Isaak Bickerstaff. Email: aleixgordo@hotmail.com Lives in: a house next to the University of Ex. Occupation: Student of the University of Ex Comments: "After visiting Brobdignac and Blefuscu, Umbagollah seemed to be the destiny port of my travel. I found what I was looking for, a place to be in a crowd of freethinkers, open-minded and comprehensible people like me. I wanted to know more about university's duty, I loved puppets and I wanted to know more...Up to now I haven't beginned tha first class but I hope I'll feel realised." Isaak lives in a set of chambers in one of the houses that burst off the sides of the university like roughly bulging tumours. He shares the house with Wallace Bruise, a student who specialises in Connections, (that is, drawing lines of meaning between events that are separated by time and space. Perhaps a mapmaker in Ex today has the same last name as one of the original inhabitants of Gum Gooloo who happened to fall down a crevasse in the Two Shows Mountains and die, and one day that mapmaker finds himself drawing a map which turns out to have the same contours as that crack) young Pham-Duy Mousewater who concentrates his studies on muscles and bones and Thursten Ben Boxhoop who is looking at the creation of plays. There are also two women who go by the names of Ulrike and Loreen and flit in and out together at odd times like butterflies, but no-one is sure what they study.