Sentence The Threehundredandseventyfirst

Meanwhile, high above the valley, up there, where the air is rarefied, up where you can imagine just stretching your arm and letting your fingers stroke a passing cloud, Professor Wilfred Bramble,

speaking sotto voce, was distributing his troops around the small quarry and setting up the poles which marked the perimeter of the site and also provided the different triangulation points; then, once

he was satisfied, he took hold of the device which looked like an inflated metal detector with a transistor radio attached, donned the World War II pilot's headphones, switched himself on and looked around the area, spoke to his cousin the Suffragan Bishop of Goole: “do you think, Bishop Peter, as the linguist in the family, you could have a chat with the young lady little Roxy is looking after? for I'd be interested to know the koine of her speech, I detect underneath the Edinburgh/Melrose lingua franca she has learned so rapidly from her eminent teacher (Roxy blushed to her roots) there is something of Hawick dialect and intonation which you might be able to identify, thankyou,” nodded, and then began the sweep – which involved walking, in a slithy sort of way, not at all like his normal marching gait, this was strange to behold and Crist realised that he could be quite other than the normal blusterer she had known all her life; first he went one way, then the other and repeating this until he had covered the whole site; after only a few lengths he stopped and stared at the screen mounted on his device, murmured to himself – quite inaudibly, he had obviously been extremely moved by Roxy's plea, or scared by her threats – and moved on; and when he had completed his sweep, he came over to Cristobal and spoke quietly to her, so that none of the others could hear: “Cristo, this is most remarkable – it certainly fits with the young lady's description; there is certainly a Cavern, just as she describes, and the void takes the form of a hand, with five fingers, the thumb leading from the entrance, which is that strange quarry, and the four fingers spread out and are possibly the sleeping quarters she mentioned,” and Cristobal nodded, then asked “you say the quarry is strange, in what way?” which caused Bramble to glance towards it, before he spoke: “it's a plug,

not at all consistent with the rest of the geology, and it isn't a kind of sgrafitto, which, of course one would expect, no, no, this rock has a quite different consistency and it's almost as though someone stuffed it in there to disguise the entrance, and that is what's so bloody queer! it must have been done about a thousand years ago, crikey, two thousand, maybe more, well before the Romans came, certainly, and even before the Votadini used the North Eildon as a fort, because if not, then the Romans would have used it, recorded it, left some indication, but they only used the hills as a Signalling Station and there's no indication that they knew of 'The Cavern' your chums speak of,” and Cristobal asked: “what happens now?” which made Bramble chuckle: “well, dear cousin, you are the Archaeologist in the family, we'd better notify the authorities and have the site designated as a Dig, we can't have the hoi polloi tramping about while we begin our excavations, now, can we?” but Crist waved his words away and spoke rather fiercely: “if the statements which have been given are correct, then it looks to me that the Police will have to be involved and the whole area, all Three Eildons sealed off, and this place treated as a Crime Scene!”