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through slowly-rotating filters. For a dreadful moment, he thought he might be having a religious experience.
    The Realm
, Pocket said matter-of-factly.
Or, as we are supposed to call it nowadays, the bleddy Thraldom of Morl.
    It began to scroll towards Philip and pass slowly and silently beneath him. Farrin was a high plateau of conical hummocks and copses of trees that cast orange shadows. It was webbed with tracks, although there was no obvious sign of dwelling places, merely scatterings of jumbled stone. The walls of the plateau dropped away, shrinking into long ridges of rock like the spinal plates of buried reptiles. These stretched into a harsh desert where blue-shadowed dunes were continuously transformed by winds that Philip could not feel.
    A range of mountains came into view, rearing up almost vertically from the sands and sweeping in a great arc towards a dark sea far off to Philip’s right. These crags were grey, but where their surfaces had been broken by collapse or quarrying they showed interiors of buttery yellow. The higher peaks were lightly dusted with what looked like snow, although it was white for only brief periods of time. Among the far foothills, light dancedon the surface of a lake; close to its far shore a black castellated island cast a green shadow on the water.
    The clerk’s voice spoke, and his hand wrote, the names of all that rolled below them. Philip knew, with a dreamer’s certainty, that every word was being inscribed indelibly on his memory, hard-wired to his brain. He felt consumed by an insatiable happiness.
    His eyes tracked the course of a river; silver, then milky blue, then turquoise. It enfolded three walled cities before it vanished, beyond a mighty cataract, into what seemed a limitless forest. But this too passed, and a rich undulating plain appeared, patchworked with fields and meadows, woodlands and thatched hamlets and greens where children might have played but did not.
    Some immeasurable time later, a darkness appeared in the approaching distance, spanning the horizon. At first, Philip thought that the clerk’s Greme magic had rolled the world into nightfall; then as it drew nearer, he realized that he was looking at a vast, black, flat-bellied cloud. It cast onto the land below it a shadow that was an utter absence of light.
    The Thule of Morl
, Pocket’s voice announced.
This is as far as we go. We don’t know the Layout beyond here any more.
    The slow unfurling of the world stopped.
    Peering ahead, Philip now saw that a mesh of perfectly straight roads spread from the darkness out onto the plain. Along it and across it columns of what looked, from his height, like termites moved steadily and unceasingly.There were many fires, but the termites passed heedless through them.
    Swelts
, the Greme’s voice said, and the word lowered the temperature of the dream.
    The Realm now reversed its scrolling, and the Thule receded. Philip had not been aware of any loss of altitude, but they were closer to the surface now. He saw details that he had not seen earlier. On the plain, there were smudges where whole villages had been extinguished as if by a gigantic and filthy thumb. The forest was scarred by furrows of toppled trees. Of the three walled cities, two were derelict, their towers topless, their ramparts broached. Where the mountains plunged into the sea, he saw in isolated coves the blackened ribs and spines of burned boats. The jumbled stones on the surface of Farrin were wrecked townships, perhaps razed by some spasm that had rocked the plateau.
    Someone spoke from the far distance, and Philip recognized the voice as his own.
    ‘What happened?’
    Instantly he turned liquid and was syphoned downwards. When he was himself again the world had gone. He somehow knew that he was back in a subterranean chamber. The old cracked voice was still mumbling gibberish. Pocket was talking eighteen to the dozen and the pen was flying across the paper and the ink was again desperately