bleached bone. AMERICAN SWORDFISH, the label translates.

The crown jewels of Strahov’s collection—two creatures who glare at each other from their opposing cases across the hallway—also lack proper labeling, but their striking forms beg recognition. There’s no historical evidence to support the notion that Lewis Carroll ever visited Prague but here—tucked within a quiet, overlooked corner of Strahov’s monastery, secreted among the crabs and lobsters—are a bandersnatch and a jabberwock. The flattened bird head of the yellow-eyed bandersnatch emerges without benefit of a neck from what appears to be a large, overstuffed sofa cushion fringed on two sides by a continuous fin, and ending in a tail that resembles a horseshoe crab’s. Lacking any apparent means of self-propulsion,