No sooner had Drake’s men rowed a long boat onto the island did they discover the leader of the tribe of natives was very well read. As a small aside, as Gulliver was in the long boat, he found himself whistling the tune Row, row your boat gentle down the stream before he even realized he was doing so. The leader of the natives had read Shakespeare, Plato, Newton and the Bible. He did tell Drake, however, that one year when the rains stayed mainly on the plains of Spain giving their tiny islands a wide berth, his people were so hungry they ate the pages of the books in their library, as the pages in the books were made of rice paper. The library was made out of bamboo with the roof being covered in the leaves and branches from several large palm trees, surely this library must have more books in it than the one in Brixham in old Devon, Gulliver thought dryly.
Apparently a Portuguese ship had sunk when it came in contact with a blue whale, whose internal sat nav had gone haywire in the shake-up of time by the gods. A great deal of the ship’s library was washed up upon the shores of their island. However, the books that were illuminated in gold and were of more than 400 pages long sank like the proverbial anchor.
The chief said his people dried out the pages of the books they recovered from the wreck in the sun, like they often laid tobacco leaves in the sun to dry. Gulliver, being as inquisitive as any twelve-year-old boy, asked the chief what books he and his people had eaten. ‘The boring ones first and the ones they had already read,’ was the chief’s logical reply. He did add, however, that nothing could bring him to eat the books of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, he’d rather starve, he said, than eat the words of the great William Shakespeare, either that or he would be forced to eat one of his fellow natives! The chief then bellowed with laughter so loudly, it was as if they were standing next to Big Ben!
For Gulliver this conversation bought to mind the expression ‘I’ll make them eat their words’, most writers would have said this at one time or another regarding the critics. However, not many of these critics lived on a small island in the middle of nowhere, where people got so hungry they had to eat other people’s words.
Drake was a little disappointed there were no cannibals on this island as it would have made a great story for his journal and the ship’s log. However, Gulliver was more than happy that he actually got the chance to write in his travelogue that there weren’t any cannibals on this island! Gulliver found the natives of this island to be as friendly as any people he had ever come across, so friendly were they that Gulliver wondered if this island was called the Friendly Islands, however, it wasn’t, so let that be an end to it!
This tiny South Pacific island in the middle of nowhere ticked all the right boxes as far as idyllic South Pacific islands went. The sea was crystal clear and as blue as the ocean, the sand underfoot was as white as the fur on the back of a polar bear, the palm trees, which were in great abundance, swayed gently in the warm Pacific breeze, and all the girls wore grass skirts and had colourful flowers draped around their necks. However, if cannibals had lived upon this island then one of those boxes would have had to have had an X placed within it, like an X marks the spot on one of Long John Silver’s or Black Beard’s treasure maps.
Gulliver wondered if this island had any national treasures like his world had Stephen Fry and Fiona Bruce.
As Gulliver and Drake sat around an open fire chewing the fat\tobacco with the chief and some of the island’s people, they told the chief of the tribe of their quest to find The Last Bookshop in the World. The chief said there was a wise man named Solomon who lived on the dark side of the island who might be able to tell them where The Last Bookshop in the World resided. This man was a very wise man indeed and was filled with much knowledge the chief said, smiling warmly. Drake asked the chief how they would recognize this man when they saw him. The chief said when they saw him they’d recognize him. The chief wondered if Drake was one of these right Charlies he’d heard so much about and said as much; the chief, of course, was only yanking Drake’s anchor. ‘No,’ the chief said picking a piece of boar meat out of his teeth, ‘you can’t miss this wise man because he has such a big head, which is how everybody on the island knows this man’s head is full of knowledge.’
While Gulliver was on the island he had time to study the charts and the maps, some of which had been mapped by the Spanish. Gulliver wondered if the Spanish had been yanking Drake’s anchor as one of the maps didn’t look right, in fact, it looked as if it were a fake. Perhaps knowing the English revered their mapmakers, the Spanish had slipped Drake a forgery so he’d get lost at sea.
Gulliver had wondered why Drake had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to get to the South Pacific, passing literally thousands of islands both large and small in the process. Some of these islands were so tiny that whichever part of the island you were on the sound of the waves was ever present. Gulliver thought Drake could just as easily have taken the short cut, sailing through the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea where they might possibly see a ship called Jesus that had run aground, and some sail fish. If they had taken this route they would have sailed past the Maldives and Sri Lanka, reaching the Equator and the Indian Ocean, passing Indonesia as they did so, where Gulliver might have seen the giant Komodo dragons, which to Gulliver’s mind resembled miniature dinosaurs.
Whenever Gulliver had seen a Komodo dragon on the television, he heard the song Puff the Magic Dragon in his head. Now how did it go? ‘Puff the magic dragon lives by the sea something, something, something, something in a land called Galilee’. Gulliver never could remember the words of the song. Words often disappeared from his head like the lost world where Komodo dragons lived. Or at lest they did according to old black and white films, that was before they invented CGI! And then finally on this imaginary voyage of discovery they would make for the Pacific Ocean where they would drop anchor onto the head of some poor unsuspecting sea monster who would probably have wished them further. If the anchor had landed upon the head of Puff the Magic Dragon, God knows where they would have ended up.
