Santiago and the Englishman are curt and distant with each other when they first meet, but warm up when they discover that they are both carrying two divination stones called Urim and Thummim. Indeed, when the Englishman reveals a knowledge of the provenance of Santiago’s stones, the boy feels “suddenly happy to be there at that warehouse” and is excited by the Englishman’s recognition of their encounter as an omen. The Englishman comments that he’d like to “write a huge encyclopedia just about the words luck and coincidence. It’s with those words that the universal language is written.” Do all of the characters in The Alchemist experience omens as coincidences? What other kinds of omens occur in the book? If the universal language, in the Englishman’s words, is “understood by everybody but already forgotten,” in what sense do omens remind us of that we’ve forgotten? How is the Englishman himself both a link to Santiago’s past and an omen about his future?