The diving bell passed long strands of billowing seaweed and bemused sea life as it made its way through the dark murky water as it headed for the sunlight above.
‘Look!’ Alice cried as she pointed at a shoal of shimmering silver fish which darted past the window of the diving bell in the half light.
‘It’s a different world down here,’ Gulliver said, unaware of exactly what he’d just said.
Gulliver would have loved to have seen more wondrous sights but these greenie dark black waters were not like the pristine crystal clear waters of the South Pacific or the blue waters of the Antiquarium.
The diving bell slowly rose to the surface in a motion best described as that of a jellyfish, in other words in slightly jerky stages. Da Vinci’s design was simple, brilliant and effective and like a lot of his inventions, based on the designs of Mother Nature.
Nearing their journey’s end and with both Gulliver and Alice metaphorically holding their breaths, disaster struck when the diving bell hit the bottom of a passing submarine.
‘Water!’ cried Alice, which being inside a diving bell wasn’t the worse thing you could have heard unless the water was inside the diving bell. Unfortunately for Alice, Gulliver and Beagle, it was as water started pouring into the diving bell at an alarming rate. Gulliver was hoping the pump action of the jellyfish applied to the inside as well as the outside of Da Vinci’s diving bell, but unfortunately it didn’t!
This left no other option but for them to swim for their very lives. In this moment of madness Gulliver had the foresight to thrust his travelogue down his trousers in the hope it could be saved for posterity along with the travellers!
Gulliver watched the diving bell sink like the proverbial stone back down into the murky depths from whence they had come. Da Vinci’s diving bell might not have seen them safely all the way home but at least they were almost there, and it wasn’t Leonardo’s fault the British Navy weren’t looking where they were going!
A little while later Beagle and Gulliver emerged from beneath the waves but Alice was nowhere to be seen. Gulliver dived down several times but could not see her anywhere, he feared the worst and that she had drowned in the backwash of the submarine.
Disconsolately Gulliver swam to the dry land of St Mary’s Bay in Brixham and with Beagle by his side walked back to his houseboat-cum-antiques emporium. As he did so he noticed that Beagle was no longer a puppy but was old and by the look of his hands and legs so was he. In fact he was thirty-five again; he hadn’t aged a day in the time he was in the parallel world. In fact, to add insult to injury, it was a Sunday, the exact same Sunday that they had left this world on.
Gulliver later wrote in his travelogue that he felt like many moons had passed since he left his world when in fact no moons had passed at all, which was strange to say the very least. Mind you, in the parallel earth-cum-giant antique globe, the moon was a large moonstone, that and in that world there was no time to pass so was it any wonder it was still a Sunday?
Gulliver had always said Sundays went on for ever and it seemed he wasn’t far wrong! Beagle still had his golden collar on, the one Queen Elizabeth I had given him on the parallel earth they had travelled back in time to, which at least proved this wasn’t a dream. Having said that, as the parallel earth had no time perhaps that description is not all it should be. All Gulliver had on when he resurfaced in the Devon of 2O13 was some very tight trousers and a shirt he’d split.
*
Gulliver continued on with his life as usual almost as if his travels hadn’t happened but had all been just a vivid dream, although getting used to time again was a little strange. However, by this time Gulliver and strange were anything but strange bedfellows. He didn’t tell anybody of his story, why would he, for whom in their right mind would believe a single word that came out of his mouth? However, Gulliver did write a travelogue entitled Gulliver’s Travels in Wonderland, which he turned into a novel, although it only sold a few thousand copies around the world. No matter, he enjoyed writing it even if nobody enjoyed reading such nonsensical hogwash! Perhaps whoever read it would end up between the pages of the book travelling by his side on his fantastical voyage into the unknown. And at least it took his mind off feeling guilty that Alice had drowned in their attempts to get back to his world, unless she really was a mermaid and she had swum back to her own world, this at least gave Gulliver some comfort. Who knows, maybe his fantastical yarn would be turned into a film which would pick up several Golden Globes, perhaps even an Oscar or two. Well, one could dream, one could always dream.
Having written his first book and having read other people’s books, Gulliver knew that all writers were as mad as a hatter and this to Gulliver’s mind was not a fairytale. It was true, however, that some writers were madder than others, but they were all mad. This meant Gulliver felt write, sorry right at home in this noble profession which in part required you to use your imagination and wear a hat which said ‘Not for sale!’ upon the brim.
Gulliver still lived in the old world as he still worked in his antique shop which was still less than shipshape and Bristol fashion, although it was shipshape and Brixham fashion, well, after a fashion! Since his travels Gulliver felt reborn, like a kid in a candy store, even though his short return to childhood was over, well for the time being at least, and he didn’t work in a candy store. Now every time somebody called him ‘Sir’ it made him stand tall both literally and metaphorically, whereas before it had just made him feel old. He may not have been a knight in his world but now in his soul he felt every bit as much a knight of the realm as Sir Galahad or King Arthur.
