At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from our breakfast table and said: "I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails," we should have followed him to the end of the world.
I don't know whether this mystical feeling of mine about Basil on this occasion has got any of the dark and cloudy colour, so to speak, of the strange journey that we made the same evening.

It was already very dense twilight when we struck southward from Purley.

Suburbs and things on the London border may be, in most cases, commonplace and comfortable.

But if ever by any chance they really are empty solitudes they are to the human spirit more desolate and dehumanized than any Yorkshire moors or Highland hills, because the suddenness with which the traveller drops into that silence has something about it as of evil elf-land.

It seems to be one of the ragged suburbs of the cosmos half-forgotten by God--such a place was Buxton Common, near Purley.
There was certainly a sort of grey futility in the landscape itself.
But it was enormously increased by the sense of grey futility in our expedition.