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Anywhere. They could see the city now. It was very hot here, far hotter than Nine. The high muddy-looking walls and the strange-shaped domes above them quivered in the heat, like things under water. Sandy dust blew up in clouds, almost hiding the dirty-white row of old men squatting in front of baskets blowing into pipes. Christopher looked nervously at the fat snakes, each one swaying upright in its basket.
    Tacroy laughed. “Don’t worry. Your uncle doesn’t want a snake any more than you do!”
    The city had a towering but narrow gate. By the time they reached it both were covered in sandy dust and Christopher was sweating through it, in trickles. Tacroy seemed enviably cool. Inside the walls it was even hotter. This was the one drawback to a thoroughly nice Anywhere. The shady edges of the streets were crowded with people and goats and makeshift stalls under colored umbrellas, so that Christopher was forced to walk with Tacroy down the blinding stripe of sun in the middle. Everyone shouted and chattered cheerfully. The air was thick with strange smells, the bleating of goats, the squawks of chickens, and strange clinking music. All the colors were bright, and brightest of all were the small gilded dollhouse things at the corners of streets. These were always heaped with flowers and dishes of food. Christopher thought they must belong to very small gods.
    A lady under an electric blue umbrella gave him some of the sweetmeat she was selling. It was like a crisp bird’s nest soaked in honey. Christopher gave some to Tacroy, but Tacroy said he could only taste it the way you tasted food in dreams, even when Christopher firmed him up again.
    “Does Uncle Ralph want me to fetch a goat?” Christopher asked, licking honey from his fingers.
    “We’d have tried if the carriage had worked,” Tacroy said. “But what your uncle’s really hoping for is a cat from one of the temples. We have to find the Temple of Asheth.”
    Christopher led the way to the big square where all the large houses for gods were. The man with the yellow umbrella was still there, on the steps of the largest temple. “Ah yes. That’s it,” Tacroy said. But when Christopher set off hopefully to talk to the man with the yellow umbrella again, Tacroy said, “No, I think our best bet is to get in around the side somewhere.”
    They found their way down narrow side alleys that ran all around the temple. There were no other doors to the temple at all, nor did it have any windows. The walls were high and muddy-looking and totally blank except for wicked spikes on the top. Tacroy stopped quite cheerfully in a baking alley where someone had thrown away a cartload of old cabbages and looked up at the spikes. The ends of flowering creepers were twined among the spikes from the other side of the wall.
    “This looks promising,” he said, and leaned against the wall. His cheerful look vanished. For a moment he looked frustrated and rather annoyed. “Here’s a turnup,” he said. “You’ve made me too solid to get through, darn it!” He thought about it, and shrugged. “This was supposed to be experiment three anyway. Your uncle thought that if you could broach a way between the worlds, you could probably pass through a wall too. Are you game to try? Do you think you can get in and pick up a cat without me?”
    Tacroy seemed very nervous and worried about it. Christopher looked at the frowning wall and thought that it was probably impossible. “I can try,” he said, and largely to console Tacroy, he stepped up against the hot stones of the wall and tried to push himself through them. At first it was impossible. But after a moment, he found that if he turned himself sort of sideways in a peculiar way, he began to sink into the stones. He turned and smiled encouragingly at Tacroy’s worried face. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    “I don’t like letting you go on your own,” Tacroy was saying, when there came a noise like SHLUCK! and Christopher