I'm delighted to see you. You're as brown, my gadling, as though you had returned from another journey to the East with Jean de Village.

To torture another metaphor, it would be the difference between slowly letting the air out of a balloon, and popping it. Though the dam metaphor is more apt, what with the excess magic flooding outward.

Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he found himself suddenly accosted by some kind of synaesthetic fixation with the woman: hearing the colour of her hair in the mosque, smelling the touch of her hand on the tube, tasting her smile while innocently walking the streets.

But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous “field” in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a “global village.”