But on other days, when the evening light streams in through this window and I allow myself to be taken in by the overall view, then I see for a moment the Temple with its antechambers and the living quarters of the priesthood, the Roman garrison, the bath-houses, the market stalls, the sacrificial altars, covered walkways and the booths of the moneylenders, the great gateways and staircases, the forecourts and outer provinces and the mountains in the background, as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity. In closing, Thomas Abrams dug out a magazine from under a pile of papers and showed me a double-page aerial view of the Temple precinct as it is today: white stones, dark cypresses, and in the centre, the golden Dome of the Rock, which immediately brought to mind the dome of the new Sizewell reactor, which can be seen on moonlit nights shining like a shrine far across the land and sea. The Temple, Thomas Abrams said as we left his workshop, endured for only a hundred years. Perhaps this one will last a little longer. On the bridge over the moat, where we lingered for a while, Thomas Abrams told me how much he liked the ducks, a couple of which were quietly paddling around in the water and snapping up the food which he now and then took out of the pocket of his overalls and threw down for them. I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind. That is how it has been for as long as I can remember. As I took my leave and mentioned that I had walked over from Yoxford and was now going on to Harleston, Thomas said that he would drive me as he had an errand in town anyway. So we spent the quarter of an hour to Harleston sitting side by side in the cab of his truck, and I wished that the short drive through the country would never come to an end, that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem. But instead I had to get out at the Saracen's Head in Harleston, an inn several centuries old whose guest rooms, as it transpired, were furnished with the most fearful pieces one can imagine. The headboard of the pink bed consisted of a black marbled formica construction nearly five feet high, with various drawers and compartments, rather like an altar; the thin-legged dressing-table was lavishly decorated with gold arabesques; and the mirror, which was fitted into the door of the wardrobe, made one look strangely deformed. As the wooden floorboards were very uneven and sloped towards the window, all the furniture stood at something of a tilt, so that I was pursued even while asleep by the feeling that the house was about to fall down. It was therefore with a certain relief that I left the Saracen's Head the following morning and walked eastward out of the town into the open fields. The stretch of land which I now traversed in a wide arc was no more densely populated than the one I journeyed through on the previous day. Every couple of miles there is a hamlet, and without exception these hamlets are named after the patron saints of their churches: St Mary and St Michael, St Peter, St James, St Andrew, St Lawrence, St John and St Cross, and as a result the people living there call the entire area The Saints. They say such things as: He bought land in The Saints, clouds are coming up over The Saints, that's somewhere out in The Saints and so on. My own feeling, as I walked over the featureless plain, was that I might well lose my bearings in The Saints, so often was I forced to change direction or strike out across country due to the labyrinthine system of footpaths and the many places where a right of way marked on the map had been ploughed up or was now overgrown. A couple of times I began to think I was lost, but then, around noon, I saw my goal, the round tower of the church of Ilketshall St Margaret, appear in the distance. Half an hour later I was sitting leaning against one of the gravestones in the cemetery of that parish, whose souls number no more today than in the Middle Ages. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parsons who were the incumbents of such remote livings usually dwelt with their families in the nearest small town and drove out into the country by pony cart just once or twice a week in order to hold services and make a few calls. One such vicar of Ilketshall St Margaret was the Reverend Ives, a mathematician and Hellenist of some standing, who lived with his wife and daughter in Bungay and was said to have liked his glass of sparkling Canary wine at dusk. During the summer of 1795 they were visited every day by a young French nobleman who had fled to England to escape the terrors of the Revolution. Ives talked with him about Homer's epics, Newton's mathematical theories, and the journeys which both of them had made in America. What great expanses that continent covered, and how immense the forests were, with trees whose trunks towered higher than the pillars of the tallest cathedrals! And the plunging waters of Niagara — what did their eternal thunder mean if there were not also someone standing at the edge of the cataract conscious of his forlornness in this world. Charlotte, the rector's fifteen-year-old daughter, would listen to these conversations with growing fascination, especially when their distinguished guest conjured up pictures in which warriors adorned with feathers appeared, and Indian maidens about whose dark skin there was a touch of moral pallor. Once she was so overcome with emotion that she ran out quickly into the garden on hearing of a hermit's good dog that led one such maiden, in her heart already a Christian, safely through the dangerous wilderness. When the teller of the tale later asked her what it was in his account that had so moved her, Charlotte answered that it was mainly the image of the dog carrying a lantern on a stick in his mouth, lighting the way through the night for the frightened Atala. It was always such little details rather than the lofty ideas that went straight to her heart. In the manner of such things, it was surely inevitable that the Viacomte, who was exiled from his homeland and undoubtedly surrounded by the aura of a romantic hero in Charlotte's eyes took on the rule of tutor and confidant as the weeks went by. Whilst it goes without saying that she practised her French, by taking dictation and engaging in conversation, Charlotte also asked her friend to devise more extensive courses of study for her, to include antiquity, the topography of the Holy Land, and Italian literature. They spent long hours in the afternoon together reading Tasso's