Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [111]
1. Once the Doctor’s party had assembled in Sabbath’s map room, the Doctor had explained that Nie Who was necessary to the process, as he had ‘an understanding of time not likely to cause offence [to the apes]’. It was therefore Who who would perform the rites of the ceremony. (It might seem odd, at first, that a quack from the eighteenth century might be essential to the recovery of an artefact like the TARDIS. However, consider this in modern terms. If the Doctor existed in the twentieth century and needed to repair his TARDIS, nobody would raise an eyebrow if he were to call on the services of, say, a modern electronics expert. Yet the TARDIS is described as being so far beyond human experience that in context the idea of a mere computer technician working on it is in itself ridiculous. The implication is that Who had a certain understanding the Doctor found useful, regardless of the era’s technology.)
2. After the explanations, the door of Sabbath’s map room had opened and two of the ‘crew’ had shuffled into the room. This had caused some alarm, but the Doctor had assured everyone that the apes had been well-trained, hence the clothing. With his usual humour, Sabbath had dressed the creatures as footmen in wide jackets and knee-length socks, although he’d stopped short of giving them wigs or shoes. The Doctor had spoken to the apes in formal tones, and Who had translated his words into a language Lisa-Beth took to be oriental: why the apes should have understood him and not the Doctor is unclear. Perhaps Who was being used as a ‘buffer’. Whatever the reason, the apes had then turned and snuffled their way out of the chamber, and minutes later there’d been ‘a monstrous humming’ in the walls. The ship had begun to move.
3. This is where events become cloudy. The ceremony hadn’t continued until the ship had reached a certain point, which Lisa-Beth says lay on the p[oint] from which the h[orizon?] was visible’. Her notes then degenerate, for the next two paragraphs, into coded shorthand. The suggestion is that the Jonah had left the world altogether, to exist somewhere in the mysterious spaces between elemental realms, but as there were no portholes in the map room the group could only have known their location by going up on deck. If they did indeed do this, then it could explain Lisa-Beth’s lapse into gibberish. What would she have seen, standing there on the steel of the ship and looking out at another world? And more importantly, how could she possibly have described it in English, when English hadn’t yet developed proper words to accurately describe the passage of time? The only fragment of proper English in these two paragraphs begins ‘Scarlette stood with her face turned up to the heavens [more evidence that they’d left the map room], and there in her eyes I saw the light of…’ before the text becomes foggy once again. Whenever Lisa-Beth describes such an experience, she describes it almost as being a ‘magic lantern’ show, popular at carnivals and pleasure gardens in the era. Such shows often involved coloured lights, and were appropriately known as ‘phantasmagoria’.
4. At some point in this ghostly journey the Doctor had fallen to his knees, and Scarlette had rushed to his side, believing him to be sick. But the Doctor had merely stared upwards, almost in supplication. Who had stood behind him, whispering into his ear, much to Scarlette’s concern. What Who might have said is a matter of conjecture. The Doctor had then clasped one hand to his own chest, and begun to recite words of his own. The others could only have watched, as ‘all of us felt the motion of the s[hip] quicken and the m[?] around us did seem fit to bleed’.
5. More of Lisa-Beth’s shorthand. It seems that more and more of those assembled had begun to join in with the