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Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships Hints
What do I do with the hourglasses?
1 of 13: This is a nasty puzzle, and you should expect to have to try three or four times before you get it, even when you know how. And you only get three tries before Nancy meets a horrible death, so you'll want to save your game before you even start. Read all the way to the end of this hint for a step-by-step.
2 of 13: First, take the key resting against the Humilidad hourglass. Does that look familiar?
3 of 13: El Toro drew a picture of it on page 7 of his journal. He says, "What a blessing it would be for the sands of time to run out for all at the exact same time." That tells you your goal here --
4 of 13: -- to get all the hourglasses to run out at exactly the same time. That's going to be difficult, since they all have different amounts of sand in them and run at different speeds.
5 of 13: El Toro has given you another clue on page 7. Did you notice that some of the letters on this page are darker than others?
6 of 13: If you pull them out, they are H, G, C, P, T, C, and D. This tells you the order you need to turn the hourglasses --
7 of 13: -- Humilidad, Generosidad, Castidad, Paciencia, Templanza, Caridad, and Diligencia. Okay, well, that's some help.
8 of 13: But if you flip the hourglasses in that order, you'll find that's not quite enough, since some of them still run out faster than others. Clearly a little finesse is required here.
9 of 13: One way to figure this out is to flip the hourglasses one at a time with a stopwatch in hand to see exactly how long each one takes to run out. If you don't have a stopwatch, don't panic; I've done it for you.
10 of 13: Now to put it all together. The easiest way I've found to get all the hourglasses turned at exactly the right time is to count them off. You can do this either by counting the seconds backwards from 27 and flip each hourglass as its turn comes (that is, Humilidad at 27, Generosidad at 25, and so on) --
11 of 13: -- or if, like me, counting backwards sometimes messes with your head, you can count forwards, like this:
12 of 13: As I said, this will take a couple of tries before it works out well enough to open the door here, partly because you'll be guessing at the length of a second. Try saying "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" or some other counting trick; if that slows you down too much, try "one thousand, two thousand" or similar.
13 of 13: When you get it exactly right, the hourglass wall moves, and there's the treasure!
