"Born on Horn, full of scorn," they say. Not we Hornese ourselves, of course, although we like to think we have as good a sense of humour as the next man. But the fact - the simple fact - remains; that Horn was the land that was chosen as the first settlement. We know this and so does everyone else. Other lands are larger, or more fertile, or are centres of trade, or specialise in important industries such as shipbuilding or the extraction of metals. Every land has its share of Glory.

But Horn was first - first of them all. It was on Horn that we first came to realise how truly fortunate we were and it was on Horn that the first deeds of Glory were done. So we who were born on Horn are not scornful of those who grew up elsewhere; on Gold, or Edge, or Falls or Bright or even the far-distant archipelago of Grain, for in the end we are all children of 'Down. We know that everything is chance, as it is called, and that we are all equally Blessèd, wherever it may be that we come from.

Still; there is a separation, although it is not of our making, and it lies behind the second line of the verse, "All apart and all forlorn." The Hornese are expected to excel in all that they do, and any failing is seized upon by the rest of the world as an example of our unjustifiably high opinion of ourselves. It is grossly unfair, of course, but what of that? We are who we are.

I intended to give a short account of my life here, but I seem to have got sidetracked by other matters. All the same, it is important to me that you be familiar with the place of my birth and my upbringing.

My childhood was happy, but solitary, as I have no brother or sister. This was not so unusual on Horn, where small families are the norm. My parents were both in public service and very busy people. I do not think that I was deprived of their attention, but it was shared with the inflexible requirements of their jobs, which were to do with resource allocation and administration and were rather too abstract in their nature to interest me. I was a boy who liked doing things with his hands. Had I come from a humbler home I might have turned into a gardener or a builder of houses or a maker of instruments. As it was my family was comfortably off and, as I was bright and showed little aptitude for management, it was - as they told me later - down to the throw of a token whether I became a priest or a doctor. Fortunately, they chose me a career in medicine. I would have been a hopeless cleric.

Is that all I need to say? Perhaps it is enough for now, for I wish to return once more to the accidental voyage of the El Dorado.

It was a warm night, perhaps nine or ten days into my journey. Too warm - my cabin was much too hot to sleep in - so I took a book and the autoharp I had borrowed from the first mate's locker and climbed up to my shelter by the conning tower. I moved the seat from underneath the canopy so as to catch the light. There was easily enough of it to read by as the sky was crowded with celestial bodies catching and reflecting the rays of the Blessèd sun. Hally swelled above the north-east horizon, illuminated in quarter-phase and casting his orange-yellow glow over the tranquil ocean. Above me, but in opposite hemispheres of the sky, were our moon and Sally, both full and brightly lit and shining down on my ship like floodlights in a busy port. The atmosphere was clear, except for some high cloud and the usual haze hanging over the surface of the sea..

I read a little from my book - it was an ancient work by Currer Bell - and picked up the autoharp to strum a few chords. I had taken a fancy to the instrument as it was so ridiculously easy to play, or at any rate to make attractive sounds with. Several times I had heard its soothing tones floating down to me along the corridor that led to the non-commissioned officers' quarters and wished I could gather the courage to ask to try it for myself.

G major, A minor, D seventh, G major, C major, D seventh, G major… I let my fingers roll around the chords. They made a pleasant sequence - one that I was sure I had heard in many of the songs the airmen like to sing. As I sat and allowed the gentle sounds of the instrument's vibrating strings to evaporate into the night air while I bathed in the radiance from above, I slowly fell into a trance, or at any rate began to hover on the edge of sleep. I let the autoharp slip slowly down to the hull-metal by my chair. My breathing became stertorous (I have been told that I snore).

Had my head not been tilted over to one side I would not have seen it. Just on the fringes of my vision, out of the corner of my right eye, somewhere far to the north, there came a short blink - no more than a fleeting speck - of green light, followed a second later by one of red. Green, red, green, red, green, red... and then nothing. There had been just six flashes, like a coded message.

I was fully awake now. What had I seen? I was not sure, but it seemed to me that the spot of light had moved slightly between each flash. The object - whatever it was - must surely have been some kind of aerial vehicle, as anything at ground level would have been invisible behind the horizon. This seemed possible, as the El Dorado's running lights were also red and green, although they shone steadily, without blinking. Or, perhaps, the light could have come from the top of some high mountain. To work out how high such a peak would have to be for me to see it was well beyond my trigonometrical abilities. But why had the light stopped so suddenly? Had there been a crash or breakdown of some kind? I stood with my hand resting for support against the back of the chair and stared in the direction the light had come from, hoping to see it again.

I gazed northwards for seeming hours, becoming cramped despite the warmth of the night air. 'Give up,' I told myself, 'it was nothing. You were half-asleep anyway.'

'But no,' I replied. 'Suppose it is what I've been hoping for; an aircraft out searching for me?'

'So what if it is? It can't see you.' That was true enough, and I deeply regretted that in my ransacking of the ship for books and musical instruments I'd omitted to take the obvious step of looking for signal flares. I could have lit one now and run to the prow with it. I could have held it up; focused it northwards with a piece of metal like a mirror or a tin lid. It was no comfort to me that the odds were very long against such a light being seen. Long odds were better than no odds at all.

I slumped down into the chair, knocking against the autoharp whose strings - all thirty-two of them - sounded simultaneously, playing a strange discordant accompaniment to my despairing thoughts. Why had I been so stupid? I was hardly fit to be let out on my own. Why could I not pay more attention to everything that was going on? I must at least learn how to look after myself, otherwise how could I look after anyone else? These and other pieces of scorn from my childhood revolved bitterly in my mind. I stood up, gathered together Jane Eyre and the autoharp, and prepared to go below decks. I took one last glance to the north... and there it was! Green...pause...red...pause...green... The aerial beacon had returned! The quality of its light had changed, however. Instead of being a sharply defined moving dot, it was now a diffuse blur, and it was stationary. Why should this be? I stood with my chin in my hand and thought... And finally it came to me. If I had been a navigating officer and used to standing night-time watches I would have understood immediately, I am sure.

I had seen the 'Down herself, beautifully lit by one of one of the Board's vertical navigation beams. Light is only visible when it strikes something and the beam had been shining brightly but unseen by me until it found, first the 'Down, and later some high cloud. If the night sky is clear a ship's navigator has no need of artificial guidance as the positions of the stars and planets provide all the information he needs. It is only when cloud obscures the heavens that he needs assistance and it is then that the beams provide it by lighting up the very obstruction that cloaks his sightings.

The 'Down! Never before had I had such a clear, first-hand, direct connection with the foundations of our world, extraordinary though it may seem. I went to bed both inspired and depressed. Inspired, because who can touch history and not be overwhelmed and brought to tears by the achievements of his ancestors and aspire to live up to them and transcend them if he can? But also dejected, because my isolation, which up until that point had mostly been a enjoyable holiday from business, and people, and their insoluble problems, had become a most unwelcome loneliness. I was filled with a sharp desire to find people again, to converse with my fellows and to feel solid ground beneath my feet once more.

But there was no foreseeable end to my travelling. I might drift alone and undiscovered for years, like the Nederlander of legend, for there was no reason why I should ever come to land, unless the El Dorado were to sail all the way around this world of Glory and bring me once more to the port from which I had first been cast away.