‘You can see smoke coming out of the volcano?’

‘Sure. Smoke, coals, fire — ev’thing — shine like hell all night.’

‘Well sir, I cer’nly would like to see that. Glows at night, eh? Well sir, that must be mighty interesting.’ Fred turned to the amiable, unshaven taxi-driver beside him and chuckled, ‘Be kind of nice to travel in Europe, if a fellow could afford it.’

‘O.K., I guess. My old man was born in Jugoslavia.’

‘Is that a fact! Hear they got old walled cities there — yuh, great, big thick long walls — built by the Romans! I’d like to see ’em.’

‘Yuh.’

‘By the Romans! DogGONE!’

He was now emboldened to risk the implications suggested in actually entering a travel bureau.

The clerk was amused by the excitement of what was to him just a round little business man in a leather driving jacket, a jesting, over-cordial little man, for this clerk was a person who hated his job, who stood behind counters only till it should be time to escape, and dash to the Y.M.C.A. and gloriously race with himself on the rowing machine. He did not know that he was a merchant of adventure; he supposed that he was selling minimum rates, and tariffs on dogs and children, and reservations on steamer chairs, and not the mist of dawn over rosy seas, Norman cathedrals, goat-loud uplands in the Massif Central. But he will have been of some use to civilization, for he enabled Fred to walk out with pamphlets on Why Not Winter in Flowery South Africa, Native Dances in the Island of Celebes, and Ski Haunts in the Tyrol.

Fred could not promise himself that he would ever know his South Africa, or speak whatever it is they do speak in the Island of Celebes, and he professionally loathed skis — with a ski you couldn’t just put it in low and grind comfortably uphill. But he liked the idea.

While the mere body of Frederick William Cornplow, plump and sometimes panting, unmagically draped in double-breasted blue suits and startling red and green neckties, went about the office correctly doing the correct things — delivering selling talks like a phonograph, signing papers, planning a sales-floor addition to house the trailers — the person inside Fred would have astounded the customers, for he was not a man but a credulous child. Fred was nourishing an idea greater than himself. He was like a small boy who has, in a forest, found the entrance to a cave which surely leads to the centre of the earth. He was playing with the concept that there is no law that a man of fifty-six must stop all of living except sleeping and reading the newspapers and going to the bathroom. Why, he might have another thirty years of vigour and experiment, and that was a journey which lay as far ahead of him as was the journey back to the time when he had been a brat of twenty-six, younger than Sara now! But he had to start his pilgrimage out of hand; he had to undergo the ticklish complications of retiring in a year or of taking a whole year’s vacation.