Gulliver knew old sailors threw sounding weights into the sea to see how deep the waters they were sailing in actual were. If any of these weights landed upon Neptune’s head they were bound to hear about it, thought Gulliver dryly. One thing he wouldn’t be if Neptune ended up with a sore head, dry that is! Later, as Gulliver and the Golden Hind sailed into oriental waters, he would pass what looked like lighthouses, which were in fact giant candle clocks. But here, once again like inpatient elves and hungry cannibals, we are rather getting ahead of ourselves!
So in other words, regarding Drake’s navigational abilities, although the same words would probably have done just as well, they would be taking a short cut rather than going the long way round, like Magellan thought he was doing in his voyage of discovery. Later, Magellan’s pals, including Elcano, would discover this wasn’t a short cut but a long cut which led them to be the first to circumnavigate the world. If Drake had taken this imaginary route they might have had time to take a quick scout around the general area of Troy where they might have found the Lost City of Atlantis. However, to cut a long story short, or at least shorter, none of this happened!
The thing was, Gulliver may have been looking at the map through his twenty-first century eyes as he was seeing places that had yet to be discovered, and of course there were the shifting continents to take into consideration, which quite clearly he had not. (Gulliver never had been very good at mapping things in his head!) To Gulliver the map might have looked ancient but to Drake it was the most up-to-date map that was available. However, saying all that, the map Drake was using was clearly a forgery so Gulliver accidentally on purpose dropped it in the sea until it turned to papier mâché. Or should I say, he made an origami boat of the map and sailed it out to sea, the origami boat which had slowly filled with water before becoming junk mail! Sorry, that was another nautical jest not worth the paper it was written upon!
Talking about continents shifting or drifting or whatever they did, Gulliver often saw continents in the sky drifting around, or should I say clouds that looked like continents or countries floating around in the vast blue yonder. Gulliver once saw a cloud in the sky that to him resembled the British Isles, which was to his left while another cloud to his right looked remarkably like Italy with the Island of Capri floating just below it. And slap bang in the middle of these two cloud islands he saw the continent of Africa before all three clouds drifted off some place else, or with a little bit of help from Mother Nature, magically transformed themselves into something entirely different. There were definitely times when Gulliver’s judgment was clouded and this was probably one of them!
This still left an authentic Spanish map, although being in Spanish as it was it wasn’t always easy to understand. Gulliver had done O level Spanish at night school so knew a smattering of the language, he also knew Latin, which was useful being an antique dealer, especially when it came to deciphering old maps. He also knew the lost language of Esperanto, which nowadays was no good to man or beast!
After some rest, which was fairly lengthy as everybody aboard the Golden Hind was tuckered out, they then trekked to the dark side of the island.
‘So why do you think they call it the dark side of the island?’ Old Father Time asked Gulliver as they climbed the mountainous path, which in truth was a little hot underfoot.
‘Because that side of the island is thick with undergrowth and trees which are huddled together to keep warm!’ said Alice making some more sense while throwing in a little humour for good measure. How Alice would have loved to read the Alice chronicles, Gulliver thought, although Gulliver’s Travels might sail right over her head what with it being somewhat less than compendious in most of the places Gulliver travels on the map.
‘Do you need me to draw you a map?’ Gulliver could hear Jonathan Swift say slightly irritably.
‘Yes, if you wouldn’t mind,’ Gulliver said politely as this imaginary conversation ended rather swiftly!
‘Maybe the dark side of the island is full of devil worshippers!’ Drake said with a straight face.
‘Or because they haven’t paid their electricity bill!’ said Gulliver with a face that was the polar opposite to Francis Drake’s.
Everybody was just about to say, ‘Electricity? What’s electricity when it’s at home!?’ when they were distracted by something more pressing.
‘Are your feet hot?’ Old Father Time asked Alice as she wiped the sweat off her brow.
‘Yes, they are a bit, but then again I put that down to the fact that I’ve been using them to walk upon,’ Alice said making a lot of sense.
‘Rambling!’ Drake muttered as he stopped to gather his breath.
‘Pardon me!’ Alice said abruptly.
‘You’re pardoned,’ Drake said sounding like Queen Elizabeth I as he rubbed his beard with great gusto. No doubt one of Old Father Time’s fleas had jumped overboard and had landed on Drake’s ample chin.
‘I’m not rambling, I’m talking perfect sense,’ Alice said scowling, hands on hip as she stared daggers in Drake’s direction as she threw her toys out of the perambulator.
‘No, you misunderstand me, child I didn’t mean you’re rambling I meant we’re rambling, as in we’re walking, and walking makes the feet hot, especially in a warm climate.
‘Oh!’ said Alice as she looked at her shoes to see if they needed a good shoe-shine boy to give them a good polish, which they did.
Gulliver then stopped dead in his tracks as several wild animals who were wild about something or other, came rushing past him in somewhat of a hurry. Then large flocks of birds flew overhead making what can best be described as a hullabaloo, the sort of yahoo the Mugwumps in the Houses of Parliament make at feeding time!
‘Duck!’ Gulliver said as a big bird nearly took his head off and Alice’s along with it.
