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people, must see my new bicycle. It was the one thing his parents had not bought him, though they had bought him almost everything else. They would not allow Aldo a bicycle because of the various dangers involved and, in particular, because it might hinder Aldo's progress on the violin. It was for this reason that I whistled to Aldo furtively, from outside his house. When Aldo appeared he took the situation in at a glance, managing to smuggle the bicycle quickly into a disused shed in their back garden without his mother having suspected anything at all.
    Afterwards, we both went into the house and shut ourselves up in Aldo's father's library (Professore Emilio Castelnuovo having gone to Cairo for four days on business). It greeted me, as usual, with a smell both gloomy and enticing, made up of muttered secrets and hushed carpets, stealthy plots and leather upholstery, illicit whisperings and distant journeys. All day long, all summer long, the library shutters were kept closed to prevent sunlight fading the beautiful leather bindings with their gold-lettered spines.
    We took out the huge German Atlas and compared carefully every possible route on the map of Africa. Aldo's mother sent the Armenian nanny, Louisa, to us with a dish full of nuts—peanuts and almonds, walnuts and sunflower seeds—also orange juice in delicate blue glasses, still sweating with cold.
    When we had demolished the peanuts and walnuts and begun on the sunflower seeds, the conversation turned to bicycles in general and my bicycle in particular. If Aldo were secretly to own a bicycle, it should be possible, we decided, to keep it hidden from all suspicious eyes, at the back of the disused shed. And then, early on Saturday mornings, while his parents were still safely fast asleep, he would be able to creep out; there would be nothing to stop him riding right to the end of the world.
    I pronounced expert opinions on a thousand and one relevant items, approving or disapproving of them accordingly. On spokes and valves and safety valves; on batteries as compared to dynamos; on hand brakes (which, applied at speed, would send you flying immediately) as against back pedal brakes (let them go on a downhill slope and you might as well start saying your prayers); on ordinary carriers as compared to spring carriers, on lamps and reflectors, and so on and so forth. Afterwards, we returned to the subject of the Zulu and the Bushmen and the Hottentot, what each tribe had in common and in which way each one was unique, and which of them was the most dangerous. I spoke, eagerly, about the terrible Mahdi of Khartoum in the capital city of Sudan, about the real, original Tarzan from the forests of Tanganyika, through which I would have to pass on my journey to the source of the River Zambezi in the land of Obangi-Shari. But Aldo was not listening any more. He was miles away, deep in his own thoughts and seemed to grow more nervous every minute. Suddenly he cut me short, and, in a voice high and trembling with excitement, burst out:
    "Come on! Come to my room: I'll show you something better than you've dreamed in all your life!"
    "O.K. But quick," I begged. "I've got to get started on my journey today."
    Yet, even so I followed him out of the library. To reach Aldo's room meant traversing almost the entire length of the Castelnuovos' house. It was very large, all its carpets and curtains spotlessly clean, yet contriving at one and the same time to be both faintly gloomy and a touch exotic. In the sitting room, for instance, there was a brown grandfather clock with golden hands and square Hebrew letters instead of numbers. There were low cupboards along the walls and on top of them rows and rows of small antiques made of wood or solid silver. There was even a silver crocodile, but its tail was no ordinary tail—it acted as a lever also. If you pulled it and then pressed very lightly the crocodile would crack nuts between its jaws for the benefit of the