Let $D_{1}, D_{2}, . . . , D_{n}$ be rectangular parallelepipeds in space, with edges parallel to the $x, y, z$ axes. For each $D_{i}$, let $x_{i} , y_{i} , z_{i}$ be the lengths of its projections onto the $x, y, z$ axes, respectively. Suppose that for all pairs $D_{i}$ , $D_{j}$, if at least one of $x_{i} < x_{j}$ , $y_{i} < y_{j}$, $z_{i} < z_{j}$ holds, then $x_{i} \leq x_{j}$ , $y_{i} \leq y_{j}$, and $z_{i} < z_{j}$ . If the volume of the region $\bigcup^{n}_{i=1}{D_{i}}$ equals 1997, prove that there is a subset $\{D_{i_{1}}, D_{i_{2}}, . . . , D_{i_{m}}\}$ of the set $\{D_{1}, . . . , D_{n}\}$ such that $(i)$ if $k \not= l $ then $D_{i_{k}} \cap D_{i_{l}} = \emptyset $, and $(ii)$ the volume of $\bigcup^{m}_{k=1}{D_{i_{k}}}$ is at least 73.