Here we go again, Alice thought irritably as she heard the word duck and looked up.
‘It wasn’t, you know!’ Alice said as she stood up and brushed the hair out of her eyes.
‘What wasn’t?’ Gulliver enquired in Alice’s general direction.
‘It wasn’t a duck, it was an albatross. Did you know the albatross is said to be an unlucky bird?’ Alice went on in Alice-like fashion.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t a dodo?’ Drake said as the bird continued to fly off the handle.
‘Never mind the albatross being unlucky, we were lucky it didn’t take our heads clean off, did you see the size of it!?’ Gulliver said looking around him to see if any other birds were heading in his direction.
It was round about this time in the land that time forgot, or forgot time, whichever you prefer, that Gulliver had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, although it could just have easily have been a bad case of indigestion!
‘This mountain we’re climbing, did the chief tell you anything particular about it?’ Gulliver said looking towards Drake as a frown appeared upon his brow.
‘What in particular did you want to know about it?’ Drake said raising his eyebrows.
‘Well, you know, something like, the mountain in question is an extinct volcano, that’s if you take out the word ‘extinct’, and leave the word ‘volcano’ in!’ Gulliver said sarcastically, reverting to the age when men get a bad case of the grumps. Here Gulliver wished he had an iPad surgically attached to his arm like some of the people of his world appeared to have and then he could have Googled this information. Gulliver didn’t own an iPad or a computer so had to use the steam-powered search engine in his head, or the umpteen volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica he had sitting at home upon his bookshelf and which just for the record was made on the continent. Gulliver didn’t hold with the World Wide Web as there were too many trolls lurking there who could definitely not be said to be wizards with words!
‘Volcano!’ Old Father Time said as a look of panic appeared on his face. It’s amazing how powerful one word can be when it’s used at the right time with the right tone attached to it.
Gulliver just hoped Alice didn’t think this was the right time to wheel out the word Wow!
‘It’s not is it, a volcano that is?!’ Alice said deciding this wasn’t the right time to use her favourite word.
‘Well, you see that fast-moving carpet of red and gold that’s heading towards us at an alarming rate of knots? Well, I think that’s what they call molten lava and I’m as sure as dodo eggs are dodo eggs that molten lava comes out of a live volcano! Molten lava by and large doesn’t come flowing out of an extinct volcano. Mind you, this is a parallel world so perhaps it does!’ Gulliver said, rambling.
‘What’s a parallel world?’ Drake said with a puzzled expression on his face.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Old Father Time said as he turned around to start running for his life, ‘on the other hand this volcano, which has now become quite active considering its considerable age, is something to worry about!’
Gulliver thought that this wasn’t the time or the place to be sharing his knowledge of volcanoes in that they were hot enough to melt gold and, he didn’t think it was worth interrupting Old Father Time when he was in mid flow, although he would quite happily have interrupted the erupting volcano in mid flow, given half a chance. However, that quite clearly was wishful thinking so instead Gulliver chose a word from the Oxford English Dictionary that was short and to the point.
‘RUN!’ Gulliver said without expanding upon it further.
‘RUN?’ Alice, Old Father Time and Drake said in perfect unison as they looked at Gulliver in horror. Beagle also barked something out which sounded remarkably like ‘RUN?’ It seemed in this case that Gulliver’s friends were all on the same page of the dictionary as he was.
‘Yes, RUN!’ Gulliver repeated the word as a wild river of red hot lava headed towards them. The reason Gulliver had to repeat the word ‘run’ was probably because for a split second they had all become frozen to the spot in fear, even though that split second no longer existed in the real sense of the word. As a child Gulliver had always wondered how many times you could split a second before it no longer existed, as he had often done regarding the splitting of the atom. Time was a river and as such the past, the present and the future never actually existed in real time, which was a hard concept to grasp, as was time, as like water and like sand it just slipped through your hands. So although Einstein may or may not have been right about the speed of light, he was right about time being the biggest illusion of them all, or at least Gulliver thought so. That was, of course, until the boffins invented a time machine and then everybody would say, ‘Einstein was no Einstein!’
For the time being, that’s enough about the vagaries of time so let’s get back to the present…
Now the good thing about mountains, apart from the fact that most of them aren’t active volcanoes, is that it is easier to run down them than run up them. And it’s just an added bonus that you can do this running faster when going down them as you’re being chased by a river of hot molten larva. When the old adrenalin kicks in you can usually manage to get up a fair head of steam, well, as long as the river of hot molten lava doesn’t outrun you!
Now the general rule of Tom Thumb when trying to avoid being mummified in molten ash is, not only to run in the opposite direction of the river of molten lava, standard procedure in situations such as these, but also to run towards water, the ocean in this case. Lava doesn’t like water and once it comes in contact with it, it tends to run out of steam, well, it does and it doesn’t (think about it, but not for too long as we haven’t got time, because in this world there isn’t any!)
So Gulliver, being the seasoned traveller he was and fortuitously having recently read The Idiot’s Guide to Outrunning a Volcano, did just that, as everybody followed his lead. Twenty minutes later Gulliver, Drake, Alice, Old Father Time, Beagle, the chief and over a hundred of the population of the island were now standing knee deep in the ocean twiddling their thumbs. The lava had attempted to follow them into the water but after dipping its toes into the water decided better of it. Now Gulliver had always wanted to be a trailblazer and not a follower, however, this wasn’t quite what he had in mind when that particular thought first made itself known to him!
