When it was too late to get back to Satricum the same day and while we all tried to avoid raising the unwelcome subject of having to camp out for the night on this sodden ground, we came upon something.

We had been travelling an intermittently raised track through shoulder-high brushwood. Occasional clearings widened out in a ragged fashion. Somebody must use this route. In one part they had actually laid wicker hurdles where the track had sunk, though the hurdles had then been half submerged too. Quite suddenly we broached a bigger space. A tilting heap of trash grew out of the ground amongst a fungoid clutter that was definitely human in origin. It looked abandoned. It looked like the windblown rubbish that piles against bushes in forests. Not so, though. Someone had carefully collected this detritus, over a long period. There was a lopsided shack at the heart of the mess which appeared to be roofed and lived in.

‘This is it, boys!’ declared Rectus, as if he had knowingly led us to it.

‘Ooh, I don’t like it!’ crooned Lentullus, like someone listening to a ghost story around a winter fire.

We stood and looked. Nero the ox lowered his head and nuzzled around in clumps of reedy grass. His tail flicked manically, as he was tormented by flies. We were too tired and dispirited to advance on the hovel immediately. If a will-o’-the-wisp had wafted out in a swirl of mist and cried ‘Boo!’ we would have turned tail obediently.

One end of the building had a squashed look and slumped low, as if it was in the process of being swallowed by the swamp. This was a lean-to with nothing to lean against. At times over various decades, attempts had been made to patch up rotten parts. Items of hardware that may have been stolen from other people’s porticoes or looted from stationary vehicles on market day were attached like trophies: a Medusa-faced tile end, a metal knocker solidified with its own verdigris, half of a baker’s giant stone flour grinder. Around the shack were piles of old building materials, large-scale food containers that dribbled rancid waste, cartwheels, broken pieces of armour and incomplete fishing equipment. There was a table groaning under masses of machinery parts—rusty bits off pulleys, cranes and ploughs—ugly metalwork the purpose of which had been long forgotten and which would never be identified and reused. It all looked shabby. Most totters would have rejected it.