Once upon a time, a long, long time into the future, there lived a Princess. She was.... How can she live in the future? It is as easy as living in the past. To tell you the truth, she really lives in the Present. Only in the Present - though most people seem to prefer living in the past. I don't know why. I suppose they live in their memories. When you do nothing much, you don't create new memories, so you have to live in the past. But not the Princess. She has so much to do that a lot of what she does spills into the future.

The story I am about to tell you all happened a long, long time ago, and continues a long, long time into the future. Sometimes it all seems like a dream, at other times it feels as real as the pink Christmas flowers on my window-shelf. It all depends what mood Alec is in. It also depends on great many other things, but Alec didn't know about them, until a long, long time into the future.

One autumn day Alec woke up feeling rather queasy. His temperature run a little high and his mother, worried as most mothers usually are, told him to stay home. For most boys this would be a reason to be happy, but Alec liked his school. Perhaps not every subject, but on that day they were to have Geography, and Alec always managed to imagine that he traveled to the place they were studying at the time.

It first happened when the prim Miss Brunt, the teacher of geography, history and some other subjects that did not interest Alec at all, was showing them the map of Peru. The large map had colorful photographs on each side depicting people from a bygone era. On the slopes of a mountain that looked like cascading terraces, there were men and women and children all surrounded by strange animals she called llamas and alpacas. Miss Brunt explained to the boys and girls that although these were photographs of paintings, people still dressed in the same clothes that looked even more beautiful than a springtime rainbow. There were reds and crimsons, and rich blues and oranges and sunny yellows. They, Miss Burnt said, wove all their cloths themselves. Above the people on the green terraces there rose a big stone wall upon which stood a man dressed in even more splendid attire. He was taller than others were, and he looked down on the men and women below him with a kindly smile. He must have been some kind of a king or ruler.

And this is when it all started.

Alec immediately saw himself as an Inca prince, dressed in princely regalia, in colorful clothes spiced with gold thread. He stood next to the king and also looked kindly upon his people from the top of the wall. He then smiled down, and as the men and women approached, he distributed golden nuggets to them that he collected on his many travels.

"Alec!" Miss Brunt's voice was even louder than the laughter of his people.

"Yes Miss Brunt?"

"Are you paying attention?" she asked sternly. But not too sternly. Alec was her star pupil of geography, even though his attention seemed to wander at times. "You are paying attention", she affirmed for her own satisfaction.

"Yes, Miss Brunt!" Alec agreed even as he handed another golden nugget to a youngster about his own age reaching up on his toes. "Would you like one too?" he asked Miss Burnt quietly.

Luckily, Miss Brunt was already explaining the method of making wool from Vicunas.

Alec's daydream would last until the Miss Brunt tapped on the blackboard or otherwise distracted him from his waken jaunt. That same evening, on returning home, Alec read up all he could on the Inca Empire in the Encyclopaedia. The following night his dreams were filled with soaring mountains, their crags disappearing in mysterious mists while their bases seemed lost in deep, even more mysterious, ravines. He pondered their mysteries while he traveled on a narrow mountain path, a stony trail. Behind him his people followed with a number of llamas carrying his tent, food and water.

He was only ten when he started having such visions. By the time he was twelve, he sat on the throne of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the throne of the Czars of Russia, he slept in a Cossack tent in the middle of the Mongolian dessert, shared hot, sweet goat milk in cozy yurts surrounded by of the inaccessible, forbidding Afghan mountains. He crossed the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian oceans in a variety of sail-craft, the powerful square-riggers, their sails billowing in the steady easterlies. He almost died from lack of water on a raft that strayed from the established trade-routes into the treacherous doldrums. He reached the North and the South Poles on foot, skis and sled, he climbed the Everest and the K2 mountains in the perilous reaches towering over Kashmir. He sat at the feet of gurus in the somber Buddhist monastery, listening to the secret chant of Aum.

As time went on his visions became more and more real. He not only imagined the places he saw, he actually felt the cold air of the high mountains, he smelled the stale miasma of the subterranean caves, he tasted the thick black tea on the deck of original two-masted dahabeahs with their long yard supporting their triangular sails, drifting majestically on the slow-moving waters of the Nile. He once woke up with bites from a scorpion he suffered crossing the Sahara on foot, only to find a tiny spider looking down on him from the ceiling. There was no reason to think that the spider ever lowered himself, or was it herself, down to his bed. Anyway, most spiders don't bite though his leg hurt and festered for a week....

read on in the book...

He was falling, seemingly falling for ages.

The walls, solid up above, became diffused with grayish light. They looked soft, pliable, although he did not touch them. How long would the fall take?

The air was getting thicker. At the same time, the walls of the precipice receded, or became transparent, and he could see vast areas of quite primitive terrain. There were small but cruel mountains, their crests as sharp as needles. Between them he saw what looked like craters which became more common as he fell down. He felt he was receding not so much into a depth, but in time. The Earth, or the planet he was on, seemed to grow older. He was descending into its ancient history. The words 'Ancient History' flashed across his consciousness and stayed there.

The rate of his descent seemed to slow down. The landscape became more clearly defined, more color filled his field of vision. He became aware of heat penetrating through the now almost non-existent walls of the ravine. Then a roar filled his ears. He saw a volcano vomiting masses of ash and rocks into the orange sky. That's right. Down there, or here, possibly as deep as any man has ever been, there was a sky. A curious sky. The clouds were dense, oppressive in their apparent thickness. They reflected the heat right back into the soil that continued to throw up whatever it didn't want. The surface of a lake nearby seemed to boil.

"How can anyone survive in this land?" He wandered. "And what on Earth, or in the world, am I doing here?"

And then he stopped moving, although he didn't feel any ground below him. He felt suspended about six feet above the ground, a ground he wouldn't want to step on. It was moving even as he hovered above it.

"What in the world am I doing here?" He asked again. "And where are my legs, and arms, and body?" His eyes traced the space where his body once was. "Where am I, where is me???"

A monster about ten times the size of an elephant approached him with slow, measured steps. The beast seemed quite unaware of his presence. It moved heavily, each foot covering no less than some five or six feet of the ground. The biggest feet he ever saw. Just as well. Its jaws spanning from shoulder to shoulder had some snakes protruding from it. Snakes with white balls on the end that looked like eyes. Also four or five elongated body parts with flat widening funnels at the end were hanging from the corners of what must have been its jaws. As the monster thundered forward, a sharp crevice opened between its front and rear paws. The beast's left rear paw spanned the two edges of the crack. It just walked on as though nothing had happened...

continued in the book...