‘So now what?’ Gulliver said to the chief as they both stood in the ocean and as ash fell from the sky like snow. Gulliver felt he was in a situation that could definitely be said to be between a coral and a hard place. The molten lava was still letting off steam in front of them as the chief, who had previously been bent double stood to his full height, which was about the size of a Shetland pony.
‘Well, we just have to wait until the lava cools down,’ the chief said coolly as if this was an everyday event, which it wasn’t.
‘And how long will that take?’ said Gulliver as he watched several large colourful fish nip at his toes.
‘How long’s a piece of fishing line? To be honest, your guess is as good as mine. The last time the volcano erupted was a hundred years ago?’ said the chief shrugging his shoulders.
To be honest, Gulliver and his friends were just lucky this island wasn’t full of cannibals otherwise they might well have seen this as a sign from the gods for a good fry up! The good thing was that since the gods had deserted this world for sunnier climes, the natives no longer felt they had to please them with human sacrifices to make sure the harvests were plentiful and the weather was benign. Gulliver was extremely grateful to the gods for their sudden disappearing act for it meant he wouldn’t end up on a plate next to a half-cooked potato! Mind you, if it had of happened, his subconscious told him it would serve him right for going off on a half-baked quest in a land he knew little about. And what sort of quest was it anyway, looking for a mythical bookshop? Why not go on a quest for hidden treasure, or thinking outside the old box, what about a quest to find Pandora’s Box? Now that would be a quest worth risking life and limb for. Life and limb, who on earth did he imagine he was? Long John Silver the pirate with one leg!
Although Gulliver wasn’t altogether happy to be chased by a river of molten lava, he knew enough about the history of earth to know that if it wasn’t for the magma and lava inside the planet’s core, man might not have even swum out of the primordial soup. For at one stage in the earth’s development it was nothing but a large snowball and it took the magma and lava to thaw it out. Gulliver also knew that by using neon scanners and computers, it made predicting volcanic eruptions possible, as could observing increased CO2 levels in volcanoes.
Mind you, he didn’t want to bore the chief to tears and perhaps the chief already knew how the earth worked, after all he wasn’t a right Charlie, that and he didn’t want to blow the chief’s mind with talk of computer technology, that and computers were like a different world to him, that and… no, that was it! Since Gulliver had discovered the Discovery Channel he was a mine of both useful and useless information. Gulliver wondered if this antique globe atlas was hollow like the supposed Hollow Earth Theory which stated that the earth was… HOLLOW!! He also wondered if this earth globe had a meridian arm like on the toy atlas globe he had sitting on his Victorian cabinet of curiosity at home, or was it like the antique globes which were encased inside what appeared to be a box or a table? And were the poles magnetic like on his earth? Well, a globe was made out of metal so probably, although the words ‘probably not’ could just as easily have fitted into this line, a line which at a later time and date Gulliver was to write in his travelogue. One had to wonder why Gulliver hadn’t wondered how it was even possible that a volcano had sprung up on a giant antique globe! Well, for anybody curious as to how, then wonder no more, for like an American B-movie title ‘it came from outer space’, like the giant meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs and flattened the forest in Russia known as the ‘Tungsted Event’, or something along those rough lines!
Drake suggested that instead of everybody standing in the ocean like lemons freezing their whatsits off, how would they like to join him on the Golden Hind for a right royal knees up at Queen Elizabeth I’s expense? As she, along with Sir Christopher Hatton was funding this voyage. All who were freezing their whatsits off unanimously decided this was a good idea and it beat having their toes nipped by large colourful fish, that obviously hadn’t eaten for a week or more. Still, at least the fish weren’t piranha, Drake joked. Later still, Drake told Gulliver that he was used to dealing with mountainous waves and winds that tore the sails asunder and snapped the masts of his ships in two like dry twigs, but dealing with erupting mountains was a whole new experience for him. But Drake liked new experiences, which is probably why he was always sailing off to here, there and everywhere at a drop of a navy admiral’s hat. Gulliver wondered if there was a place called Here or There or Everywhere for that matter, or if they were just metaphorical lands like the Middle of Nowhere. In this world, Gulliver mused, there probably was a place called the Middle of Nowhere, which he found amusing even if everybody else thought he was one ship short of an anchor!
Drake did say that he had experienced an earthquake in South America which had a most peculiar effect upon the tide, which rose up the beach quickly to a high-water mark, but not in great waves as one might have expected, almost as if someone had speeded up time. And then just as quickly, the tides returned to their normal level where they had been before the earthquake had happened. Drake thought it might be the gods stirring things up again, although it could just as easily have been Mother Nature, Old Father Time said on overhearing the conversation.
