Here’s one of Notovitch himself. It shows our hero in the library at Hemis, examining the volumes of the secret books. Its intent is narrative rather than devotional – in other words, you’re not supposed to pray to it. And yet the depiction of the lama pushes the orange of his robes as close to radiance as Church doctrine will permit. The artist seems to have been influenced by images of Joseph Smith encountering the Angel of Moroni: there’s the same surprise on the young man’s face, the same transfiguring light surrounding both figures. It’s probably just a coincidence. I expect all annunciations are vaguely alike.

This is one world where the fates of Rachkovsky’s and Nicolas’s books have been reversed: where the Protocols sank like a stone and The Unknown Life swept across the world and acquired believers. It is a world where a set of poisonous certainties has been exchanged for the inclusive story that Nicolas found. This dream seems close to what Notovitch hoped for. But the fantasy is so remote that the dream threatens to grow thin and colourless before our eyes. The world where this happened is quite another story.

Quick: pick your goods. No war? No poverty? A spirit of tolerance, community, better stewardship of the planet? Since human nature hasn’t altered in any fundamental way, any change is bound to be accompanied by new opportunities for suffering. Only a fool would be certain that this will be better than our world. But, knowing the twentieth century, it seems unlikely to be worse

In this other world, there are many changes from our own. To take one of the most minor: here, my great-uncle Leonard died at the much riper age of eighty-two.

I only met him once: at my grandparents’ ruby wedding anniversary in 1977 – the year of the Queen’s silver jubilee.

What I remember is this: his liver-spotted hands, the somewhat reddish colour of his remaining hair, his nut-brown skin and distinctive accent. When he said my grandfather’s name, Ray, it sounded like Rye: the strange – to me – vowels a product of long decades working at a steel mill in Wollongong, Australia.