The crew of the Golden Hind were not met with any opposition of any note, in fact they found the African people only too obliging, especially when they found they had not come to round them up and put them in the cargo hold of their ship and then take them halfway around the world before selling them into slavery.
It wasn’t long before Gulliver, with his O level geography grade B and his knowledge of old sea maps, realized they were in Morocco. A little while later, with the help of several of the local people, they found themselves in Marrakesh. It appeared to Gulliver from his travels in his head with the aid of picture books and HD television, which included the History, Eden, Discovery and National Geographic channels, that in this part of the world after the great shake-up, time had become even more mixed up than in England.
Then fate smiled kindly upon Gulliver when he bumped into a man, who knew a man, who knew a man, who thought he knew a man who could help them. After some argy-bargy, bartering, begging and pleading, the man who knew a man who thought he knew a man actually did know a man who could help them.
Now you may or may not be interested in who this man was, well, whether you are or not I’m going to tell you anyway, for their meeting was either an amazing coincidence or synchronicity gone mad. For this man was none other than Hans Christian Andersen, the storyteller that Gulliver had bumped into in Portsmouth within spitting distance of The Liar’s Inn.
Anyway to cut a long story shorter, Hans Christian Andersen pointed them in the direction of a small shop that sold carpets that weren’t magic. And how did they know these carpets weren’t magic? Well, because they weren’t flying off the shelves and out the door!
Gulliver told Hans Christen Andersen about the quest and as Hans loved books he asked if he could join them. Gulliver said that as it was he who had directly and indirectly got their quest started, then it would be a pleasure to add his company to the ship’s company, if you get my continental drift. And that was how Mr Hans Christian Andersen joined the ship’s company of the Golden Hind and, after hearing about Alice ‘the mermaid girl’ this was how Hans Christian Andersen came to write the fairytale The Little Mermaid and that’s not a fairytale, even though in truth it is!
Gulliver, Alice, Drake, Old Father Time and Hans Christian Andersen were shown through a beaded curtain into a back room of the carpet shop where four men sat around a table playing backgammon and one puffing on a hookah pipe. The room was filled with the scent of musk, myrrh and frankincense, which at first was more than a little overpowering. The men stopped their backgammon doubles match and introduced themselves.
‘My name is Isaac Newton,’ Newton said, standing up and welcoming them, ‘and my colleagues from left to right at the table are, Nicolaus Copernicus, Archimedes, Pythagoras, Timaeus and the fellow at the end gazing into the distance likes to be known only as Nostradamus. Gentleman and ladies will you please be seated?’ Isaac Newton finished speaking then moved the table with the help of Pythagoras and sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, as one by one his colleagues joined him,’
‘Now we’ve heard it on the grapevine that you are looking for The Last Bookshop in the World and you’ve come halfway around the world to find it. My first question to you has got to be, are you stark raving mad? Have you lost the senses God gave you or just your sense of direction?’ Newton said with a straight face before he and the five most original minds on the planet broke into laughter.
‘You’ll have to excuse my ebullient friend, he has quite the sense of humour you know, or at least he thinks he does!’ Nicolaus Copernicus said smiling warmly, ‘In this part of the world we are known as the Think Tank, or at least I think we are. Unfortunately two of our members aren’t present at this juncture in time, Leonardo Da Vinci, who’s painting somebody’s last supper, which to be honest is his bread and butter, although from time to time he moonlights on this little think tank of ours. Well, I suppose it keeps the big bad wolf from the door!’
Gulliver knew Leonardo Da Vinci lived in the fifteenth century but then again he always was a man ahead of his time so this fact shouldn’t have surprised Gulliver unduly.
‘The brains of the operation has also gone walkabout, that’s Albert Einstein, sometimes that man thinks he’s God Almighty. At the moment he thinks he’s discovered the theory of everything and won’t be disturbed until he’s checked his calculations several times over. Frankly, I think he’s one brain cell short of a brain stem! The other day he thought he’d discovered the theory or relativity. I mean no one denies the guy’s a genius but sometimes he can be a loose cannon, if you know what I mean!’ Copernicus said raising both his eyebrows to their zenith.