Later, Gulliver introduced everybody to the game of charades which brought much frivolity and laughter and sometimes puzzled expressions to the natives, and the ship’s crew for that matter. Never more so than when Gulliver tried to do a mime of the film Jaws by acting out the whole thing, which he did by opening and closing his arms in a jaw-like motion. It wasn’t that the ship’s crew and the natives couldn’t guess that he was portraying a shark, although it could just as easily have been a crocodile, no, it was that the film hadn’t been made yet, or the cinema to show it in either! Most of the charades performed were taken from books like Moby Dick or were stories out of the Bible, or in the chief’s case Shakespeare’s plays or Greek tragedies, which in truth weren’t a barrel of laughs.
Gulliver sometimes forgot he wasn’t in his own world and sometimes he forgot there was no time to remember or forget, or to forget to remember, or remember to forget. After that night, Gulliver wrote this in his travelogue: ‘Perhaps soon I will become so immersed in this world and its culture that I will completely forget my own world, although somehow I doubt that.’ He also wrote the following: ‘It has always annoyed me that in my own world the clocks go forward and back twice a year disturbing everybody’s body clocks in the process, as most people neither wish to gain nor lose an hour, apart from the odd farmer in the far reaches of Scotland. At least in this world the clocks stay constant, although it is true, not having any time to move forward or back does tend to help in this respect. Surely it is just a matter of time before the clocks in my time are left as they are. After which time people will shout out from the very rooftop of the Greenwich Royal Observatory, ‘About time too!’ It did occur to Gulliver after he read this passage back that he must be the most irritable and cynical twelve-year-old boy that has ever lived in any world, be it parallel or otherwise! Perhaps he needed to take a leaf out of Old Father Time’s and Neptune’s book and just let things wash over him.
Many a time in this world people had been taken aback by things that had come out of his mouth, which didn’t seem as if they should have come out of the mouth of a boy his age. However, the more time people spent around Gulliver, the more time they were given to thinking he was just old before his time, like the children at his school had done when they found out that he watched antique programmes on television and was a member of the Flat Earth Society.
Gulliver had read several books on travel in his thirty-five years on this planet and most of them he found ideal late-night reading matter as they often sent him off to sleep. Gulliver was forever jumping large passages of the book or speed reading it. Although funnily enough, whenever he came to a bit about the Northwest Passage he would take his time as this passage had always held a strange fascination for him. To his mind, most of these travelogues contained far, far too much detail. Why spoil a good story, or even a bad one for that matter, with details? Who cared about how wide and high the tree was? Surely it was enough that the tree was there without giving minute descriptions on the bark, the colour of the leaves, the insects which lived on it, the fact that when it was cut down it would be made into a book, etc. etc. etc. blah, blah, blah. Nobody wanted to read about the etc. or the blahs. Journeys should be exciting, full of danger, drama and romance. The etc. and the blahs were all fine and dandy if you were an insomniac trying to lull yourself off to sleep but if you weren’t, they were no good to man, beast, beauty and the beast, or beauty and the geek for that matter! Gulliver loved Charles Darwin and his Origin book but the descriptive prose of his travels in minute prosaic detail left a lot to be desired at times.
Gulliver was determined to keep the descriptive prose in his travelogue to a bare minimum, the story was all that mattered. The only exception he would make would be for humour, for a travelogue must have humour and with that Gulliver logged off!
That night everybody slept like a log, some of the more hard-headed of the islanders even used a log as a pillow, although those logs were made of soft wood. Most of the natives were more than happy to sleep on the deck of the Golden Hind underneath the stars.
Three days later when the island had cooled sufficiently, which was a lot quicker than the earth in Gulliver’s world had done millions of years earlier, everybody traipsed back to the island through the waves with heads as sore as rutting stags on a hen night. Three days solid partying will do that to one’s head. Gulliver soon found out he did not have hollow legs, although he most certainly did have a sore head. Gulliver never had been able to hold his liquor, although most ship’s boys could and often had to hold liquor being seen as glorified waiters to the senior sailors onboard the ships.
Some of the islanders had gone back early as one of the island traditions was walking across hot coals and, as such the soles of most of the islanders’ feet resembled galvanized rubber due to this practice. Drake was to make the comment, ‘No sense no feeling,’ although in a parallel world that was probably, no feeling no sense!
The chief said he was as sure as albatross eggs were albatross eggs that the volcano had let off enough steam, and probably wouldn’t let off any more for another hundred years. Gulliver was a little wary of the word ‘probably’ because it wasn’t the word ‘definitely’, still, it would just have to do. Gulliver was as determined as ever to climb the volcano and get to the dark side of the island where he could meet the wise man with the head full of knowledge.
Later, minus the time, Gulliver and his fellow adventurers had scaled the volcano and had reached the dark side of the island. By now the lava and ash was cool enough to walk upon, although it did make the climb more treacherous, especially for Old Father Time, who wasn’t exactly in the first flush of youth, the old in his name rather gave the game away on that score.
‘How are you feeling?’ Gulliver asked Old Father Time, who looked for all the world like he was about to meet his maker. ‘Old!’ Old Father Time said managing a semblance of a smile as he blew out his cheeks, which looked redder than Father Christmas’s outfit.
‘We should probably rest here,’ Gulliver said looking around him at his fellow travellers, who by now were all weary. Old Father Time would have been happier to have heard the word ‘definitely’, we will ‘definitely’ rest here. But he’d just have to make do with the word ‘probably’ for the time being.
