I didn’t realize where we were for a moment. I just knew it smelled familiar, in a way that made me faintly alarmed. Then I noticed that there were shops all along the side of the tunnel that I was facing. I craned round behind myself and saw a parapet, a cliff of shops and houses in the distance opposite, and bridges spanning in between. When we went swaying past a huge hoist, I was sure. We were in Loggia City.
But it looked quite a bit different. The pavement Mini’s feet were on had hollow, worn places. There was litter blowing everywhere, and the paint on the hoist was peeling. None of the shops at the back of the arcade appeared to be at all prosperous. Some were boarded up. The rest had desperate-looking notices in the windows, saying 90% OFF!! and EVERYTHING MUST GO!, and they didn’t seem to have much for sale inside except for shoddy-looking rolls of plain cloth. Nobody was in there buying anything either.
“What’s happened here?” I called over to Romanov.
“The workers on the top terrace left,” he called back. “Someone told them they were producing works of art that people would pay a great deal for. They concentrated on tapestry after that. I helped them migrate to another world some years ago now. They’re doing very well there.”
I found I was crouching down in my end of the seat, trying to hide my hot face. Who would have thought it? I casually tell an old man that his tapestry was fabulous, and ten years later the whole economy of a city is grinding to a halt. Who would have thought it?
Somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Halt!”
Mini’s pacing feet faltered. “Keep going,” Romanov said.
Her feet picked up their pace again. The person shouting got out of the way in a hasty scamper of yellow uniform, but he kept on shouting. “No animals on this level! What do you think you’re doing?”
I looked down at his angry face as we slid swaying past him. And I knew him. He was the Important Policeman, evidently still on the job. But he had a seedy, down-on-his-luck look these days, as well as looking older and wrinkled and anxious. His yellow uniform was saggy around him, with darns in it, and he had lost weight. His mustache was still just as bushy, though.
He looked up at me as I looked down. An expression came over his face of Where-have-I-seen-that-boy-before? Then he got it. His finger came up and pointed. “Hey, you! You’re Nick Mallory! You skipped factory duty ten years ago. We want you!”
But Mini went imperturbably marching on. Important slid away behind. The great pillars of the stairway slid past, and a notice saying LIFTS OUT OF ORDER, and then we were out on a different and much more ruinous section of the arcade, where the sun came blinding down in long lines through gaps in the roof.
I looked back, and Important was gone. Behind Mini, there were still houses in the walls of the great canyon, but they were ruins, with empty black spaces for windows, and half the bridges were down.
“What’s happened?” Toby asked.
“This is the next world on,” Romanov said. “The people we’re looking for are one world along from this one, but the sun is pretty harmful in all these canyon worlds, so I’m taking a route that keeps us in shade as much as possible.”
Mini marched on, from arcade to empty arcade, always curving to the right out of the direct glare of the sun, until we went under the ruin of what looked like a factory and came out on the bare tops of the canyons. I think the canyons were not so deep in that world. At any rate, I could see them curving and branching in all directions around us, like the twigs and branches of a tree, as if the empty desert had cracked from the heat. At the end of the largest dark crack was something that glimmered.
“The people we want are in that xanadu there,” Romanov said, pointing to the glimmer. “It’s fairly well defended. I’m going to try to get us in underneath.” It was pretty extraordinary. He had taken us from world to world so smoothly that I never noticed us go. Or Mini had. Come to think of it, Mini must have had a gift for it. I envied her.
“Down you go, Mini,” Romanov said to her. And we set off down a long slope where houses had dissolved away to rubble and formed a sort of ramp into the bottom of the chasm.
FIVE RODDY
It was peculiar but practical, I suppose, of Romanov to load us all on his elephant. Romanov is one of the most practical people I have met, and so full of energy he made me feel tired. But the thought of his once being married to Sybil still amazes me. It is odder even than Grandad Hyde marrying Heppy. Still, it does explain where Grundo and Alicia get their noses from.
Toward the end of our journey I began to feel better, though I was still feeling odd. Every time the elephant seat lurched, I looked anxiously round at Grundo and then felt embarrassed at being anxious. It was habit, I suppose. Grundo was all right anyway. He was watching the walls of the gorge as we went down a sort of ramp into it and pointing out to Nick that the earliest of the ruined houses, on the ledges near the bottom, were carved straight out of the rock. Both of them were highly interested.
I was ashamed to see that Grundo nearly always was all right. Things that bothered me, like people being foul to him, just roll off Grundo’s mind. He takes no notice because he is interested in things instead. Nick is the same. I felt very stupid not to have realized what Grundo was like before this.
The lurching was much less when we reached the bottom of the chasm. It was quite cold and dank there because the sun never shone on it directly. There was a trickle of river running through the middle, but nothing grew there but green slime. The elephant picked her way along the edge of the river, between lumps of fallen house as big as she was, until the walls of the chasm seemed to meet together overhead and we were crunching along inside a huge, arched cave.
“Oh, my dear!” squealed one of the Izzys. “Bats!”
“Darkness,” wailed the other one. “I’m frightened!”
I don’t think they were frightened in the least. They were enjoying themselves. Their voices echoed and reechoed in the cave, shriek upon shriek. And as soon as they heard the echoes, they made more noise than ever.
“Coo-eee!”
“Hall—oh—ho!”
Romanov turned round. “Be quiet,” he said.
The Izzys stopped, just like that. I don’t think Romanov used a spell on them. He just had the most forceful personality in many universes. Soon after that he made a light. It was not the small blue flame our teachers had shown us how to make, but a soft, spreading glow that seemed to come from the elephant’s forehead. She seemed to appreciate it. She walked much faster. And the chain of caves we were going through sprang into life a
s we passed, quite astonishingly. Things like stone curtains hung from the arched roofs, folded and draped and banded with colors, reds, white, yellows—even greenish—and were reflected upside down in the black, shiny waters of the river. Nick remarked that they looked like streaky bacon—well, he would!—which made Toby give a yelp of laughter.