Desire was there from the beginning. That I remember. But that's an easy explanation for why the boy on the mail coach became the boy of the labyrinths and salons and gambling houses. A philosopher-thief took me to her bed and talked of time stretching back so far it made my head spin, talked of water moving over mountain ranges over millions of years, drip on drip, small rivulets carving rock; she whispered of colonies of corals creating continents, of the minute skeletons of chalk creatures making cliffs, of seabeds heaving up and slowly pushing fossilised oyster beds to the peak of mountains hundreds of up and away from the sea. She murmured of continents drifting apart and drifting back together again, and she entwined and enravelled mind and body so you stopped knowing where one finished and the other began.