Drake knew exactly what he meant, several loose cannons had run over his foot the last time they were in a rough sea. Although Queen Elizabeth I .admired Drake’s buccaneering qualities, at times she thought he too was a loose cannon as he didn’t always adhere to the principles of her fleet. Drake was always having run-ins with Sir Thomas Baskerville, who was admiral of the navy, but then again, Drake was a privateer and was never a great lover of authority to boot! Gulliver wondered why Galileo wasn’t in this think tank; could it be that the Vatican, who thought he was a loose cannon, still had him under house arrest for his unorthodox belief!?
‘So tell me why you want to find this mythical bookshop, which by the way isn’t that mythical,’ Nostradamus said quizzically.
‘Because we like books,’ said Alice making more sense than all the greatest thinkers in the world put together, well, minus Einstein and Da Vinci!
‘The kid’s a smart cookie there’s no denying that,’ said Isaac Newton, who at this point in time hadn’t had a knighthood bestowed upon him.
‘Yes, she’s certainly a lot smarter than Cookie the ship’s cook that’s for sure!’ Drake said lightening the mood.
‘Well, I don’t know about you boys, but I say we put our eggheads together and solve this little mystery right here and now!’ Archimedes said enthusiastically. ‘Oh no, I think I left my thinking cap at home!’ he said with a worried look upon his face.
‘Don’t worry, Archie, you can borrow my fez,’ said Newton thoughtfully
‘Piece of cake,’ said Nostradamus tucking into a piece of dried cake.
‘Piece of cake, that’s funny because the last time you tried to divide a piece of cake up you clearly showed how little you knew about mathematics!’ said Pythagoras rather abruptly.
‘Don’t worry, kid, we’ll figure it out in no time,’ said Pythagoras as he looked at the miniature sundial on his wrist before looking at both Alice and Gulliver at the same time, which made him appear boss eyed. Then Pythagoras started counting on his fingers, which to Gulliver did seem a little archaic but still, as he had only just scraped through O level maths, who was he to argue with such a computer-like brain as the one that was ensconced within Pythagoras’s skull?
‘I was thinking,’ said Archimedes before he was interrupted by Pythagoras.
‘You know where thinking got you, Archie,’ said Pythagoras raising an eyebrow or two.
‘Sorry, not with you, old chap,’ said Archimedes, mirroring Pythagoras’s expression.
‘Well, the last time you tried thinking you shouted ‘Eureka!’ jumped out of a bath full of water, ran down the street as naked as the day you were born and were nearly arrested for indecent exposure!’
‘I was thinking,’ Archimedes said before continuing. ‘I was thinking and thanks to your untimely interruption now I can’t remember what I was thinking!’ said Archimedes with a puzzled expression on his face.
‘No, I can’t think what you were thinking either, running down a street naked in the middle of the day!’ said Pythagoras, moving the beads of an abacus first one way then the other. ‘That’s the trouble with Archie, he’s always thinking outside the old bathtub when he should be thinking outside the old box!’
Then Timaeus, an astronomer of the old school who in truth Gulliver had heard little of, mostly because he rarely spoke, stepped outside to consult the stars. However, having been blinded by the patently obvious, the sun in this case, and realizing it was still daylight, came back into the room and shook his head. It seemed the stargazer couldn’t give them the time of day and he went back to smoking his hookah.
‘Timaeus!’ Gulliver said sounding like Archimedes when he exclaimed eureka before adding ‘Plato!’ Drake hoped Gulliver wasn’t going to go through the whole of Greek history picking out historical figures of note as Greek history was all Greek to him, that and if he did they would all be here till kingdom come!
