8. The Camino Real

Jūrmala, Latvia – arrived by train across the Lielupe from Riga. Beautiful art deco hotel and breathtaking white sands only ruined by party officials like Russian bears bathing naked each morning. They keep bothering daddy in the dining room too. They seem to know we were in China. My baby bear yr Mummy bear.

(6dgp Montpelier)

They were ushered through to Foggy’s den. The room had much the same foundation of white sterility as the first room but in this one it had been liberally infected with Foggy’s relaxing regalia - soft leather weather beaten sofas; bookcases tumbling old books onto the floor; an old Ferrograph reel to reel tape recorder; LP records and a monstrous hifi stack with loudspeaker columns in each corner; a low coffee table covered with smokers requisites. In the corner stood a diving bell and a heavy canvas jacket with no hand holes but heavy leather straps and buckles all over it.

They sank into the sofas as Elisabeth, in the adjoining room, was putting a tray of coffee followed by a sacha torte into a serving hatch cum airlock in the far wall. And as he served them Foggy began to tell them the tale of the Camino Real.

The legend of the Camino Real – the Royal Way – in the UK dates back to Elizabethan times and earlier, to the reign of Henry VII. A network of invisible lines girdle the globe tracing the path of a particular type of geo-seismic activity.  At the confluence of such lines - the nodes or hubs of the network - are portals through which a body may pass and immediately emerge from a point elsewhere on the grid.

It is said the Sumerians first discovered this network and unlocked the secret of how to enter it and how to determine one’s exit. This knowledge was brought from the east into Europe by the Moors at the time of the Spanish occupation. Because of the potential for military use and the limitations on the number of persons who could navigate the network simultaneously, this knowledge was guarded and treasured by the ruling elite. After the Moors had been expelled from Spain it was kept by the Spanish monarchs who used the network only when they needed to escape great danger. There were risks associated with surfing these seismic waves and a judgment had to be made each time it was used.

How the understanding and practice of such technology came to these shores, we have the movers and shakers of the court of Henry VII to thank. They negotiated its transfer as part of the dowry of Catherine of Aragon when she was betrothed to Henry’s oldest son Arthur, Prince of Wales. It is rumoured his early demise 5 months after the marriage was due to youthful exuberance and hubris. In using the way to show off to his pals he had damaged certain vital organs by not correctly following the protocols for entry into the portal. The resulting deficiencies in his physique figured significantly later on in the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine.

With the shock of Arthur’s death, the family drew back from plans to use the network and, somewhat ironically, it was only ever considered for use again as a getaway route for the Queen and government at the time of the Armada had it landed successfully.

Newton and other scientists of the 18^th and 19^th centuries were aware of the network. Some observations were made and recorded of the physical phenomena associated with the nodes and the locations of these were said to have been mapped at one time. But it seems the knowledge of how to access or utilise the gateways had been buried with the Tudors.

At the beginning of this century, a wealthy family of industrialists and entrepreneurs from the West Midlands acquired the ruins of a Tudor castle near Cheltenham. This they set about restoring for use as their country home and as a showcase for their success. During the renovations, builders stumbled upon a cache of documents. Among other things these contained details of the whereabouts of the various portals in the UK and instructions on how to go through them and emerge from a predetermined exit point.

At first they tried to interest the government in sponsoring research into using the gateways but they hit a wall of scepticism. However, during the Great War an administration desperate to make a breakthrough in the stalemate on the Western Front were ready to fund all sorts of whacky schemes they thought might give them an advantage.

There were 2 brothers – twins – who managed the family’s businesses. It all seemed to be going well at first. A team of experts poured over the documents on behalf of the Department for Internal Communications System (DICS) and verified their authenticity. A number of demonstrations and presentations by the brothers’ and their team of scientists convinced DICS to release several tranches of funds. Objects and animals were sent through the network, even people at one point – though they never were able to determine consistently the point of exit and some of the guinea pigs sustained minor injuries to their extremities, bits of fingers or toes missing. (For some reason a picture of Lee Delamere’s yellow-pink flabby skin and melted earlobe ran through DD’s mind.)

Sadly it turned out that much of what they claimed to have achieved and what the so called experts witnessed was a scam. Exactly how much, nobody knows. The science was sound but DICS eventually rumbled that the money was being siphoned off and the research had stalled as a result. At the end of the war the surviving brother was convicted of treason and hanged. The other had disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Some said he entered the network and never emerged. Others, that he entered the network in Cradley Heath, his torso came out in Clitheroe, his arms and legs in Cleethorpes and his head in Chorlton Cum Hardy.

You may be thinking that hanging seems a bit harsh for common or garden fraud – but to obtain money by deception from one’s own government in time of war, to deprive the nation of scarce resources at such a time, was quite another matter.

It transpired that the family’s fortunes had been at the point of collapse because of years of poor management.  Speculative investment in overseas ventures in the hope of redeeming the company just before the war had all been lost at the outbreak of hostilities.

“But how could it work?” DD interjected, semi-serious, semi-scoffing.

Foggy ran on – basic physics, simple relativity – Albert Einstein and all that. You know that if you sit on a chair you are not actually touching the chair. The atomic particles which make up everything are in constant motion, all repelling each other maintaining microscopic distance yet sufficiently attracted to one another to coalesce into objects and articles and bodies. People are really just a cloud of loose objects – some looser than others.

The portals of the network are like a complex wire mesh, an interweaving of the seismic waves at the junctions of the network. Can you imagine a glutinous liquid object being pressed through a sieve? It re-emerges on the other side in exactly the same shape, perfectly intact. The portals are like that mesh. You might walk right through one without realising it.

“So how do you enter the ‘network’?”

Imagine that the portal is like an invisible giant Shreddie. The large rectangular holes in the mesh have something like lobes or fins lining each side. The whole structure is vibrating at a constant ultra high frequency. By forcing subtle changes in the frequency of the vibrations , theoretically, the fins can be made to act like the flippers on a pinball table.  If you could succeed in co-ordinating their movement, then instead of an object passing straight through the mesh the object – or person – may be redirected to another portal on the grid from which they emerge.

Of course, if you fail to properly co-ordinate the movement or if the vibrations across the mesh are out of phase .... well they are not called Shreddies for nothing. It was said that it was this co-ordination and control that defeated the team but they deceived the government scientists and so secured further substantial sums of money to conclude the project.

“There, and I thought scientists couldn’t be fooled!” Toddington muttered.

“Scientists don’t know everything. The Theory of Relativity? The clue’s in the word “theory”. Einstein wasn’t always right you know!” Foggy concluded.

“And who were these brothers who came to such a grizzly end?”

“Canes. Milton and Maynard Canes.”

Canes? Now where had DD seen that name recently?