How can you explain another land? The smell of the soil out of which grows its evolving biosphere, the quality of light -- people recognise the reality of these distinctions even if they have travelled from city to country, or from one part of their homeland to another. To describe the substance of such distinctions takes a special skill, but to communicate the nature of a world most people don’t even believe in presents a new order of difficulty. You may not believe in mine, oh humanity, but rest assured, we exist, and in great number, although very few of us take much of a direct interest in your absurd goings on. Most rely on storytellers like me to fill them in. Muhammad (aws) spoke to all Jinn, but tell me, what Jinn has ever tried to speak to those made from dust? I am no Prophet, of course, nor a Saint or Qutb, although I begin as always in the name of Allah.

Rather, my quest is more desperate, more personal: to free myself from this in-between world, a place I can barely articulate to myself, let alone an audience, a weird province where untold stories shackle me and only a special incantation of these same tales can release me, insha Allah. I hang on a precarious thread of hope. Every day that passes, it seems as if I am more and more lost to my own mind. What sin have I ever committed that I deserve to suffer this uncanny dungeon? But enough of my pathetic complaints -- I should focus on negotiating my escape.

My spellbook barely makes sense, but I discern two clear threads among this tangle of outlandish histories. One tells a small part of my own heroic happenings. I was born in 1272 AH in the Sanjak of Jerusalem, the son of Sultan Al-Hakawati. Like most Jinn, I am promised a life considerably longer than your paltry three score and ten and hence I will be a youngster amongst my own even when the fourteenth Muslim century finally comes to a close, insha Allah. The second concerns the life of an eccentric Englishman -- though he despises both epithets -- born in England, though that does not always make one an Englishman, it would seem, on the afternoon of Friday 19 Raby al-awal 1383 AH. The birth-name of this peculiar rootless raggle-taggle hominid was Julio Jumbo Jelly.

We are in more than one place inside the borderlands. I implore Allah, glorious and exalted is He, to protect me from despair and guide me out of this lonely, hoofish realm.

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