eing whom I might encounter, lest I
should inadvertently betray important knowledge to them. This promise I
gave readily enough, but, I must confess, with no intention of keeping
it. He gave me some further instructions and a pass written with the ink
pencil, which he said would entitle me to protection and help from any
first-class being whom I might encounter.

Thus then on a fine sunny morning I started out with no more equipment
than I could easily carry on my back. The prospect of adventure lured
me. For the first time for days I felt in good temper and spirits.

CHAPTER VI

The Professor had been well within the mark in stating that the breadth
of the island was not less than eight miles. By sundown I must have
covered thirty miles at least and encamped for the night by the side of
a swift and narrow stream. I had still the low hill to cross which the
Professor had spoken of as a mountain. In a flat country such as Thule,
all hills are mountains.

The Professor's mistakes in regard to time and distance interested me a
good deal. I could understand that they rendered him professionally
unsuitable for the practical work of the Central Office and that they
probably helped to debar him from the post which he desired in the Inner
Office. It may be, perhaps, that one cannot have an over-development in
one direction without a compensating defect in another. The Professor
showed the same anxiety to conceal his want of time-sense that an
engine-driver might show to conceal his colour-blindness. After all,
instances of this want of time-appreciation are common enough among my
own people in dealing with the past. One knows the vagueness with which
the ordinary man assigns a fact to the sixteenth or seventeenth
century--a fact which in reality belongs to the eighteenth. The further
back we go the more vague we become. It is difficult for us to realise
that the difference between the tenth and eleventh centuries is a
difference of a hundred of those very years which we are now living. So
far as the present was concerned, the Professor's time-appreciation was
clear and accurate enough. He never forgot the hour at which he should
take his pills or his siesta in the sun. Watches were unknown in Thule,
but there was a clock in every room, and all clocks were wound and
synchronised electrically from the Central Office.

I had never been able to persuade the Professor to tell me where the
Central, Outer, and Inner Offic