Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [58]
But perhaps the most notable features of the room were the alcoves. Set into the two side walls were rows of arches, in the style of classical cloisters, again wrought out of black metal. Each one was lit by a lamp, modern gas rather than oil, and although the sketch deliberately avoids depicting the alcoves’ contents the accounts describe them in detail. Each alcove contained an idol, set on a metal plinth. From the middle of the vast, humming room, the faces of more than a dozen gods looked out at the observer.
Did Sabbath worship these totems? Or was it all an obscure, blasphemous joke? Without knowing the exact nature of the idols it’s hard to say, though one witness records that ‘some had faces so monstrus I could not bear but look’ (bad writing, or did she mean it that way?). As Rebecca mentioned at least one in the Polynesian style and one following the fashion of the West Indian witch-cults,perhaps Sabbath saw the icons as an inventory of all the world’s major systems of ritual. There was even a crucifix, complete with a sculpture of Christ, described with maddening vagueness as ‘obscene’. Possibly Sabbath believed that by keeping this inventory, he could (symbolically?) keep an eye on all those who moved in the same circles as himself. In which case, the bridge-room was almost a three-dimensional rendering of Scarlette’s own Red List.
The other noteworthy feature of the room was the map. One entire wall, the far wall from the entrance, had been covered by an enormous map of the world almost twice as tall as a man. This was common in the ‘war rooms’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Napoleon himself had a map that took up a wall of his study, as did the British Prime Minister during the Napoleonic wars. On Sabbath’s map, dark red (almost blood-coloured) continents floated on metallic grey seas, spidery letters marking out settlements as far apart as Paris and Botany Bay. Interestingly – because it was a practice which didn’t become common for another century – small ‘flags’ were always pinned to the map, markers of red and black and white and blue. There were so many of these on the map that they seem to have formed patterns, like contour-lines, although as these lines swept across whole oceans they couldn’t have indicated military units.
(However, there’s mention in the Doctor’s yellowed notes of ‘time walls’, the language he uses suggesting the isobars or ‘pressure lines’ used on modern weather-maps. The Doctor believed that it was the erratic movements of these strange contours which had prevented his TARDIS entering the eighteenth century, and that if he could navigate a path through the contours then he could finally summon the device. If this is what Sabbath’s chart represented, then the Doctor must surely have been interested that Sabbath’s research was ahead of his own.)
Rebecca’s story is most specific about what happened in the room, though it sounds so dramatic that it may all be part of the Henrietta Street folklore. Sabbath himself was standing before the great map when the Doctor entered. His back was turned, and his two plump hands were folded behind his waist. He was staring up at the chart, regardless of his visitors, even though he can hardly have been unaware of their presence. It’s an image straight out of melodrama. The casual, confident villain waiting patiently in his lair, finally turning around only after the Doctor greeted him (‘hello, I’m the Doctor, but I suppose you knew that’).
What can the Doctor have expected from Sabbath,