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early age, I had read each week a comic-strip that filled the inside back cover of the Australian Women’s Weekly . The title of the strip was “Mandrake the Magician.” To this day, I do not know whether the creator of Mandrake and his companions was a resident of Australia or of the United States of America. As a child, I was content to locate Mandrake’s adventures in a daydream-country where towering cities were set far apart on rolling grasslands: a country deriving in part from the few films that I had seen but also from the glimpses of far-reaching landscapes that came to me whenever I heard from a distant radio on a quiet afternoon the faint sounds of some or another hit-parade song.
    Mandrake had two constant companions: Lothar, his giant Nubian servant, and Princess Narda, a young brunette woman who might have attracted me if I could have learned something about her character. In one of their adventures, Mandrake, Lothar, and Princess Narda went for a holiday to a dude ranch in a desert landscape. (This is no proof that the comic-strip itself came from the USA. I learned many years later that some of the comics I had once assumed to be American were devised by men who toiled all their lives in Sydney or Melbourne.) Late on their first evening at the ranch, when all three were preparing for bed in their separate rooms, Princess Narda, who had not drawn the curtains across her window, saw outside the window a giant human hand poised as though about to thrust through the glass and to grope towards her. Princess Narda screamed and then fainted away. Mandrake and Lothar hurried into her room, but by then the hand was no longer in view, and when Princess Narda had been revived and had told her story, the men were inclined to believe that she had imagined the giant hand. (Later, Mandrake himself found a giant footprint and had glimpses of parts of a threatening giant. Some villains had made the parts out of papier-mâché in order to frighten visitors away from the ranch. The villains wanted to buy the property cheaply and then to profit from the oil that they believed was under the property.) Even as a young child, I saw through, as it were, most of the adventures of Mandrake the Magician; I was almost always aware of the presence behind the line-drawings and the speech-balloons of a person who lived in some or another part of what I called the real world and who struggled continually to imagine. And yet, I got from certain images in comic-strips what I got from certain pieces of fiction in publications such as The Australian Journal : details worthy to be included in the scenery that I needed to have always at the back of my mind and outlines of persons worthy to live among that scenery. For example, I watched unfolding in my mind often as a child the following events. A huge, awkward male person, quite unlike myself to look at but of a disposition not unlike my own, finds himself one evening outside a lighted room in which a good-looking dark-haired young woman is undressing for bed. He had first caught sight of the young woman from some distance away, but when he stands beside the window he is so tall and so clumsy that he can only stoop and fumble with a hand at the lighted panes. His only means of getting past the window is to smash the glass with his knuckles. This he does so easily that the shards of glass bring hardly a trace of blood to his pudgy fingers. He is unable to see into the room, but he trusts his fingertips to be able to distinguish between furniture and fabrics and human flesh. Shortly, his fingers close around the limp female body on the floor of the room. But then he pauses. He had been going to lift the woman out; to hold her up to his face; to admire her miniscule features; to look beneath her clothing. But now, he pauses, perhaps out of pity for the doll-sized creature who lies at his mercy but more, perhaps, because the unfolding of my mind has come to an end. I have lost sight of events. I