Timaeus stopped smoking his pipe and said, ‘Plato, who’s he when he’s at home?’ He then smiled and went back to smoking his hookah as if to say ‘my work here is done.’
‘Tell us all you know and we’ll see what we can do,’ said Newton, in a polite but austere manner hoping to restore some sort of order to the proceedings. To be honest Gulliver was rather starstruck at seeing one of his heroes in the flesh and shook Newton’s hand rather too vigorously.
‘I’d like to congratulate you on the Newtonian reflector,’ Gulliver said trying not to gush too much.
‘Well, thank you, young man, that’s most kind of you to say so. Now when did I invent that?’ Newton said stroking his long beard as a frown creased his already creased forehead.
‘1668, sir,’ Gulliver said as his brain ticked over and then produced the correct year at something approaching the speed of light.
‘Really, was it that long ago? It seemed in those days I had all the time in the world. Little did I know the end of time was just around the corner!’ Newton said reflecting on the passing of time and his invention all at the same time.
‘I’m thinking of building a place and filling it with telescopes, then we can put names to all those bodies and faces out there and stop calling everything the planet X!’ Newton said, with a wry smile on his face.
The search for the planet X, now that was a quest Gulliver wouldn’t mind going on; a voyage to the distant far-flung reaches of the galaxies, sailing upon the cosmological oceans in a ship that travelled across time and space. Gulliver was daydreaming again and was only brought back down to earth by the sound of Newton’s voice.
‘What do you think of me calling it a planetarium, a bit like an aquarium minus the fish and plus the telescopes, stars and the planets?’ Newton said, looking at Gulliver studiously over his half-moon spectacles.
As soon as Newton finished his sentence Gulliver was imagining astronomers in wetsuits immersed in water in tanks looking up at the stars through waterproof telescopes. Mind you, water did magnify things so was this so far-fetched? Don’t answer that!
‘I, I couldn’t think of a better name for it,’ said Gulliver knowing at this exact moment that he was a part of history, albeit an alternative history as Gulliver knew that the planetarium was original called an orrery and that in fact it had been Galileo who had invented the first planetarium in the third century BC, which was a rotating globe which could illustrate the movements of the ‘seven wonders’ which were the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. He also knew that Galileo had called the telescope a perspicillum in his 1610 paper ‘Starry Messenger’. Perspicillum, a word which didn’t exactly roll off the tongue but which Gulliver liked the sound of, even if it was a bit of a mouthful and he couldn’t spell it for toffee. Gulliver wondered, like his hero Professor Brian Cox, if he should tell Newton it wasn’t his destiny to discover the planetarium but Galileo, but perhaps in this crazy mixed-up parallel world it was Newton who was to make this giant leap for mankind.
Gulliver had recently read in the New Scientist that quantum boffins thought it was the big silence which kicked off the universe and not the big bang. More boffin eggheads blinding us with science again, Gulliver thought when he’d read this article.
Newton looked extremely pleased with himself, like the astronomer who found the planet X one might say. Gulliver knew it was a man named Clyde Tombaugh who had found the planet X, or as they later called it Pluto, which a few years ago had been downgraded to a dwarf planet, and Gulliver thought this world was crazy!
Anyway, to cut a long story even shorter still, Drake, Alice, Gulliver and Old Father Time left the think tank to end all think tanks to think about their little problem.
Gulliver wondered if this place should have been called Boffin Island as it was full of Boffins, well, why not? After all, there was a place called Baffin Island. Why not indeed? It’s hard to argue with logic like that, although I’m sure the boffins at the new Crick Institute in London would give it a pretty good go!
Archimedes was putting figures into the abacus in his head to see if the numbers stacked up to the abacus that he was holding in his hand. Newton was scribbling equations and figures out on a blackboard in seemingly random fashion. Pythagoras was still counting on his fingers, while Nostradamus was doing a very passable impression of Rodin’s statue, The Thinker, adding two and two together and making five!
