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its surface.
    And then, between one step and the next, the shape changed – no, opened! It was a door . I went up to the doorway and peered through. It gave onto a passage, plain-walled and constructed of a smooth off-white material. Light came from the glowing ceiling. The passage curved away gently in both directions. It appeared I was entering some sort of structure, a building far larger than any I had ever been in.
    I stepped into the passage – no, corridor was a better description – and started to walk. My eye caught movement behind me. I whirled around to find the door back in place. Heart hammering, I ran back. The door opened; tendrils of mist curled out into the corridor, disturbed by the abrupt motions of this strange device. I resisted the temptation to retrace my steps and check if the village was still there. Instead I turned away from the door – trying not to flinch when I heard it swish shut – and carried on down the passage.
    Now I did count my steps, and I found, some fifty-three steps further on, another door, this one on the opposite wall. It did not open as I passed it. Seventy-eight steps in I found a further door on the same side. This one did open, and led into a cavernous hall, unlit and filled with structures whose function I could not begin to guess. The air was dry, and filled with a faint hum. I decided to carry on along the corridor.
    I had gone just over a hundred steps when the revelation hit me: I was not in a building. Instead, the structure, with its strange gleaming surfaces enclosed the entire reconstructed village . Whatever this place was, it was huge!
    I will not detail here all the wonders I found on that day, nor on the many days since that I have spent exploring my unimaginably vast home. I have mapped and recorded and postulated about my findings in other books, which can be found in my library back at the ersatz village.
    I agree with the angel’s assertion that my mind as it was when I arrived would have been unable to encompass the true scale and complexity of this place. Consider the door that opens into a space whose walls are almost invisible, due both to their great distance and to the clouds that form and dissipate within the chamber. Or the long door-less section of corridor where I hear a faint but thunderous rush of waters behind the walls. Then there is the huge cylindrical room I have glimpsed through a window, actually a contained hurricane whose true nature is only revealed when some unidentified scrap of matter flies past.
    I can move freely about and not come to harm here; in places where I have inadvertently walked into danger, such as the cloud chamber, I was held back from the lethal drop by an invisible force. More than once I have chosen a direction and walked for days, carefully mapping my route. Even so, I can only have explored a fraction of this place.
    It has occurred to me that if a complete re-creation of my village is enclosed by this endless expanse of corridors and rooms, then perhaps the entire world I once knew also exists within the same, vast space. Could the roaring waters I heard at a distance be the sound of the very sea I once sailed, cascading over what I once thought of as the edge of the world? When I asked the angel this question it said, in its unhelpful way, that such a possibility was ‘quite feasible’.
    Though I continue to explore, there is one place I keep returning to: the starry window.
    I found the window two years and sixteen days after my first foray from the village. I call it a window, but that is merely a theory, formulated after much observation. It is located in a stretch of straight corridor located approximately ten thousand paces from my home. The corridor has a patch of wall forty-five paces long which is not like any other wall I have seen: it shows darkness relieved by scattered lights. This view bears a passing resemblance to the night sky I remember from my old life, but it is a night never relieved by