Medieval Islamic geographers wrote of a distant island whose trees bore extraordinary fruit: heads, human and animal, which cried out as they ripened. The island was called Waq-Waq — the name is the sound the fruit makes. Cosmographies of wonders carried the story for centuries; one version has Alexander the Great consulting a talking tree about his fate.

Painters inherited the problem the writers never faced: what does it actually look like? The solution on this folio is a masterpiece of matter-of-factness. The tree is botanically calm — leaves, stems, a garden ground — and the heads simply grow where flowers should be, gazelle and lion and human faces nodding on their stalks like heavy blooms.

The strangeness works because nothing else is strange. It is the studio's discipline applied to a dream: paint the impossible with the same care as a tulip, and the viewer believes it. Hung on a wall, it reads as pattern from across the room and becomes a story only when a guest steps close — which may be the best trick a painting can do.