In less than one turn of the sandglass later Archimedes said, ‘Eureka!’ Well I ask you, what else was he going to say? After all, this is Archimedes were talking about, the guy who ran naked down the road after flooding his house!
Then Archimedes handed Gulliver a folded bit of paper which he unfurled to reveal nothing, as there was nothing on the paper. At first Gulliver thought that it must have been written in invisible ink.
‘Sorry, boy, we haven’t a clue where the Last Bookshop in the World is, it’s a complete and utter mystery and it’s probably best left that way. I mean, since they found the Loch Ness monster nobody’s been within a mile of Loch Ness! If they found Atlantis or Big Foot what would we all talk about?’
Gulliver, Alice, Drake and Old Father Time just stood there open-mouthed, this never happened in a Dan Brown novel, one clue would lead neatly to the next, or if not neatly at least it led to the next clue. All this time Hans Christen Andersen had kept his council and just scribbled upon a pad. Later it transpired that he was writing a story which may well have been a fairytale, on that score I could not say one way or the other.
Surely the greatest minds on the planet could solve this puzzle. All right, admittedly the think tank was down a few hundred thousand brains cells as neither Leonardo Da Vinci nor Albert Einstein were around. Still, you would think the think tank to end all think tanks could solve this humdrum conundrum. It seemed this think tank couldn’t think straight, in fact, it seemed they hadn’t the brains they were born with, which in truth and to be fair to them, as brain cells start dying as soon as you’re born, they hadn’t!
Then Newton walked forward and handed Drake a screwed up bit of paper with writing only an inebriated spider could have written, with equations, compass directions and various doodles which looked not unlike hieroglyphics but weren’t.
Drake looked at the piece of paper, frowned and handed it to Gulliver, who frowned and passed it to Alice, who frowned and then passed it to Old Father Time, who smiled and said, ‘Thank you, gentlemen, for your help. We’re most obliged to you.’
‘Sorry, just yanking your anchor!’ said Archimedes with a smile almost as wide as the Milky Way.
‘I apologize for my mischievous friend but if we don’t let him get his own way he throws his calculus equipment out of the perambulator,’ Isaac Newton said as a slight smile lightened the dark side of his face.
And then before you could say, ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’ or, ‘One Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights’, they were on their way, leaving the think tank to end all think tanks arguing over whose turn it was to put the rubbish out.
‘So what does it all mean? It was all gobbledegobble to me!’ said Drake quizzically as they walked back through the dusty marketplace.
Gulliver’s head was in such a spin he could have given a whirlpool galaxy a run for its money as left, right and centre in the bizarre marketplace throngs of people bartered for goods in a hubbub to end all hubbubs that would eventually turn into a hullabaloo!
‘Luckily, Francis, I’ve always been good at languages, especially gobbledegobble. Basically it means we have to turn right at the seas of the Mediterranean, take a long walk across Constantinople, across the sea which is blacker than a sailor’s foot, hop, skip and jump our way across Persia and then somewhere in that general area, if my calculations are correct, or should I say, the Brain Trust’s calculations are correct, we should find The Last Bookshop in the World, or not!’ Old Father Time said sounding rather pleased with his less-than-compendious explanation, which to the others was as clear as mud!
‘I’ve been to Constantinople,’ said Hans Christian looking up from his writing pad. ‘Its like living in a fairytale with its minarets, palaces and towers. Admittedly it’s poorly lit and would benefit from some fairylights but the whole place oozes mysticism. It’s a fantastical place, like Paris combined with Venice and the fantasy,’ Hans said as his eyes widened to that of a child waking up on Christmas Day. Later, Hans told Gulliver he was among the first wave of modern tourists to arrive in this exotic land. Hans Christian might not have said much but when he spoke you hung on his every word. Gulliver wrote this in his travelogue, which reminded him of his nightmare with words raining down from the sky upon his head and hanging on to the letter Z as he was swept out to sea.