This uplift of spirit was helped by yet another strange event which began with the word however…
However, this wasn’t end of story, not quite, for six months later Alice walked into Gulliver’s antique’s shop\boat as an adult. As soon as Gulliver saw Alice he knew it was her and she in turn knew it was Gulliver, simply by looking the other in the eye. They hugged as rivers of tears flowed from their eyes, which later Gulliver said might have flooded his shop if they hadn’t stopped.
Apparently Alice had surfaced but had bumped her head on a rock, suffering from amnesia in the process. It was only a few days ago that her memory had returned and it transpired that she had been staying at a bed and breakfast house in the area. The lady who found her on the shoreline was the owner of the B &B who took pity on her as she appeared to be down on her luck, as she had no money and no means of identifying herself. Alice told the woman she couldn’t even remember her own name and the police had no luck in finding out her identity either.
Once Alice regained her memory, she, like Gulliver, found getting used to a world where time existed quite strange. Now, for a girl who didn’t known the meaning of the word ‘strange’ or ‘time’, this all took some time, how much I cannot say. However, Alice was familiar with the word ‘curious’, and it was curiosity (which in this case didn’t kill the cat) which helped her adjust to this strange parallel earth which had an abundance of time in it which could be both valued and wasted in equal measures.
One particular fine day on the earth of 2013, the sky was full of balloons, or I should say hot air balloons of all shapes, sizes and colours, it was truly a glorious sight to behold. However, Alice was worried that the balloons would hit the roof of the world and burst or the roof of the ship’s bottle, which of course in Gulliver’s world did not exist. Alice also found the weather confusing and more severe than she was used to. Being in the confines of the ship’s bottle meant the winds were lighter and it never snowed, although when it was very cold ice did form on the top of the ship’s bottle and then fell in large sheets. This, if you were underneath at the time, wasn’t much fun as Gulliver had found out to his cost, nearly ending up like an ice sculpture of Rodin’s The Thinker. When the glass wall at the back of the ship’s bottle iced up, climbers with crampons on their feet often scaled it, or at least attempted to!
When Gulliver looked back over his time in this strange world with the help of his travelogue he wondered how everything managed to work even though he had seen it work with his own eyes. Gulliver was fully aware that some time ago in his world there had been an experiment in a science laboratory where life had been conjured up in a beaker by a boffin, and that the earth, like the antique globe, was magnetic, and that life and water may well have been brought to the earth of the past via a comet or a meteorite. And although this still left his explanation of the parallel earth as woolly as a woolly mammoth, at least it made some sense out of the nonsense that was Alice’s Wonderland. There were times Gulliver thought earth was nothing more than an experiment in a beaker, that beaker being the earth, as an alien lifeform looked on to see how their experiment was working out. If you thought about it, which Gulliver had, this made us an alien lifeform! Yes, Gulliver certainly had some imagination, which since he had come back to his own world was back to its old self, almost as if the child within him had been regenerated by his wondrous, fantastical ‘out of this world’ adventure of several lifetimes.
For the first time in her life, Alice saw and heard lightning first hand, which made her jump out of her skin and hide under the nearest table shaking like a leaf. Although Gulliver was used to lightning, he being the perfect gentleman crawled under the table with her and held her hand until the lightning passed. Yes, his world did take a bit of getting used to, Gulliver had said to Alice with a wry smile upon his face.
*
Time passed as it has a mind to do and in this world Old Father Time kept very much in the background, watching from a distance. But be in no doubt, the Guardian of Time was there along with the gods sitting up high amongst the clouds in the heavens known as Mount Olympus. Gulliver eventually summed up the courage to propose to Alice, which he did in a rather romantic fashion while travelling on the Paignton and Dartmouth steam train line. Of course Alice said yes. Even more romantically, they had a maritime wedding, getting married on board the Golden Hind, the replica mind. The icing on the cake was that their wedding cake was of the Golden Hind, which was definitely a replica, with a married couple standing upon its deck. Just for the record, the cake had been baked by Heston Blumenthal, who like Gulliver was one of planet earth’s true original thinkers. And they all lived happily ever after. Well, that’s a nice ending but that’s not quite the end of the story.
A year later in 2013 a terrible flood hit the coast of Devon and Brixham was flooded. At the time, Gulliver, Beagle and Alice were standing upon the deck of the Golden Hind as a wave swept them out to sea. (Once again this was a replica of the Hind and there wasn’t an aardvark or zygote in sight as this wasn’t Noah’s or Gulliver’s Ark!) At the time, to Gulliver’s imaginative mind, it felt as if the Golden Hind was nothing more than a toy boat caught in a squall, or like a surfer riding upon a crest of a wave until the wave fell away.
