Treacle also carries some stuff, and I volunteered too, but they didn’t give me much.
I’d packed the pink dress with my WD, and wore this grey-white one I brought from the house over the gulf. (And, I packed this book, although I hadn’t written in it and thought I might not, again. But, as you’ve seen, that didn’t last.)
Venn also carried things in a bag on his back.
The funniest thing was the team of six cats Jotto and Grem rounded up and harnessed to a sort of sled, to carry light bedding and other bits and pieces.
Venn drew a rough map before we started.
‘The library is often here.’ He pointed at the spot he’d marked in a tangle of squares and circles and snake-like coilings that were apparently rooms, corridors, courtyards.
Jotto particularly looked glum.
‘Only doubtless it won’t be there,’ Venn went on. ‘It had a phase,’ he added, ‘of travelling east then south, then back north and west. So we could try for that, to start with.’
‘But what about the time it just kept going up and up?’ said Jotto. ‘It was on the sixth gallery once, rumbling about between those towers—’
I stopped listening really. It sounded hopeless, frankly. Why were we doing it? For me, it seems …
We left the gardens about mid-morning.
The cliff-palace loomed over us, swallowed us up in its caves of painted stone.
For about an hour we walked steadily, and although we heard sounds of parts of the Rise moving, everything round us stayed still, as it was once supposed to when someone was there.
‘Though just walking about in a room can set it off now,’ said Jotto. ‘I should know. The times I’ve been trapped for days.’
Once or twice peculiar mechanical things appeared and went rattling past. That is, they went past because we all quickly got out of their way – they seemed likely to knock you flying otherwise, and some were as large as a sheep. They are cleaners, Jotto said, sniffily. Once too there was a sort of spider thing, crawling over a ceiling, touching up the paint-work.
Soon however, we were just going out through a wide arch, when an enormous staircase came pouring out of a wall. It rolled right at us (reminding me of the storm-waves on the ship) and stopped with a thud only when it had blocked the arch. Meanwhile we’d scattered yelling, and the cats had overturned the sled.
Jotto and Treacle and I gathered up sheets and Grem mended the broken harness.
‘We’ll have to go that way instead,’ said Venn, waving the map.
This became the chorus to our crazy journey. Oh, this way’s now impassable. We’ll go that way then.
But that way was often found to be blocked too, or had gone off itself somewhere else.
Four days went by. And four nights. Unbelievable, I know, but worse was to come.
Books at the House were sometimes adventures. Some of them had titles like Hunting the Treasure Hoard or Quest for the Emerald Queen.
Well, this must be the Quest for the Library.
In a sane book, one would travel over plains, across mountains, through deep woods. Here we slog on and on through this ghastly palace. In the book, probably we’d be getting somewhere. Here, we’re always miles away. I do mean miles.
On the fifth day we got stuck. In here.
We’d got caught before, once, on day three, when an apartment we were crossing abruptly took off – so fast Treacle and Jotto and I fell over!
The apartment, which was of several rooms with inner curtained doorways – if there are no closing wood doors, the whole thing tends to move together, Venn said – rushed around for nearly an hour and then stopped dead in an area dark enough the hard light came on.
When we looked, there was no way out, the three outer doors were covered by walls now directly outside. Luckily after only ten minutes the apartment went off again. Soon as we could we all charged out into a stone courtyard with a statue (of a huge rat or something). We only just made it, too, before the apartment swung away again. (We walked past this same apartment the day before yesterday, I think. It looked the same. Fortunately we didn’t need to go through.)
Anyway, the evening of the day before yesterday, we made camp at dinnertime facing the foot of a vast staircase. We left quite a gap between us and it, of course, in case it suddenly moved. It didn’t move though. Jotto set up the brazier and Grem lit it, for tea.
It’s extremely weird. Unless there are the lights, which often there haven’t been, sitting round this kind of brazier-campfire, late at night, in the middle of a building. Shadows gather blackly at the edges of the light, just as they do outdoors. Even eyes sometimes gleam there, watching cats or other things (?) that Venn says live in the palace.
In the morning we were woken about dawn by the rooms behind us thundering off like a herd of rhino.
Venn consulted his map and said we ought to climb the staircase. This obviously was tricky, especially for five of us and six cats pulling a sled.
He said we’d do it this way: me and Jotto together, then him, Treacle and Grem (carrying the cats and the sled). This way, even if separated, no one should be stranded totally alone.
I was jittery, climbing that stair, I can tell you. But we all made it – almost.
Treacle, clutching three cats, was on the last landing, when the lower stair split away. It was a fearful sight. She seemed to be hanging in space, but then her piece of stair just rose gracefully upwards. As it sailed past us, she was able to jump off into Grem’s arms. One of the cats bit him in the excitement.
Leaving the stair-top soaring on up into a dome, we came out into this massive hall with cream-yellow walls, a gallery, and a gigantic
