It was near the start of one of my earlier visits to the small wooded German suburb which had not yet quite been absorbed into the adjacent Grossstadt (Munich) and I had only just begun to turn my attention from investigating the great city to finding out what this attractive little place might have to offer of its own. (Far more than I had thought, as I very soon discovered.) It was a warm early Saturday evening in summer. I had been back there for only a couple of days, but my younger sister (who was putting me up - and, no doubt, also putting up with me) had long been committed to putting in an appearance at a house-warming party given by a colleague (a young and genuine von, no less, though at present only something of a technical assistant) in his new abode in the Laim district of the city. I was thus left completely free to make whatever plans I thought might suit me for the greater part of the evening.

As if there was going to be very much doubt about that! I quickly decided that this gave me the perfect opportunity for attempting a systematic first move in my long-term project of familiarising myself with the local plantation-woods. True, these did not seem to have any too depthless or mythic a reach, but they had a remarkable internal intricacy and irregularity of layout nonetheless which meant that on my few previous visits, all fairly ...