Sometime later, the replica of the Golden Hind appeared out of the mists of time to see the Golden Hind surrounded by several Spanish galleons. As the Golden Hind sailed into view, the Spanish could not believe their eyes, it was true what everybody said about Drake, that he was a god and had magically conjured up another Golden Hind which was sailing full steam ahead in their exact direction. The Spanish thought this was a ghost ship and sailed off into the sunset with their collective sails between their legs.
Then the golden seas they were sailing upon became as becalmed as a mill pond. Were the seas actually golden? Well, there are such things as extremophiles which are microbes, and there is one such microbe called archaea which thrives in hot springs and black smokes upon the ocean floor. Some of these species consume the heavy metal dissolved in the water before excreting it as solid. This process produces gold from sea water, a form of alchemy some might say. Then, of course, there is another form of gold, in the oceans, black gold in other words oil which big oil companies wanted to plunder from the Artic and oceans of the world. This plundering of the black gold by the multi-national pirates had already had consequences which were not good for the life which lived in these places, something Gulliver strongly opposed. Gulliver had been very much a greenhorn in Alice’s world, in this world he was very much into green issues realizing Mother Nature needed all the help she could get to stem the tide of global warming.
‘You took your time!’ said Drake as Gulliver, Beagle and Alice sailed into view. ‘Only yanking your anchor, boy. Nice to see you again. I wondered where you’d disappeared to!’
‘Just thought I’d take the old girl out for a spin across the waves of time to blow the cobwebs from her sails,’ Gulliver shouted to Drake across the ship’s starboard side as the two Golden Hinds sailed side by side as if it was the most natural thing in the world. One might have said these two ships were doppelgangers, mirror images of one another, if one had a mind to.
‘That’s taken the wind out of those Spanish sails,’ Drake said grinning from ear to ear.
‘Actually, technically it hasn’t otherwise they wouldn’t be sailing over the horizon,’ Gulliver said taking the wind out of Drake’s sails.
‘So where does your fancy take you this time, Gulliver?’ Drake said as he scratched his beard ignoring Gulliver’s quip, although it may well have been that he was going deaf due to the noise of the cannons going off in battle.
‘Well, I hear there is a place in the South American, Amazonian rainforest called El Dorado where a city of gold stands,’ Gulliver said as he took out his spyglass and looked into the mists of time.
‘Well, there’s no time like the present, Gulliver my boy, after all, time waits for no man, not even Old Father Time! So hoist the mainsail, lads. Splice the what-cha-ma-call-it, oh, and nice to see you again, Alice, and you too, Beagle,’ Drake said as Beagle leapt up onto the side of the replica of the Golden Hind and barked out his orders to Sir Francis Drake. It seemed to Gulliver there was plenty of adventure, out there if you were prepared to go to the ends of the earth and beyond to find it. Drake certainly felt there was plenty of the map that still needed filling in and he was intent on filling that map for both queen and country, or in this particular case, queens and country!
Gulliver wondered if there was such thing as a time map or a map of time itself. That would take some time to fill in the blanks, he thought as a smile appeared upon his dial as he continued to circumnavigate the globe of the imagination, a globe of unimaginable size which was never likely to be circumnavigated until the end of the world itself.
‘Oh you might recognize this fellow,’ Drake said nonchalantly, almost as an afterthought as Hans Christian Andersen appeared from below deck with a great big smile upon his face. And once again with no word of a lie, this unbelievable happening wasn’t a fairytale! Gulliver could hardly believe his own eyes, he thought Hans Christian had got so thoroughly lost in a book in The Last Bookshop in the World that he would never see the light of day again. Gulliver was later to write this in the epilogue of his travelogue: ‘I know it makes little sense thus making it nonsense, but I think The Last Bookshop in the World should be added to the list of ancient wonders of the world, even if this wonder is in a parallel world!’
Having sailed into the mists of time upon the replica Golden Hind, Gulliver had returned to the age when he left the parallel world so now both he and Alice were eighteen years of age, and in dog years Beagle was a teenager too of sorts. With all this gallivanting through time, or a time without time, it made Gulliver wonder if he could send a message in a bottle through time. Perhaps he could even send a ship in a bottle through time. Perhaps a sculptor or an engineer could build a giant bottle and put a giant ship in it, a bit like the Cutty Sark in London. Mind you, in summer, due to the glass the heat would be stifling, although I suppose they could always fit air conditioning. I would say these were most curious thoughts indeed but in truth, for Gulliver, thinking-wise these leftfield thoughts were pretty much standard fare!
And that really is the end of Gulliver’s Travels, or should I say The Travels of Gulliver? Hold your seahorses. What’s that I spy through my magical telescopic time device, otherwise known as the Da Vinci\Galileo Optimum Timaeus Crystal Viewing Scope? Just give me a minute while I twiddle with this crystal eyepiece, just a few minor adjustments and as the mists of time clear… hey presto! I can quite clearly see a sequel of the swashbuckling variety sailing into view… End of the story, unless I’m looking through the wrong end of the scope and that’s not a sequel I spy but a prequel!