Rodriguez looked into the deep-blue centre where the great bulge of the glass came out towards him; it was near to the edges where the glass seemed thinner that the little strange lights were dancing; Morano dared to tiptoe a little nearer.  Rodriguez looked and saw no night outside.  Just below and near to the window was white mist, and the dim lines and smoke of what may have been recent wars; but farther away on a plain of strangely vast dimensions he saw old wars that were.  War after war he saw.  Battles that long ago had passed into history and had been for many ages skilled, glorious and pleasant encounters he saw even now tumbling before him in their savage confusion and dirt.  He saw a leader, long glorious in histories he had read, looking round puzzled, to see what was happening, and in a very famous fight that he had planned very well.  He saw retreats that History called routs, and routs that he had seen History calling retreats.  He saw men winning victories without knowing they had won.  Never had man pried before so shamelessly upon History, or found her such a liar.  With his eyes on the great blue glass Rodriguez forgot the room, forgot time, forgot his host and poor excited Morano, as he watched those famous fights.

And now my reader wishes to know what he saw and how it was that he was able to see it.

As regards the second, my reader will readily understand that the secrets of magic are very carefully guarded, and any smatterings of it that I may ever have come by I possess, for what they are worth, subjects to oaths and penalties at which even bad men shudder.  My reader will be satisfied that even those intimate bonds between reader and writer are of no use to him here.  I say him as though I had only male readers, but if my reader be a lady I leave the situation confidently to her intuition.  As for the things he saw, of all of these I am at full liberty to write, and yet, my reader, they would differ from History’s version:  never a battle that Rodriguez saw on all the plain that swept away from that circular window, but History wrote differently.  And now, my reader, the situation is this:  who am I?  History was a goddess among the Greeks, or is at least a distinguished personage, perhaps with a well-earned knighthood, and certainly with widespread recognition amongst the Right Kind of People.  I have none of these things.  Whom, then, would you believe?

Yet I would lay my story confidently before you, my reader, trusting in the justice of my case and in your judicial discernment, but for one other thing.  What will the Goddess Clio say, or the well-deserving knight, if I offend History?  She has stated her case, Sir Bartimeus has written it, and then so late in the day I come with a different story, a truer but different story.  What will they do?  Reader, the future is dark, uncertain and long; I dare not trust myself to it if I offend History.  Clio and Sir Bartimeus will make hay of my reputation;