A quite spacious bookshop. A customer enters and approaches the counter, behind which stands an assistant. Assistant: Good morning, sir. Mr Pest: Good morning. Can you help me? Do you have a copy of Thirty Days in the Samarkand Desert with a Spoon by A. E. J. Elliott? Assistant: Um . . . well, we haven’t got it in stock, sir. Mr Pest: Never mind. H

One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet some one. Some one would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that – I only asked that he should

"Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table. He has been dead ten hours now.

Silet per diem universus, nec sine horrore secretus est; lucet nocturnis ignibus, chorus Aegipanum undique personatur: audiuntur et cantus tibiarum, et tinnitus cymbalorum per oram maritimam.