Gulliver asked Hans Christian Andersen if he had any more ideas on the whereabouts of The Last Bookshop in the World, unfortunately he said he did not. Despite having been to this part of the world before he had never come across the bookshop, and to be honest, he had thought the whole thing was nothing more than a fairytale.
‘This mythical bookshop is probably like Plato’s Troy, nothing more than a golden tale extracted from the imagination of a writer,’ Hans said smiling warmly. Gulliver didn’t want to tell Hans that a German archaeologist in his time had discovered the lost city of Troy in Turkey. Well, why spoil a good fairytale with little details like the truth.
Unlike Gulliver, who at times was a mine of useless information, Plato’s mind was full of gold which he’d extracted from his head and put upon the written page, as did Hans Christian Andersen. They were both storytellers from the old school and could make words dance to their tune like the Pied Piper. Gulliver was hoping to mine some of that gold from Hans Christian’s mind, or at least pick his brains as he knew he was a seasoned travel writer.
‘Well, time waits for no man, not even a knowledgeable one like Old Father Time, so we’d better get back to the Golden Hind and splice whatever needs splicing!’ Drake said as he turned to Gulliver and rested his hand upon his shoulder in a less-than-reassuring manner.
On their way back to the Hind, Old Father Time told Gulliver that Leonardo Da Vinci had invented a clock that could measure infinity, although he never actually got round to building it. According to Old Father Time, the greatest expert on clocks to ever live, this was how Da Vinci’s infinity clock worked: twelve cogs of exponential size were to be connected in series, with the smaller gear completing one revolution per second. Each successive cog would rotate more slowly than its predecessor, until the final cog appeared to be entirely stationary. However, that apparent standstill would be deceptive; even the final cog would be turning, albeit unimaginably slowly. It would take a billion years to complete a single revolution! Old Father Time joked that this would be the ultimate clockwatcher’s nightmare. Such a valuable timepiece as this one would have to be guarded around the clock to make sure it wasn’t stolen by a time thief! Gulliver didn’t want to burst Old FT’s bubble by telling him he had actually told him this story when they were in the hot air balloon.
After Old Father Time had retold Gulliver the tale of Da Vinci’s Infinity Clock virtually word for word, it started the cogs of Gulliver’s mind turning and the result was that he could imagine a thief stealing time. This the thief would do by travelling through time and stealing time from people, i.e. if they were catnapping or gazing into space, he would literally take this time away from them and add it to his own timeline. And if the thief was caught and tried for this crime, he would enter a plea of not guilty, his lawyers claiming he was only stealing people’s free time, so how can you steal something that is free? Lawyers are a crafty bunch and they will always find a loophole! Nostradamus was well known for his fire and water gazing technique to predict the future, so Gulliver was sure the time thief would make a beeline for Nostradamus’s timeline. If anybody was going to build a time machine, surely it was Leonardo Da Vinci, with a little bit of help from Timaeus of course, Gulliver thought and then smiled to himself!
In no time at all, literally no time at all, almost as if a time machine had transported them through time and space, they were back aboard the Golden Hind. It was funny but nobody aboard was musing about anything or gazing into space wondering about the universe or time as there wasn’t time for such flights of fancy. Onboard there wasn’t time or space to be bored as things on the ship needed splicing so things could be shipshape and Bristol fashion, this was just in case they ever got back to England where Bristol lay. To be honest, Gulliver wasn’t sure if Bristol was still in Bristol, it may well have left the safety of its harbour and floated off God knows where, coming into port somewhere off the coast of New Holland! Or perhaps Bristol was now where Baffin Island was and Baffin Island was now where Bristol used to be. If this was the case then Gulliver thought Bristol wouldn’t be all shipshape and Bristol fashion, Bristol would probably be complete pandemonium!
