“Why do you not let yourself believe instead that he lives amongst the Beyonders and thrives in that way which motivated him to leave our valley in the first place?”
“Because the Departed, Trimmers — the ones who stay away too long— they never return. Why do they not return?”
“Perhaps circumstances don’t permit it.”
“Shall we give those circumstances their rightful name, Trimmers? I have a better idea. Let us change the topic. This one is much too gruesome for such a bright and beautiful morning as this. In fact, I will no longer detain you, my good friend. You must go and take your tea with the bickering biddies.”
“That was rather an unkind characterisation.”
“Say it isn’t true.”
I shook my head and smiled. “It is only for an hour. Almost anything can be endured for a single hour.”
“’Tis true. ’Tis largely true.”
— NOTES—
THE LOST DELL OF DINGLEY, occasional appellation for Dingley Dell, both evocative and indicative of the fact that its location upon the planet has never been firmly established, and life within the Dell perpetually shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Efforts have been made to discover its location short of making an exceedingly perilous extra-valley investigation; its latitude was long ago calculated through measuring the sun’s angle at noon, and it has been, therefore, established that Dingley Dell lies at roughly 41°13′ North parallel. However, in absence of a reference meridian, longitude cannot be estimated by any means other than blind supposition.
A close conning of the leaves of McCormick’s Atlas of the World (copyright 1872) and topographical descriptions of known places that lie upon the determined circle of latitude has, over the years, divided delving Dinglians into competing camps of “position suppositioners,” none of whom, for latitudinal reasons, have argued for any point in Great Britain. Nor have there ever been proponents of any of the arid and rugged provinces of Turkey, Spain, and Portugal, nor any point in the western United States — excepting California — (largely too dry elsewhere), nor the Midwestern United States (largely too flat), nor the several Asian “Stans” (too dry and/or too altitudinous).
Over time the following disparate groups have emerged: those who advocate for Campania, Italy, those who believe Dingley Dell to be somewhere installed upon the northern end of Honshu Island in Japan, a smattering of promoters of the Northern provinces of the Kingdom of Corea, a slightly larger number of supporters of one of the several fertile valleys of Eastern China, a sizeable contingent of defenders of the Trinity River Valley in Northern California, U.S.A., and an even larger collection of adherents of “somewhere upon the Allegheny Plateau,” which stretches from northeastern Ohio through north-central Pennsylvania. This last, most populated camp bases its belief upon the existence of the availing coal and iron deposits found within the environs of the Dell — a prominent geographical feature characteristic of that selfsame plateau — and the presence of fauna indigenous to northern North America, most noticeably the rattlesnake, the mockingbird, and the common Blue Jay of Canada and the eastern states of the U.S., and, conversely, the conspicuous absence of the European Jay (though this fact may be ascribed to its extinction).
THE DEPARTED AND THE RETURNED, the former term refers to those who leave Dingley Dell and do not return. This number comprises some 250 individuals of every age and walk of life. The latter term refers to those, numbering thirty-five, who did return, each within two weeks of his departure. It has therefore been extrapolated from this data that one’s chance of returning from the Terra Incognita diminishes in direct proportion to the number of days spent there, repatriation being all but infeasible when visitation exceeds a fortnight.
It should be noted that those who do return to Dingley Dell are quite incapable of conveying anything that is useful to know about the Terra Incognita, delivering, instead, curiously frantic, feverish, and opiate-like ravings of a fantastical world that challenges belief. Authorities have had no choice but to sequester these men and women in the west wing of Bethlehem Hospital upon Highbury Fields, or “Bedlam” in informal denomination, named for that English lunatic asylum of macabre Anglo fame and legend, lest the returnee infect those round him with the illness of the brain with which he has been diagnosed.
THE RIVER THAMES, primary waterway flowing through Dingley Dell. The river enters the valley through the Tewkesbury Cut in the Northern Ridge, passes in both concerted and meandrous fashion through the entire length of the valley, and finds its subterranean egress through a decadesold re-diversion channel appropriated from retired mining tunnels within the Southern Coal Ridge, the natural outlet — the Belgrave Cut — having been dammed up and its waters so successfully redirected for industrial application that a residual oxbow lake once situated at its foot has been long exsiccated.
Much has been written of the river and its importance to Dingley Dell. What follows is an appropriately descriptive passage from Miss Clara Trotwood’s A Geographical and Lyrical History of Dingley Dell:
But who should not believe Dingley Dell to be the most beautiful vale in all the world (if one were to stand with the scarred and scabbed Southern Coal Ridge to one’s back), with its fields of rye and oats and corn and mangold set in eye-pleasing checkerboard upon the agricultural northland, and plump rolling downs emeralding the valley’s southern reach. And here is the lace that trims the beautiful green garment: a river of both breadth and majesty, which has flowed the length of the valley since time out of mind; that river which sculpted the valley itself and which is therefore both its mother and primordial primogenitor. This is the river, which we named, in our earliest years and with anglophiliac jest: the Thames.
Attend ye the hurried race of this great storied waterway, powering all of the mills of Milltown and irrigating the paddies of the Wang-Wang Rice Farm, a mainstay for those almond-eyed Dinglians whose ancestors had been brought to the valley, without doubt, from the wet rice field-blanketed continent of Asia. (Indeed, there are other foods that would surely be found by the curious Outlander to be equally exotic: for certainly no English dale produces New World maize in such abundance nor could so many citrus varieties be grown as those which thrive within our teeming hot house orangeries. Nor could any other dale boast orchards of the sort of fruit and nut trees one generally finds only in the more whimsically eclectic British botanical parks.) Into Dingley Dell the Thames sallies forth with wild, thrashing abandon through the deep ravine that it has carved from the less adamantine rock of the Northern Ridge, notching that great, solid mass with alluvial impropriety before slowing by degrees to wander lazily past field and farm, nourishing the piscatorial from its crystal, aerated waters: sustaining all with foot and hoof and wing within the valley with the life-sustaining liquid it gives to surrounding wells and puddles and oxbow ponds; and then flowing ever onward through predominating Milltown and the satellite villages of Tavistock and Hungerford and Folkstone and Fingerpost, town and hamlet alike, drawing power from its replenished speed; then coming to rest in placid leisure within Lake Collier before slipping quietly belowground to flow through the retired mining tunnels and porous recesses of the Southern Coal Ridge where it bids formal adieu to this happy valley.
Without the Thames, there would be no Dingley Dell. O ye Gods of Fluvia! Suffer this life-sustaining river to flow forever through the valley that takes sustenance from it, quenching the thirsty tongue of every creature that calls our valley its home.