I was in a tunnel lined with glass blocks that shone with some inner light. I was moving rapidly towards one of its ends. I tried to see what was there, but was dazzled by the warm light that flooded in from whatever lay beyond. I looked harder. But whatever I did see was so indefinite, and so changed from moment to moment, that I was no more certain than if I hadn’t looked at all.
I say that I was moving. I wasn’t walking, though. Instead, I floated, as if carried on some invisible chair. I tried to shift position, but seemed to have no control over my body. Indeed, it was hard to tell if I had a body at all.
I felt that I was coming to a moment of understanding. The shapes within the light were beginning to resolve themselves into something definite and perceptible. Even as I focused, however, I was moving back the way I’d come. The light still dazzled, though from a growing distance. The distance stretched and stretched as I flew back at a now incredible speed. The tunnel was miles long – hundreds of miles long – and still I moved back along it, away from a light that may have been more distant, though it shone with undiminished brightness.
My speed was increasing. The glass blocks were merging into a single blur, and still I was going faster. I had no sense of hearing. I couldn’t feel any resistance of the air about me. I felt none of the forward rush you get when a chariot or a fast ship accelerates. It was enough to know that I was moving. I don’t think I was falling – though it was hard to know if concepts of up and down had any meaning here. I was sure I wasn’t falling. That couldn’t have accounted for the speed I was moving. I was like one of the atoms that Epicurus conjectured – small and unimportant by itself, and moving at inconceivable speed through a universe infinite in space and time.
I was no longer moving. I lay still on a soft surface. I opened my eyes and looked round. I was in a strange room. It was crowded with furniture of immense elaboration. There was a window of glazed panes looking out into blackness. The walls were hung with silk and with paintings in a realistic style of men in clothes I’d never seen before. There was an open fire in a grate against the wall. I heard its steady crackling and smelled the clean vapour of the sea coals. On a shelf above this was a machine with a dial set round with numbers in the Roman style. From it I could hear a slow, steady clicking of its works.
As I looked about in the candlelight, I saw a man dozing in a chair. A fat, dumpy creature, dressed in the silk brocade of the men in the paintings, he had a book in his lap. It was a book in our own modern style – folded and bound in sections – but surprisingly small. Other books of the same kind were heaped about him on the carpeted floor. Beside him, on a table of polished wood, was a glass bottle containing something dark. There was a glass drinking cup beside this, about a third full.
I climbed to my feet. I saw that I was dressed in the plain white and purple-bordered robe of a senator. The fat man shifted back deeper into his chair and snored. I stood over the fat man. He’d drunk himself into a doze that meant I was quite alone in the room. I took up the drinking cup and raised it to my lips. Its taste was sweet and much more powerful than any wine I knew. I drained the cup and refilled it.
Cup in hand, I moved towards the desk and reached for one of the crumpled balls of what looked like very white parchment. I smoothed it out and squinted at the neat but unknown writing. It made no sense to me. I saw there was ink in a silver pot. There were no pens, though, of the usual reed or wood. For writing, there was a collection of bird feathers, cut and split at the ends into the right shape. I picked one up and rolled it between my fingers. It didn’t strike me as at all a convenient sort of pen. I looked again at the neat writing. It was all, I supposed, a matter of custom. So too the idea of filling a room with expensive objects, and spoiling it with an open fire.
I was picking up sheet after sheet and still trying to see if I could understand any of it, when I heard a noise behind me. I looked round. The fat man was stretching his arms. He grunted and opened his eyes. I looked full at him. He looked back at me and rubbed his eyes. He reached for his drinking cup. He looked round in some confusion before staring at the cup, now empty on his desk.
He said something nasty in a language I’d never heard before and tried to stand. The effort was too much and he fell back into his chair. He reached for a silver bell, but then looked at me again. I smiled nervously back. He raised his voice and spoke again in the unknown language. I shook my head. He spoke once more in a language that sounded different from the first, but that I still couldn’t understand.
‘Do you know Greek?’ I asked in that language.
He smiled, and with an evident collecting of thought, replied in Latin.
‘There are those who stand between us,’ he said in a slow and oddly accented manner, ‘who say you served a higher purpose. We, of course, know otherwise.’
He laughed gently and repeated himself: ‘We both know better than those monks and barbarians.’
With that, his eyes closed again and he drifted back into his doze. As he did so, the room began to darken and its various objects took on a weirdly translucent quality.
I snatched up the book from his lap. It fell straight through my hands as if they didn’t exist. It fell open on the floor. I dropped to my knees and tried to see what was on the pages. Written on the left page in very small and neat characters that looked like a variant on the Greek script, and on the other in something equally small and neat that contained Roman letters and might have been Latin, I wanted to look at it in better light. Particularly interesting was that the words appeared to be separated by spaces between, and there were obvious punctuation marks. But the darkness was spreading around me like a mist.
I grabbed again at the book to try to lift it. Again, my hands went through it. All I could see before the darkness became total was the separated words written in Roman letters at the head of each page: