Will looked around carefully. Behind him the full moon shone down over a distant prospect of great green hills, and on the slopes at the foot of the hills there were houses with rich gardens, and an open parkland with groves of trees and the white gleam of a classical temple.
Just beside him was that bare pat the air, as hard to see from this side as from the other, but defihere. He bent to look through and saw the road in Oxford, his own world. He turned away with a shudder: whatever this new world was, it had to be better than what hed just left.
With a dawning light-headedness, the feeling that he was dreaming but awake at the same time, he stood up and looked around for the cat, his guide.
She was nowhere in sight. No doubt she was already expl those narrow streets and gardens beyond the cafes whose lights were so inviting. Will lifted up his tattered tote bag and walked slowly across the road toward them, moving very carefully in case it all disappeared.
The air of the place had somethierranean or maybe Caribbean about it. Will had never been out of England, so he couldnt pare it with anywhere he knew, but it was the kind of place where people came out late at night to eat and drink, to dand enjoy music. Except that there was no one here, and the silence was immense.
On the first er he reached there stood a cafe, with little green tables on the pavement and a zinc-topped bar and an espresso mae. On some of the tables glasses stood half-empty; in one ashtray a cigarette had burned down to the butt; a plate of risotto stood o a basket of stale rolls as hard as cardboard.
He took a bottle of lemonade from the cooler behind the bar and then thought for a moment before dropping a pound iill. As soon as hed shut the till, he ope again, realizing that the money in there might say what this place was called. The currency was called the a, but he couldnt tell any more than that.
He put the money bad opehe bottle on the opener fixed to the ter before leaving the cafe and wandering dowreet going away from the boulevard. Little grocery shops and bakeries stood between jewelers and florists and bead-curtained doors opening into private houses, where wrought-iron balies thick with flowers the narrow pavement, and where the silence, being enclosed, was even more profound.
The streets were leading downward, and before very long they opened out onto a broad avenue where more palm trees reached high into the air, the underside of their leaves glowing ireetlights.
Oher side of the avenue was the sea.
Will found himself fag a harbor enclosed from the left by a stone breakwater and from the right by a headland on which a large building with stone ns and wide steps and ornate balies stood floodlit among fl trees and bushes. In the harbor one or two rowboats lay still at anchor, and beyond the breakwater the starlight glittered on a calm sea.
By now Wills exhaustion had been wiped out. He was wide awake and possessed by wonder. From time to time, on his way through the narrow streets, hed put out a hand to touch a wall or a doorway or the flowers in a window box, and found them solid and ving. Now he wao touch the whole landscape in front of him, because it was too wide to take in through his eyes alone. He stood still, breathing deeply, almost afraid.
He discovered that he was still holding the bottle hed taken from the cafe. He drank from it, and it tasted like what it was, i