This side of the island was dark and why this surprised Gulliver even he wasn’t sure, especially as the chief had told everybody that this side of the island was called the dark side of the island. It was probably because he thought the chief was being metaphorical and not literal, although it appeared he was being literal for the island was as dark as the bottom of the ocean. Now if it had been night time, then that was only to be expected, but it wasn’t night time and so it wasn’t to be expected, which meant it was unexpected (even bearing in mind the chief had called this part of the island the dark side). To Gulliver’s mind this part of the island was like the dark side of the moon.
‘How are we going to see where we are going?’ Alice said squinting to see Gulliver’s face in the darkness.
‘Why don’t we find some thick tree branches and then find some lava that’s still warm, which should be hot enough to light the branches and we can use them as torches?’ Old Father Time said sensibly. Gulliver couldn’t see OFT’S face, he could only hear his voice but he agreed with the voice wholeheartedly.
‘Capital notion,’ Gulliver said, sounding like a nineteenth century gentleman in a swanky London club, probably the Reform Club where Phileas Fogg and his manservant Passepartout arrived after completing their epic round-the-world voyage in eighty days.
So that’s what they did and soon the dark side of the mountain was flooded with light and now no longer resembled the dark side of the moon but resembled a moon that was of the gibbous variety. The word ‘flooded’ reminded Gulliver of a passage from the Bible and one thing Gulliver didn’t want was to be caught in a flash flood, not after yesterday’s events, although it was hardly an event, more like a nightmare. An event was something exciting, something you looked forward to. Yesterday was something he wanted to forget about and as quickly as possible, although not before he wrote it in his travelogue for once again it made a capital story. However, in truth this yesterday wasn’t yesterday but the day before the day before yesterday, as when this Biblical-like event happened, when fire rained down from the heavens above, it wasn’t a Sunday! No, this yesterday, when all Gulliver’s troubles were far away, was a metaphorical yesterday, as to Gulliver’s mind ‘yesterday’ was any day that had come and gone and any day that wasn’t either ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’. After that descriptive passage, the expression as clear as mud springs to mind!
Once again this was all fine and dandy unless some boffin egghead like Archimedes, Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo or Pythagoras invented a time machine. You do the math and good luck to you because I have a feeling you’re going to need it!
A travelogue was only a good read if the journey was filled with excitement and wonder and being chased by a river of molten lava into the ocean was just such a story. At the time he might not have thought so, but looking back it’s just what his travelogue needed to liven it up. The balloon crashing into the sea was also a good story, as was ending up in a cave with his dog and then finding the fountain of youth. And then there was The Pandemonium Emporium, meeting Old Father Time and visiting the Antiquarium where the Loch Ness monster and the kraken were now sleeping like babies, or at least he hoped they were and nobody had released them into the seas to join the other sea monsters that were drawn upon Drake’s sea charts and maps. Yes, his little travelogue wasn’t a bad read, it still needed more stories, more close shaves, but it wasn’t half bad; the grammar left a lot to be desired, as did some of the writing, but after all, he was a dyslexic twelve-year-old boy. Now whether logically it being not half bad meant it wasn’t half good, or it was only half good while the other half was bad, Gulliver wasn’t too sure, and to be honest he was too tired to care.
After a camp fire was built and food was passed round, mainly coconuts and bread fruit, everybody, now close to exhaustion, fell asleep. The evening passed followed by the night, which was full of disquieting noises, but nobody heard them as they were all dead to the world, which is what they might have been yesterday if the gods had still been around playing silly beggars!
The morning came, although you would have been hard pressed to tell the difference from the night, although if you were press-ganged into it, like some of the crew of the Golden Hind had been at one time or another, you would probably have said the morning was a little lighter than the night had been. Everybody had a good hearty breakfast, albeit a little boring, breadfruit washed down with coconut juice, and certainly not a patch on the continental breakfasts Hans Christian Andersen had enjoyed in his travels to such far-flung places as Constantinople and Mesopotamia. The coconuts were kindly cracked open for them by the gargantuan robber crabs, which Gulliver thought resembled giant nutcrackers. Some of these creatures grew up to four meters in length, with legs up to a meter long. In a nutshell, the robber crabs had been given a taste of their own medicine, for as they broke the coconuts up with their giant grabbing arms, some of the braver sailors aboard the Golden Hind robbed their prized possessions from right under their very noses. Gulliver wasn’t even sure if robber crabs had noses, but once again you get the continental drift, which was exactly what Gulliver wrote in his travelogue!
After breakfast, everybody set off on their journey of several lifetimes, minus the time, in good spirits to find the man with the knowledge buried in his head like treasure. Gulliver, Drake and several sailors each held a lit branch of a tree to light their way.
After walking through a forest of palm trees, which thankfully had large lit pumpkins sitting in between the branches (which meant they could see the wood for the trees), they found the wise man named Solomon with the big head full of knowledge. The chief had been right, Solomon did have an awfully big head, which looked remarkably like a pumpkin. In fact, if you believed him you would have taken him for a genius. Solomon listened intently to Gulliver’s tale up to this point in the time that no longer existed, Solomon said time never had existed on this part of the island as it was like a black hole in space, which sucked up everything that came within spitting distance of it, including time.
