There were sheets of thick paper on every surface and inky rags. There were pewter dishes containing ancient cheese rinds and pots containing pens and pieces of charcoal. There was an elderly bunch of celery that had lived too long and too promiscuously in close companionship with the charcoal for its own good. There were engravings and drawings pinned directly on to every part of the panelling and the dark, dirty wallpaper – there was one of Strange that was particularly good.

At the back of the house in a smutty little yard there was an apple tree which had once been a country tree – until grey London had come and eaten up all its pleasant green neighbours. Once in a fit of industriousness some unknown person in the house had picked all the apples off the tree and placed them on all of the windowsills, where they had lain for several years now – becoming first old apples, then swollen corpses of apples and finally mere ghosts of apples. There was a very decided smell about the place – a compound of ink, paper, seacoals, brandy, opium, rotting apples, candles, coffee – all mingled with the unique perfume exuded by two men who work day and night in a rather confined space and who never under any circumstances can be induced to open a window.

The truth was that Minervois and Forcalquier often forgot that there were such places as Spitalfields or France upon the face of the earth. They lived for days at a time in the little universe of the engravings for Strange’s book – and these were very odd things indeed.

They shewed great corridors built more of shadows than any thing else. Dark openings in the walls suggested other corridors so that the engravings appeared to be of the inside of a labyrinth or something of that sort. Some shewed broad steps leading down to dark underground canals. There were drawings of a vast dark moor, across which wound a forlorn road. The spectator appeared to be looking down on this scene from a great height. Far, far ahead on that road there was a shadow – no more than a scratch upon the road’s pale surface – it was too far off to say if it were man or woman or child, or even a human person, but somehow its appearance in all that unpeopled space was most disquieting.

One picture showed the likeness of a lonely bridge that spanned some immense and misty void – perhaps the sky itself – and, though the bridge was constructed of the same massive masonry as the corridors and the canals, upon either side tiny staircases wound down, clinging to the great supports of the bridge. These staircases were frail-looking things, built with far less skill than the bridge, but there were many of them winding down through the clouds to God-knew-where.

Strange bent over these things, with a concentration to rival Minervois’s own, questioning, criticizing and proposing. Strange and the two engravers spoke French to each other. To Strange’s surprize Childermass understood perfectly and even addressed one or two questions to Minervois in his own language. Unfortunately, Childermass’s French was so strongly accented by his native Yorkshire that Minervois did not understand and asked Strange if Childermass was Dutch.