‘I know you’re not. You’re staying here to mind the luggage. You can keep your headlights on so that we can see what we’re doing. Flash them if anybody comes. We won’t be too long. Allons, mes enfants.’ And she was off, haring towards the wire, with a couple of blooming boys in hot pursuit.

I waited for what seemed to me to be hours – though I’m prepared to concede now that it might have been no more than minutes – and then, locking the car but leaving the engine running and the headlights on, I set off after them. Don’t ask me how I got over that wire. I’ve never been a good climber and I had no French acrobat to help me. Extremity of emotion alone, I suppose, made me careless of my inadequacy and had me air-borne. I was so overwrought, indeed, that I would have forgotten that I couldn’t swim and swum, if a lake had suddenly opened between me and those towering trilithons.

I caught my breath, once I was inside the wire, and rested against the great flaming Sun-Stone, itself leaning as if in obeisance towards the vast Sarsen circle and its enfolded mysteries. I peered into the darkness. I could see and hear nothing. I crept stealthily along the ground, the buried secrets of the Romans and the Saxons only inches beneath my feet. I circumnavigated the erroneously named Slaughter Stone (it wasn’t erroneously named tonight!) and made for the Sarsen pillars, which, incidentally, are in reality silicified nodules of sandstone, that’s to say sand held together by silica cement, and were probably transported from somewhere in the area between Marlborough and Newbury – unlike the Bluestones, which almost certainly came from the Prescelly Hills in Dyfed in Wales. (I include these geological niceties, I ought to say, not to load with verisimilitude this extraordinary turn in my narrative, nor to curry favour with those who like to acquire a little learning when they read, but because I can scarcely bear to recall the terrible events of this night without the support and comfort of the dispassionate labours of harmless scholars. Their love of bloodless stone reminds me that the orifices of the body are not the only study to which the restless imagination of man need sacrifice itself.)