Solomon, having pondered on Gulliver’s quest, said, ‘It’s written in the stars.’ Gulliver’s whole body literally shrank in disappointment like a tortoise’s head shrank into its shell in times of danger. This man wasn’t as wise as he had been led to believe by the big chief, who was tiny, as this was quite obviously mumbo jumbo of the highest order.
That was until Alice said, ‘Look, look at the stars!’ and sure enough it was written in the stars. The stars in the heavens had rearranged themselves into words and the words said, ‘The place you seek is to be found somewhere bleak,’ then the stars disassembled themselves.
‘Can you believe your own eyes?’ Old Father Time said with a look of wonderment upon his face. ‘I’m not sure a man of my advancing years can, but I’m sure you young pups can!’
‘It’s written in the stars and that’s good enough for me, after all, the stars have never let me down on my journeys before,’ Drake said as he put his hand on Old Father Time’s shoulder as if to say, ‘Your eyes weren’t playing tricks upon you, old man.’
Alice was inclined to think this was all black magic and Solomon was some kind of witch doctor. Gulliver was inclined not to believe in black magic, rather to believe that someone had spiked their coconut juice with hallucinogenic, mind-altering drugs, albeit of the natural variety, like magic mushrooms.
Gulliver thought some of the doctors in his world were nothing more than better-dressed witch doctors, however, both kept their council.
‘Well, bleak suggests somewhere cold and desolate,’ Gulliver said as the wheels and cogs of his mind turned and whirled into action, like the internal workings of a clock.
‘What about the North or the South Pole, they’re both pretty bleak?!’ Old Father Time said looking at Gulliver.
‘That’s it, the snow domes!’ Gulliver said, sounding like Archimedes again.
‘You mean The Last Bookshop in the World is in the North or the South Pole? I don’t suppose they do much business there!’ Alice said disbelievingly.
‘I’m not sure the stars were saying the bookshop resides there but it might well be where we will find our next clue,’ Gulliver said thoughtfully.
‘I think you might be right, my boy,’ Old Father Time said, agreeing with Gulliver.
‘I hope we’re not reading too much into these stars, like astrologers do in my world,’ Gulliver said thinking out loud, which produced a few puzzled expressions.
‘Well, we’d better not waste any more time hypothesizing. We’d better get back to the Golden Hind and sail for the Arctic Circle, otherwise the old girl will think we’ve forgotten about her,’ Drake said good humouredly, referring to his ship once again as a lady, as was the custom for seafarers to do, probably to get Lady Luck on their side Gulliver surmised.
‘Or Antarctica?’ said Gulliver, adding a note of caution.
‘Good point, Gulliver,’ Drake said nodding his head. ‘We’ll consult the charts, the maps and the stars, and I’ll get the compendium out of mothballs, the one the clockmaker, Humphrey Cole, was kind enough to make for me, and then we’ll toss a coin!’ Drake said
laughing his pantaloons off. Although he didn’t say as much, Drake quite clearly had a mind to think that Solomon had just sold them the snow job to end all snow jobs!
Gulliver was amazed to see Cole’s astronomical compendium dial with its five gilt-brass leaves, which incorporated a compass, a calendar and a geometric square, which when aligned with the lunar and the solar dials, enabled Drake to calculate the phases of the moon. This fantastical compendium, a marvel of ancient engineering, enabled Francis Drake to become a master of both time and tide. Okay, so this wasn’t quite on a par with Archimedes’ Antykythera Mechanism but it wasn’t far off. Humphrey Cole had made this device on the bequest of Queen Elizabeth I, and it was now sitting in the Greenwich Maritime Museum in Gulliver’s time, although nobody wanted to pin their colours to the mast, so to speak, regarding the ownership of this compendium. However, Gulliver certainly thought this came under the heading of a good story if nothing else.
‘How could one object be in two places at one time?’ Gulliver said under his breath when Drake showed him the compendium before adding, ‘Where’s a quantum scientist when you need one!?’
It was the old Schrodinger’s cat in the box theory, which stated that a cat in a box could be both alive and dead at the same time. Gulliver wondered if this cat in the box belonged to Pandora and if it did, he was rather grateful that he wasn’t going on a quest to find Pandora’s Box! Gulliver then recalled Schwarzschild’s ‘Magic Sphere’ theory, and a magic sphere was something this world could well be described as, in fact, that was exactly what he wrote in his travelogue. Then Gulliver stopped wondering as he realized he was blinding himself with science again and it was giving him a blinding headache!
Now, going down the mountainous volcano should have been relatively easy but due to the large amount of ash that now littered the mountain, it was anything but. In fact, it was harder going down than coming up, of course this time they weren’t being chased by a river of molten lava. Old Father Time said it was all in the mind, although Alice, Gulliver and Beagle weren’t convinced, as far as they were concerned it was all in the legs. It appeared to Gulliver as if they still had their sea legs on and that the land they were walking upon was like the shifting sands of the desert, or the shifting sands of time. With every step they took, they sunk down to their knees until they sank down to their ankles until they brushed the ash aside as if it were nothing more than a slight smattering of snow. Eventually they reached the beach and collapsed in a heap.
