There are, I had learnt in my school days, two types of illusion and for
those living in southern England in the late twentieth century there
was often a personal familiarity, through aunts and uncles, through
clay modelling and gardening instructors, through the mothers and
relations of friends who frequently and fondly spoke of everyday
feudal scenes observed caught in an ogee arch at their parish
church, for just as most of my sample data base at that time lived
within walking distance of the ruins of an abbey or of abbey lands, so
also did they have these personal insights into internalized vision that
went deeper than a coarse sensation of negative or positive vibes, or
cerebrochemical vibrations in which a snap judgement is elevated to
the level of intuitive understanding. We may all have had relatives
who at one time or another observed endless streams of dwarves
carrying ladders through their living rooms, indeed we may well have
been subject to such sensations ourselves, but our concerns were
significantly greater for those who believed that what they saw
represented an external truth, and hence worried themselves sick
about how to cope with such an accumulation of ladders within the
house, than for those who understood that what they were observing
was an internal envisualisation that bore no connexion with their
shared ambient reality. I was temporarily, or so I thought, to be
classed within this latter happier group, for I knew that I remained on
board the LUCA and that, led by the MarkVI, I was in rapid, generally
bipedal search, of the control console which must lie within a not
insuperable number of length units of my current position, and yet
such was the power of the LUCA's audioscoping that I actually
believed, as the roof of the tunnel suddenly opened up above me,
that this spouting flume gave onto the void of an unplugged volcanic
vent that plunged tens of toises through the crust and where in my
long terminal flight I would reach similar velocities to those achieved
by the peregrine falcon in the much cosier aerial environment above
central London.
No one can hold it against me that as I was launched into space by
the rushing stream, I let loose the most chilling scream I have ever
heard, enough to terrify myself into silence once I realised that the
sound that boomed in that enormous throat came from my own. The
sonar effects were devastating, far worse than anything imaginably
endured by some helpless clap-and-flinger drawn by currents beyond
its control into the mouth of an active tuba, I now began to understand
