Looking Glass Hall -- a great one-room building designed to house a single (multiple) image -- has been so completely demolished (the West wall and ceiling gone without a trace, the North facing wall -- where the portrait would have hung -- a ragged line of rubble, as are the East and South) that even its true original height, breadth and depth are points of hot dispute among scholars and chroniclers. Skirmishes break out at academic conferences regularly, an ongoing war of paper, email, text message and other weapons of communication.

Some of the wood fragments and shards of grass in the rubble about the North wall might have been from the frame and glass casing on the portrait of the Maximum Leader. Fragments of photographic paper have been rescued in a futile effort to reconstruct the original image, lost to us due to a universal elimination of the once-so-plentiful reproductions -- every household had one -- in the years immediately following the ouster from power and summary execution. None of the fragments is enough to reconstruct reliably so much as a single feature, though some still shiver at the sight of them as if they recognized little slivers of incarnate evil. Others think he wasn't so evil as all that. Oral recollections of the M.L.'s appearance abound, but contradict one another in almost every detail. Partly from written records and partly from oral recollections, which on this point achieve a surprising unanimity, it is possible to reconstruct with some conviction the pattern of looking glasses set up to reprise the dominating image on the North facing wall: a full-length portrait, twice life size (which some say made it the height of a reasonably tall man, others more nearly a giant--bear in mind every witness at first hand is between seventy five and a hundred ten years of age. Also this portrait was somewhat above sight level, which could have distorted people's impression of its size.)

Two glasses each were set up by the East and West facing wall, looking directly back at the portrait, each canted at an angle that allowed full capture of the original image. The distance between seems to have been enough for visitors to walk about comfortably, studying the original image and the four duplicates (in two tiers of two) facing it directly -- not so comfortably perhaps, since from every angle you'd be both facing the portrait and feeling its eyes bore into you from the back -- and from most angles at least one of the images would be gazing at you sideways as well. It made you well with something more than pride if survivor testimony is to be believed. Tours were rigorously scheduled for a reason.

The mirror on the South wall, on a parallel sight line with the portrait, was intended as another straightforward reflection, and because of the height at which the portrait was hung, gallery visitors wouldn't have cut across the reflected image; however the great portraits hung back to back at the centre of the hall did interfere, which at first the Maximum Leader took as a great personal affront, until he realized that it was his own planned image that was affronting him. The simplest solution would have been to hang a matching portrait on the South wall, but the M.L.'s preferred solution seems in retrospect wasteful of material and human resources, though unquestionably a stunning technical achievement -- its execution delayed the opening of Looking Glass Hall by a little over six years. The M.L. by all reports was a thunderous rapper of fingers on tables in his impatience. The solution was to embed a series of tiny mirrors in the walls and available space on the ceiling, each of which provided one mosaic detail of what, fully assembled in the mirror, became a seamless reflection on the South wall of its counterpart image to the North. The scheme and its execution was admirably grandiose, but there were those who voiced the opinion, from the comparative safety of exile, that visions as comprehensive could be found in every wing of any state-sponsored asylum.

The mirrors that ran almost the full length of the Hall, suspended on sturdy steel wires, were referred to by the M.L. affectionately as his Picassos -- he had an extensive private collection of this artist's work. (To this day there's heated debate in artistic and political circles over whether this attribution was strictly correct; were they true Picassos or more nearly Braques? The point this oft-times raging debate turns on to me seems almost uniquely moot, considering that neither the images nor any photographic representations of them have survived to the present day -- perhaps an aesthetic judgment delivered by History herself.)

The mirror facing north from the centre was tinted so as to give its collage of overlapping perspectives a blue-red cast; the south facing centrepiece had a blue-green tint. The intent was to heighten the monumentality while lessening the photographic realism of what were referred to at the time as "paintings in silvered glass". (Those colours it's said were the ones, to varying degrees depending on the cast of light and the day, that came in later years to dominate the Maximum Leader's complexion.)

It may be that the embedded mirrors along the walls and ceiling were more intended to build up the jagged surging multi-faced texture of these than the unity-without-a-seam of the South mirror. They almost certainly contributed to the well-attested fact that these images never stabilized into a single settled form, which the M.L. at first responded to with fury, promising to execute those responsible, but soon came to insist had been his intent all along. History is silent as to whether in the interval mulling this over, he did execute any of those he deemed responsible.

Two looking glasses each were set up by the East and West facing wall, looking directly back at the South facing mirror, each canted at an angle that allowed full capture of the secondary image. The distance between seems to have been enough for tours to walk about uncomfortably, studying the reflection and the four duplicates (in two tiers of two) -- but this set of images must have been compromised as well in the catastrophe that overtook the facade of the South facing image.

Cracks developed, as had been predicted some years before, in the elaborate construct of the mirror mosaic. These the Maximum Leader, some say in an act of heroic defiance, at first ignored and later celebrated as an accurate allegorical representation of the trials and tumults he'd overcome in the service of his people, which had left him patched and cracky perhaps but by no means broken. (It was silently acknowledged even then by his inner circle, and shortly thereafter openly avowed, that the trials and tumults were way ahead on points.) A famine (by wide traditional consensus) was ravaging countryside and city alike in those years; persistent drought didn't help (rainfall indices worldwide were at near record lows): from what vital projects could money and work hours be siphoned? where would additional police and militia be found even to replace casualties and desertions, let alone continue to put down fresh riots carried on by an already-mutinous population? A simple solution ,well within even the straited means of an embattled economy, was proposed: replace the mosaic image with its widening fault lines by a portrait on the South wall exactly duplicating the one already hanging.

But the days seemed long past when the M.L. could grasp a simple solution. On the one hand he stumbled and faltered at the most mechanical and repetitious acts of governance and protocol, hesitating to ink his signature on necessary emergency legislation, shunning those public officials he should have cultivated and vice versa; on the other hand he was working out progressively more baroque schemes for the subjugation of the known universe. So it's said at least; no official document of this kind has come down to us intact, only suggestive fragments.