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of carved pink stone, helmeted by turrets and cupolas that blinked in the
golden sunlight. All very nice if you like that kind of thing. But Maxwell did
not.
    ‘I must
imagine that I’m home,’ Maxwell told himself. ‘And then I will be. Imagine
that I have closed the book and that I am home. And then I will awaken from
this daydream or nightmare or whatever.’ Maxwell closed his eyes, screwed his
face into an expression of deep concentration and thought himself back home.
    ‘There,’
said Maxwell, opening his eyes. Then, ‘By the Goddess!’ he continued.
    He was
still where he had been a moment before. But now the vista had drastically
changed. The grass about him rose in course blades almost to his waist, the
story-book meadows and cultivated pasture lands had become gorse-grown
moorlands, the Hidden Tower was nothing but a jumble of fallen
stone.
    Maxwell
made a rueful face and hugged his arms. There was a definite chill in the air,
and the reason for it was all too plain to see. Above the barren landscape, in
a clear and cloudless sky, the sun hung nearly at its zenith. But the sun was
strange: swollen, bloated, ruby red, as if about to set. A thin black line was
evident about the solar disc.
    Maxwell
made a sullen sound to go with his rueful face. ‘That is not my fault,’
he murmured. ‘I did not do that.’
    Maxwell
gazed about the cheerless panorama. Where was he? Still in England ? Perhaps not. Was there somewhere
in the world where the sun looked like that? Greenland ? Iceland ? Tierra del Fuego ? Patagonia ?
    Maxwell
sniffed the air. Did it smell like England ? What did England smell like anyway? An American he’d once met had told him that France smelled of garlic and Gauloise and England smelled of stale beer
and boiled cabbage. Maxwell recalled that the American smelled of cheese, but
couldn’t remember why, although it had been explained to him at the time.
    ‘Wherever
I am, I have no wish to be here.’ Maxwell took half a step forward and fell on
his face. Tied boot laces again? It was far from amusing. Maxwell struggled
with his feet. They were literally grown over, knotted with ground weed and
stinkweed. He kicked and thrashed and fought himself free. Two dark dead
patches of soil remained to mark the spot where he had been standing. ‘I’m out
of here,’ said Maxwell.
    He
trudged down the promontory, hands deep in trouser pockets, jacket collar
turned up to the chill. Out onto the gorsy waste. But which way? ‘South,’ he
decided and trusting to that in-built sense of direction that all men claim to
possess, struck off towards the west.
    The
going wasn’t easy and neither was it pleasant. Small stinging beasties of the
gnat persuasion swarmed up to feast upon his exposed fleshy parts. Something
howled ominously in the distance and the dreariness of the gorsy waste relieved
itself periodically by suddenly giving way to a boggy morass into which Maxwell
stumbled without let or hindrance.
    The sun
moved on before him, which puzzled Maxwell who found himself hard put to
calculate which portion of the globe it was, where the sun set in the south.
    It was
with no small sense of relief therefore that he finally tripped through a
ragged overgrown hedge and fell onto the side of a road.
    Though
it wasn’t much of a road.
    More of
a track.
    It had
the look of having once been a road and by its width, one much travelled. But
now it was gone to fragmentation, burst through by beggarweed and spark
heather. Maxwell looked up the road and down and consoled himself with the
traveller’s verity that ‘A road always leads to somewhere’.
    ‘Hm,’
went Maxwell. ‘West or east? West, I think.’ And so saying he began to plod
northward.
    He had
plodded for more than an hour, blessing, with almost every step he took, the
substantial nature of his substantial boots, when he saw it.
    Away in
the distance.
    But
bright as a shilling in a sweep’s behind and beautiful as Bexhill was