He seemed to see and hear nothing of what was going on around him and to be absorbed by some depressing and
unsolved problem.
No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left
unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.
Having amused myself till a late hour with my favourite recreation of Geometry, I had retired to rest with an
unsolved problem in my mind.
Why they did not arrange to build their vaults and incubators nearer home has always been a mystery to me, and, like many other Martian mysteries,
unsolved and unsolvable by earthly reasoning and customs.
And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be
unsolved to the last.
Why Dodo, when she caught him in the china closet half an hour afterward, nearly squeezed the breath out of his little body with a tender embrace, instead of shaking him for being there, and why she followed up this novel performance by the unexpected gift of a big slice of bread and jelly, remained one of the problems over which Demi puzzled his small wits, and was forced to leave
unsolved forever.
However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go
unsolved for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy.
My mother is only astonished that you remain so long
unsolved. I believe, while the Countess G takes you for Lord Ruthven, my mother imagines you to be Cagliostro or the Count Saint-Germain.
But the
unsolved problem did not worry me so much as at another time it might have done, there were so many other things to attend to.
Yet, search as he would, the baffling mystery of the trail seemed likely to remain for ever
unsolved.
Better than another, he realized something of the
unsolved secrets of the Great Dark Continent, enormous areas of which have as yet been untouched by the foot of civilized man.
The one mystery of death, still
unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him to love and to life.