The trouble with Gulliver, apart from the fact that he was obviously a greatly troubled individual, was that he had a tendency to overthink things, as the Think Tank was to tell him before he left them. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black, or the greatest thinkers and minds on the globe telling Gulliver he was overthinking things!
‘Do you think we’re going in the right direction?’ Alice enquired in a low voice into the labyrinth in Gulliver’s right ear.
‘Honestly, I think we’re making the whole thing up as we go along, like Hans Christian!’ said Gulliver with both his eyebrows raised to the crow’s nest.
‘I thought so!’ said Alice sounding like she was on a wild moose chase, well, they had recently past North America.
Gulliver thought it was just a matter of time before they were forced to admit they were lost at sea. After which they would have to go through the whole rigmarole of tossing a gold ducat, until it landed the queen’s head side up, to decide whether they went left or right at the next bit of land that jutted out. At times it appeared to Gulliver that Drake had lost the plot… of land he was looking for!
So the Golden Hind navigated its way through the Mediterranean in between Italy and Malta, on past Greece where historians and writers would have loved to have lived in the past, on their way to Constantinople, where Niccolo Polo, the father of Marco, and Niccolo’s brother Maffeo had sailed to in the year of our lord 1250, collecting a cargo of riches from Constantinople when they arrived there. Or at least they did according to the history books in Gulliver’s world, but then again, as his grandfather once told him, ‘Half of history is a fairytale and the other half is made up!’ Here in the Aegean Sea on the very cusp between Greece and Constantinople\Turkey, they parked the Golden Hind and left the meter running, leaving most of the crew on board.
Then Alice, Gulliver, Hans Christian, Old Father Time, Francis Drake, the coxswain Horace Hortop and Able Seaman Gracegirdle went on their merry way as the men carried the canoe upon the top of their heads. This was the canoe the chief of Gulliver’s Island had so kindly given to them before they canoed their way across the Black Sea, making good time as they did so. That was the good thing about the land compared to the sea, the land was reasonably well marked out, what with the gods having been good enough to have clearly written place names upon the globe in the beginning when they created it.
On this journey, Gulliver had plenty of time to overthink things, even if the sailors didn’t, and while doing some of this overthinking, his thoughts turned to the story of King Midas who was the king of Phrygia in modern-day Turkey. Now if this story was true and not another one of these myths\fairytales, then if they found his tomb they may find large quantities of gold. However, as his mother was always telling him when he was a boy (although technically he still was), you must concentrate on one thing at a time, for if you didn’t you would end up like Jack and the Beanstalk, in other words you wouldn’t amount to anything more than a pile of beans!
This, however, didn’t stop Gulliver wondering how the history books of the future would read in a time where there was no time. Rather confusing, Gulliver thought, not unlike this world as times. But as philosophers were always saying, everything is judged in comparison to something else, or at least the philosophers Gulliver came in contact with were telling him that, or at least Archie Medes had! If you are used to a way of doing something, however alien it might appear to someone else, your way is the right way, and often the only way you know how to comprehend whatever it is you are supposed to be comprehending. After all, Gulliver didn’t comprehend the English language half the time, or most of the people on his own planet, who either spoke a foreign language or spoke gobbledegook. Therefore comprehending the incomprehensible becomes fairly comprehendible, if you get my continental drift!
As they canoed down the Black Sea in a southerly direction, that’s if you’re holding the map in front of your face, which Gulliver was at this exact moment in non-time, which meant he couldn’t see exactly where he was going! Gulliver suddenly dropped the map in the canoe as he heard a loud gurgling noise which appeared to be coming from the water far below them. This set Beagle off and he went barking mad, almost falling over the side of the canoe as his curiosity nearly got the better of him. This, Gulliver thought was one of Sir Isaac’s Laws of Motion, every action having an equal and opposite reaction. To Gulliver’s mind the Black Sea wasn’t anywhere near as black as its name suggested it to be, or had been painted by some artists, as something in the water then caught his eye.
