I frowned, remembering something else. ‘He said Hannah had once visited it because she was interested in the research being done there.’ I looked at him. ‘I wonder what sort of research it was.’

He did not answer for he was watching Ahmedri, who had found a metal ladder set into the wall of the building, and was climbing it. When the Sadorian had reached the top, he looked down and called out that there was a walkway and it looked like there was another one above it.

‘The walls must be thick,’ I muttered, as Swallow followed the tribesman up the ladder. Examining the walls, I discovered there were sliding panels opening to small bedchambers, a little cook room, transparent bathing rooms and even one of the strange relieving chambers the Beforetimers had built. All of the cloth and paper had long since perished but there were several pots in the kitchen that were far lighter than those sold by jacks in the Land, and none of them had a spot of rust. Their handles were cracked and broke away, but new ones could easily be carved. I set these by the door to take with us, along with a very light piece of shining silver matting that would serve as a ground sheet and a knife with a metal handle that was still sharp. There were places where there had been shelves fixed, but they had long fallen to dust along with whatever had stood on them. Obviously people had lived here but it must have been a strange existence, dwelling in a remote place and observing distant places such as the settlement called Pellmar Quadrants.

I abandoned my search and went back to look at the device fixed to the floor. There were parts of it that looked like parts of the machines that the teknoguilders had found in Beforetime ruins, but I had never seen anything as large at Oldhaven. I discovered a set of long narrow levers protruding from near the base of the machine where there was a seat fixed to the ground, and prodded at them gingerly, thinking they might be controls. Nothing happened. Climbing up it, I found another phalanx of levers and buttons and tiny glass windows with numbers behind them, but they gave not the slightest hint of the machine’s function. Higher up, there was a computermachine with a seat built into it. The seat covering and padding had long decayed, leaving no more than a metal plate to sit on. I sat down.