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were lurking in ambush for stragglers from among their supplanters, not half a mile from the road.
    â€˜Or of course, in the ultimate analysis,’ he said blithely, ‘they’re the spirits of the dead, who are also dispossessed and submerged, and have reason to bear a grudge against the living. In either case, they’re to be feared and avoided at all costs. And all those princesses, and elder brothers, and younger sons who fall into their clutches in the stories – well, in the stories they’re always rescued in the end, of course. But how do we know how many of the dominant race went missing to provide all those legends? And weren’t rescued?’
    When I dropped him at last in Kitzingen I had a furious headache, and a mind full of monsters. I’ve never been so glad to get rid of a passenger in my life.
    â€˜It’ll be pretty late when you cross the Spessart hills,’ he gloated at me through his ginger beard as he took his leave. ‘I often think many of the wildest Grimm stories must have come out of those forests. Only a few miles from Aschaffenburg and Hanau, and yet you might be in another world and another age. There are places, you know, where the veil is very thin. Spessart always seems to me to be one of them.’
    He went off dangling his plethora of equipment and hunched under his enormous rucksack, and in the half darkness he looked like one of his own ogres.
    As for me, I crept through Würzburg feeling uncommonly miserable, and along the narrow road under the ominous shadow of the Marienburg, and out into the rain-soaked countryside again. By eight it was dark; pitch dark because of the low and heavy clouds which brought the night down on me untimely. Then the real thunderstorms began, streaming with rain until there seemed no air to breathe between the slashing jets of it, and visibility was nil.
    I slowed down to a timorous crawl, and edged along by feel, through sudden pools that tried to tug me to a standstill. It was plain night now, and a black night, too, hot and heavy and crushing, so that even between the rainstorms the very air seemed solid.
    I should have stopped. I should have had sense enough to settle for the pub in the nearest village. But I went obstinately on, determined not to give in to my luck. And in the Spessart hills I lost my way.
    It couldn’t happen now. The autobahn has been extended right to the outskirts of Würzburg, and you roll along through the wilds on a moving belt. But at the time I’m talking about, only a few years ago, the motorway had only reached Aschaffenburg, and you did the rest of the trip on the old, winding road. After you passed the well-known Spessart Inn it was forest, forest all the way, rising and falling with the road, and not a solitary house to be seen in miles of it.
    It was pouring with rain again, my head was thudding like a steam-hammer, and all I could see by my headlights was drowning, drenching streams of water, and occasionally the merest glimpse of the long, unchanging procession of tree-trunks on either side. The road was a river, and had narrowed considerably on this stretch, so that I didn’t notice for some time how extreme this narrowing process had become, or how bad the surface was; and exactly how and where I left the road I shall never know.
    But at last I realized that there were no more lorries, and that was odd. Whatever my speed, I should either have overtaken one or two, or been myself overtaken. But now there were no more lorries. There were no more cars at all. Nothing but the Ford and me.
    I was afraid to stop my engine, so I kept going, but wound down my window and stuck my head out into the saturated darkness. There wasn’t a solitary sound left in the world except the indignant note of the car and the slashing fall of the rain. Then the rain stopped, and all round me I could feel the silence pressing in, and the darkness, and the wet, green, earthy, ancient smell