‘Captain, I think I saw something moving in the water!’ Gulliver said as a look of concern appeared upon his boyish face, prematurely ageing him somewhat.
‘It was probably the sea, lad. Seas do have a tendency to do that, you know, move!’ Drake said as a smile flickered across his face.
‘No seriously, I thought I saw something large moving below us!’ Gulliver continued.
‘It might be a sea monster, Captain!’ Able Seaman Gracegirdle said with a look of horror upon his face.
All aboard the canoe were jumpy and in that respect they were all in the same boat together, both metaphorically and literally speaking.
‘There’s a light down there!’ Old Father Time said looking over the starboard side as he peered into the gloom.
‘A light, it could be a USO!’ Gulliver said instinctively.
‘A what?’ everybody bar Gulliver exclaimed with a puzzled expression on each and every one of their faces.
‘An Unidentified Submersible Object,’ Gulliver said matter-of-factly.
Hans Christian said nothing, as usual, but you could see by the look in his eyes what he was thinking, this would make a great story.
It was round about this time, or perhaps a smidgeon earlier, that Gulliver realized he actually was in the Twilight Zone.
Now to be fair, explaining what a USO was, which frankly could have been anything from a diver, to a sea monster, to a large piece of floating debris, wasn’t the hardest thing he’d had to do since he fell down Alice’s rabbit hole. And at least it wasn’t a UFO, which would have taken a lot more explaining. Although if that happened he would probably have explained it away as the gods returning in their chariots, or some such nonsense.
Perhaps this was just another vivid Technicolour HD 3D dream like the one he’d had the previous night of ships sailing in the depths of the oceans like submarines; an underwater world where trees blossomed and delivered fruit and flowers grew. And where a large dome sat which wasn’t filled with water but which housed a whole city and the city was called Atlantis.
Gulliver’s flashback was cut short as the able seaman shouted, ‘Bubbles! I can see bubbles!’
Bubbles started rising to the surface and became larger and larger and more and more frequent as time passed.
‘What on God’s flat earth is that!’ Drake exclaimed loudly, as something resembling an overturned tin bathtub rose to the surface about a fifty feet from the canoe, nearly tipping it over.
Soon the top of the submersible contraption peeled back like a sardine tin being opened to reveal a man with dark curly hair and a beard, for to describe the man as anything but hair and a beard would have been a falsehood or a fairytale. A contraption was how Gulliver was later to describe this Underwater Submersible Object in his travelogue before adding that it reminded him of Nautilus in Jules Verne’s story Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, or should I say the bathtub in the Nautilus!
‘Does anyone know the way–’
Gulliver was half expecting the man to say ‘to Amarillo’!
Then two songs vied for attention in his head, one was an old song his grandfather used to sing in the bath, ‘Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed.’ Perhaps Gulliver was already in bed and this was just a dream, or more likely than not he’d got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning and this was turning into a waking nightmare. The other song was a childhood favourite of his and one he still sang in the bath today, ‘Row, row, row the boat gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.’
‘Does anyone know the way to the nearest dry dock? I think I’ve sprung a leak!’ the captain of the vessel said in an Italian accent and in a surprisingly cheerful manner considering his perilous predicament. ‘You know, you can’t see a thing down there, it’s as black as an octopus’s inkwell. Mind you, it didn’t help that I dropped my torch,’ the man continued with a smile on his face.
‘I think you need to head that way,’ Drake said pointing to where they had just come from.
‘That way, you say?’ the captain, said pointing in the same direction as Drake.
‘Yes, just turn left of the jutty-out bit, then right of the other jutty-out bit and you’ll find the land where the water ends. You can’t miss it, it’s well signposted,’ Drake said in what some might say were less-than-nautical terms.
‘Magnifico! I’m most obliged to you all, arrivederci,’ and then the man and his submersible contraption disappeared in a mass of bubbles.
