This carriage, in which me and my mother and Ooldra were being taken towards the enemy encampment outside the city walls, was a peculiar yet efficient contraption and I would have been quite astounded at it if I hadn’t seen pictures of such things in my books. It jolted along at a great speed drawn by four horses—two brown, one a splotched grey, and one almost striped. The one which was almost striped kept throwing up its metal shod feet and trying to break the traces but when it found it couldn’t it went on again with the others; then, after a little while, it tried again. There was a person on the little platform in front which is part of the carriage but not in it; the person kept shouting things out to the horses, especially to the horse which was almost striped. I suppose the person was a man. It is very bewildering to see men like this and have to behave as if they were ordinary normal people.

“Vicious creatures,” remarked the Dictatress as the hybrid again tried to kick free of the traces.

A little while later, turning a corner, I looked back and saw we were being followed and being preceded, at some distance, by groups of them (men) all wearing the same clothes. Green and a sort of pink on their tunic edges. But they were hard to see; it was far easier to just look out the windows, which only showed the sides.

My gaze was now held by the buildings the carriage was passing. They weren’t at all the sort of places I am used to seeing. When there was stone used in their composition, which was rarely, it was never marble. And so many exteriors all in rows—I have never seen any but one interior before, and that for my whole life. The newness of it all, the strangeness, the uncertainty and the responsibility of what I was going to, had made my whole being a fever.