Still,′ whispered Jack, ’you have to keep at it. Overcome the miseries of vomiting and the whirling pit. Pay your dues and work towards the real rewards of big-time adult drinking. Something to look forward to.

The hill road wound upwards, as hill roads do, unless you’re coming down them, of course.

And the city itself.’ John was not done yet. ‘Where have we seen that before? No? Well, I’ll tell you it’s Ankh Mor –.

I hope you grow up to be as good a mother as your father.

Neville flexed his nostrils, he didn’t like the smell of this. The young man was clearly a monomaniac.

Who was there to guide them? The words of self-obsessed politicians, egotistical media personalities, power-crazed newspaper magnates and half-mad clerics? Who could reason sensibly when supplied with all the wrong information for all the wrong reasons?

It was a sight to make Zane Grey reach for his ballpoint, or Sergio Leone send out for another fifty foot of standard eight.

To say that it was wondrous would be to say that the universe is quite a big place.

What it all comes down to, as it so often does, is the very beginning of the universe. This, say the big-heads of the scientific fraternity, all began with a big bang. Wrong! The universe, in fact, began with the sound of a duck call, followed by a whistle and an enormous cosmic wind-break. Had anyone been around at the time to overhear these sounds, they would probably have received a pretty good indication of what God had up his sleeve, amongst other places.

H. G. Wells once said that every word of which a man is ignorant represents an idea of which he is ignorant.