‘Who on earth was that, and moreover, what on earth was that?!’ said Coxswain Horace Hortop disbelievingly, which to be honest, was better than hearing Drake say, ‘Where on earth are we?’ and Gulliver replying, ‘Don’t ask me, I couldn’t circumnavigate a ship around a bathtub!’
‘I think it was Leonardo Da Vinci, or at least if it wasn’t it was his doppelganger. He was probably roadtesting one of his latest inventions,’ Gulliver said thinking on his feet while seated in the canoe.
‘Doppel what?’ said Horace Hortop the coxswain, almost as disbelievingly.
‘Doppelganger, somebody who looks like somebody else,’ Gulliver said matter-of-factly and making perfect sense while at the same time sounding as if he wasn’t.
This incident reminded him of a bathtub race he’d once been witness to as a child, but thought the telling of such a story would only muddy the waters further. And let’s face it, when you’re in the Black Sea, submerged deep within a parallel world, you really don’t need to be muddying the waters any further than they were already being muddied. So once again Gulliver held his tongue, which was better than biting his tongue and a darn sight less painful if the truth be told. ‘The truth? You must be joking!’ as Hans Christian Andersen was always saying in jest.
‘Well, whoever he was, I like the cut of his jib. With an attitude like that he’d make a good Englishman,’ Drake said in admiration.
So the crew of HMS Canoe rowed on until they came to the end of the Black Sea.
Drake said they should leave the canoe in a safe place so nobody would steal it, so this is exactly what they did, finding a nice large rock to hide the canoe behind, after which they covered it over with tree branches. Hopefully they would recognize this rock on the journey back if, in fact, there was to be a journey back. They were now a stone’s throw from Persia.
Two suns plus two moons later they found themselves in Persia where they trekked on foot until on a mountain pass they came to a sign which read: ‘This way to The Last Bookshop in the World. Please don’t drop litter’. Gulliver was a little disappointed they hadn’t been attacked from the skies by a pterodactyl with jaws and teeth the size of a great white shark, like in the book The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as this would have made his travelogue a little more interesting. Having said that, if that had happened then the last entry in his travelogue may well have been, end of story! Hans Christian Andersen, having written several travelogues of his own, the most well known one being A Poet’s Bazaar, had told Gulliver that you couldn’t go around making things up just to make the story more exciting, or at least not in a book about travel, unless of course this book about travel was a fairytale with the highly imaginative title of Gulliver’s Travels, then you could! One thing Gulliver was determined to fit in his travelogue at the end of the book was: ‘This world is literally out of this world, end of story!’
‘The Last Bookshop in the World straight a head, Captain!’ shouted the sailor standing next to Drake looking through his spyglass, the sailor, who it has to be said, was normally in the crow’s nest.
‘There’s no need to shout. I’m not deaf you know!’ Drake said as the sailor bellowed in his ear.
‘Sorry Captain. Old habits die hard!’ the sailor said a little red faced.
Drake gave him that steely eyed glare he often saved for the Spanish or Sir Thomas Baskerville, almost as if to say, ‘You will die hard if you ever do that again!’
‘Can you believe it, Alice!?’ Gulliver shouted in Alice’s general direction, avoiding Drake’s ears and eyes as Beagle jumped up into his master’s arms like the excited puppy he now was.
‘No, can you?’ Alice shouted back as she saw the sign come into view.
‘No, perhaps we’re both dreaming!’ said Gulliver disbelievingly.
‘Which means we’re both in one another’s dreams, cool,’ Alice said picking up on another one of Gulliver’s expressions.
Gulliver was half expecting The Last Bookshop in the World to be underwater so you had to climb into one of those old-fashioned diving suits with the lead boots, the ones with the big metal helmets with the long oxygen pipes attached to it, if you wanted to enter the shop. Either that or the mythical bookshop would be on the moon! Gulliver’s grandfather was right, Gulliver did have a vivid imagination, but nothing could prepare him for what happened next.