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agreeably old-fashioned name suggestive of sound literary craftsmanship and a restful night’s sleep in a feather bed.
    I made my optimistic way into the gloomy lobby and across a strip of musty carpet to the reception desk, where, when no one appeared, I rang a copper bell. It was cracked and its discordant clangour filled the air. I turned, hoping to see some member of the staff hurrying towards me along one of the shadowy corridors that led off the lobby, but nobody came. Turning back to the counter, I was startled to find that the receptionist had materialised behind it like magic. He was a Murkholmer, I could tell from his pallid complexion. My knowledge of Murkholmers had been acquired from Sebag Seriosa’s excellent novella on the subject, The Damp Denizens , and I had already encountered several of these rather weird Zamonian life forms in the streets.
    ‘Yes?’ he said, sounding as if he was at his last gasp.
    ‘I’m, er . . . looking for a room,’ I replied in a tremulous voice.
    Five minutes later I was bitterly regretting not having taken to my heels on the spot. My room, for which I had paid in advance at the receptionist’s insistence, turned out to be a lumber room of the most appalling kind. With unerring misjudgement, I had settled on what was probably the worst overnight accommodation in Bookholm. Not a sign of a feather bed, just a coarse, prickly blanket on a mildewed mattress with something rustling inside it. To judge by the noise coming from the room next door, which was occupied by a family of Bluddums, their children were using the furniture as xylophones. The paper was peeling off the walls and some creature was scampering around beneath the floorboards with a series of high-pitched squeaks. Dangling from the ceiling in an inaccessible corner, a white, one-eyed vampire bat seemed to be waiting for me to go to sleep so that it could begin its gruesome meal. Then I noticed that there were no curtains over the windows. The sun’s merciless rays would be bound to shine in at five in the morning and prevent me from getting another wink, because the smallest glimmer of light prevents me from sleeping. (I’ve eschewed ‘slumber masks’ ever since I tried one out and forgot the next morning that I was wearing it. Panic-stricken in the belief that I’d gone blind overnight, I blundered around like a headless chicken, then tripped over a stool and landed so heavily that I dislocated my shoulder.)
    I had no intention of spending the night at the hotel in any case. I was able to lay down my bundle at last and sluice off some of the dust from my travels with the brackish water in the washbasin - that would do for the time being. Bookholm’s antiquarian bookshops were open twenty-four hours a day. Hungry, thirsty and itching to root around in their wares, I bade the bat and the Bluddums goodnight and hurried out into the bustling streets once more.
    Only a small proportion of Bookholm - barely ten per cent, perhaps - is situated on the surface. By far the greater part of the city lies underground. Like some monstrous termite’s nest, it consists of a system of subterranean tunnels that extends for many miles in the form of shafts, chasms, passages and caverns entwined into one gigantic, unravellable knot.
    No one can say when or how this cave system came into being. Many authorities claim that it was indeed created by a race of prehistoric termites - huge primeval insects that constructed it as a nest in which to hide their gigantic eggs. The city’s antiquarians, on the other hand, swear that the system of tunnels was excavated over thousands of years by many generations of booksellers as a place in which to store old stock. This is certainly true of some parts of the labyrinth, especially those situated close to the surface.
    Countless scholars have augmented this wealth of speculation with theories of their own. Personally, I favour a composite theory according to which the original system of