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Perian de Chirolo – ask Kemperer, for whom you once worked, who knows me minutely. His wife will also say a good word for me.’
    He brushed my speech aside, stood gazing into the distance in very much a pose I have used for Blind Kedgoree.
    â€˜Well, I need a young man not too ill set-up, there’s no denying that … The older you get, the more difficult things become …’
    At last he turned back to me. ‘Very well, I shall take you in my confidence, young man; but I warn that what I tell you must not be repeated with nobody, not with your dearest friend, no, not even with your sweetest sweetheart. Come, we’ll walk in the exhibition gallery while I will explain my invention and my intention …’
    He drew back the curtains, turned down the lamp, and led me back to the workshops. We climbed some steps, went through a door, and were in another world where disorder was forgotten. We had entered the elegantly appointed gallery itself, the walls of which were lined with thousands of glass slides, aligned on racks for easy viewing. The slides could be hired for varying amounts, depending upon quality and subject. There were long sets of twenty or thirty slides which told in pictures heroic stories of old, as well as vivid portrayals of brigandage or disaster, which were most popular. Well-dressed people were walking about and gazing at the pictures; Bengtsohn kept his voice down.
    â€˜Despite this place stinks of privilege, it preserves a part of the cultural thought of Malacia as well as Count Renardo’s state museum. Andrus Hoytola exploits cheap labour, no use to deny that – a class enemy if there was one – yet he is not a merchant just but also an artist and a man of foresight. However, to my invention …’
    There was a secretiveness about him which did not suit my open nature. He manoeuvred me into a corner, saying he would lecture me upon matters not generally understood.
    â€˜It has long been known through the learned alchemists that there are certain salts what have an empathy with or aversion against the light, so that some say they are fallen from the sun or the moon. I have developed here a process whereby a judicious mixture of silver iodine will secure on a slide of glass an image of whatever is placed before the zahnoscope. A second process involving oils of lavender and heated mercury fixes the image permanently on the glass. This is painting without hands, my dear de Chirolo …’
    When he beamed at me, he looked years younger.
    â€˜Why tell me your secret?’
    He shook his head. ‘It’s not mine but Nature’s. All what wish can share it. You do not realize the oppressiveness of the state what we live in –’
    â€˜I love my native city.’
    â€˜I what am a foreigner should not criticize? Nevertheless, any such scientific processes what I describe are suppressed … Justice is denied – and beauty.’
    He snatched from one of the exhibition racks a slide which he urged me to hold up to the light. It was a volcanic eruption. I stared through a volcano in full spate, with streams of lava furrowing its snow-clad slopes – to see one of the most beautiful faces I had ever come across, a face with a high-bridged nose, two dark-golden eyes, a mouth that was flashing a brilliant smile – though not in my direction – and a delicate head of cultivated unruly hair, jet-black and tied with a length of blue ribbon at the back.
    Even as this face materialized through the volcanic eruption, it turned into profile and then went into eclipse, with only the tresses and ribbons at the back of the head available to my view. Even that was thrilling enough; but never had I seen a profile so adorable, or so originally designed, with the entire physiognomy depending from that patrician nose, without the nose being too large even by one delicious millimetre.
    Lowering Mount Vesuvius slightly, I regarded the body