The beach looked like every beach should on a tropical island paradise, however the beach wasn’t covered in sand but white ash. After the search party had recovered, Drake, Gulliver, Alice and Old Father Time bid a fond farewell to the native people promising one day they would return with books aplenty. The chief said he would be most appreciative if when they did return they could bring him any of Shakespeare’s new works. Drake said he promised he would and he would make sure they were written upon rice paper, just in case food supplies ran low. Gulliver wasn’t sure if he’d ever be in this part of the world again so he gave the chief a long hug, almost as if he were his long lost son. However, Gulliver wasn’t the chief’s long lost son, that really would have been some story to write home about, but Gulliver hadn’t the time to write home about it, that and he didn’t think his letter would ever reach home, especially if it was a message in a bottle.
The chief and his people had fashioned a canoe out of bamboo and a palm tree and gave it to Drake as a gift and as a mark of the high esteem they held both him and the Queen of Eng Land, as the chief so charmingly called England. However, some people who were still a little old fashioned in their ways, mostly the Elizabethans, still called England by its old name of Albion.
The chief did leave Gulliver with one piece of homespun philosophy, saying that the real treasures were to be found close to home and not in some treasure chest in some far-flung distant land. Gulliver took this advice on board, although he was standing on the shore at the time. Although later he did take this advice on board, onboard the Golden Hind where he shared it with Alice and the coxswain, who simply just rolled their eyes to the heavens!
The chief also told Gulliver that not all that glittered was gold; this Gulliver already knew because the snow dome that sat on his dressing room table at home in Brixham in 2O13 was full of silver glitter, but he thanked him for the advice all the same.
As the Golden Hind sailed off into the sunset, its keel carving its way through the pristine waters of the South Pacific, the native people waved until the ship was the size of a dot on the letter i upon the horizon. Gulliver and his companions waved back until the island was just the size of a starfish and then little more than a grain of sand. Gulliver was sad to leave the islands which Drake had told him he’d named after him. Solomon was none too happy about the name change as in his mind the islands were called the Solomon Islands. But the chief liked the sound of Gulliver’s Island and liked it even more when Drake said the islands were now a part of the British Empire and, as part of this package, they were ruled over by Queen Elizabeth I. To the chief’s mind, this gave his island great kudos so he told Solomon he could like it or lump it because the name change stood. When the chief told Solomon this, the expression ‘his face was a picture’ was an apt one indeed. The picture Solomon’s face most resembled at the time was of an angry sea, possibly the painting Turner did after being strapped to the mast of a ship in a storm.
Solomon was dark on the chief for quite some time to come but as he lived on the dark side of the island it didn’t seem to matter, or at least it didn’t to anybody but Solomon, who put a death curse on the chief. This curse was for the chief to be swallowed by a giant Solomon fish, which according to legend could grow to the size of a python and had a mouth as wide as a cave. However, these fish normally resided in the Zambezi River so unless their internal sat nav was all at sea there wasn’t much chance of this happening. Having said that, what with the shifting sands in this world, nobody could be 100% sure of this fact. The chief died, but only after the passing of a thousand full moons, which meant he died a very, very old man. Ironically, Solomon died when the next full moon passed, this unfortunate incident happened when a female albatross mistook his head for one of her eggs and sat on it while he was asleep, suffocating him. Well, it was dark and he was as bald as a bald eagle! This meant all the wisdom in his head was lost, like Atlantis, but as they say, that’s life. It appears that the albatross suffers from Jonah and the whale syndrome in that they are unlucky, it seems at least one myth was true!
As the Golden Hind left Gulliver’s Island behind them in their wake, a rainbow appeared over the ship, although of course it wasn’t over the ship, it being an optical illusion. Gulliver then noticed that Drake was dressed as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, stove-pipe hat and all, and Brunel, the ship’s master, was dressed in Drake’s attire, frilly shirt, leather thigh-length boots and pantaloons worn on the outside that were starched within an inch of their life. Was this just an optical illusion or had both men got up on the wrong side of the hammock!? In this world it appeared one could never be quite sure what was and what wasn’t an optical illusion! However, one could be quite sure, the rainbow was smiling down upon the Golden Hind because its arc was upturned. In this upside down world and being in the southern hemisphere, this was once again only to be expected. Perhaps if Gulliver saw a straight rainbow he might have been more surprised, give it time!
Sir Isaac Newton knew all about colour, light and prisms. This discovery, along with his three laws of motion, was for him the gold at the end of the rainbow. However, Newton, being a keen alchemist, was still determined to find a way of turning base metals into gold. Gulliver wondered if in this world he had succeeded? Did the rainbow appear inside or outside the ship in the bottle? I hear the enquiring scientific mind ask. In truth I couldn’t possibly say, other than to say that regarding this question, refer the prism!
Later that night, Gulliver had a nightmare where he was being chased by a tall man who had a pumpkin for a head and whose eyes were ablaze with anger, although this man was carrying his own head! And if that wasn’t bad enough, he was joined by another man who was made of red hot molten lava and who appeared to want to give the bogeyman a run for his money!