The evening sun goes down

The sun was setting over the Serengeti. The trees cast long shadows that were lost in violet blackness. From our bird’s eye viewpoint we could look down on the gazelle gathered by the watering hole and see what they could not, the leopard waiting in the shadows.

It really was the most amazing train set.

He gave me the tour. It started conventionally enough with a picturesque English village, complete with cricket match on the Green. From there the railway ran along a wave-lashed coastline to, well, to the Alps. Down whose papier-mâché slopes skiers raced. The plains of Africa were, in turn succeeded by a Wild-West landscape where men were men and buffalo were buffalo. It took me a while to notice that, as we moved from one room to another, the model railway seemed to be lacking a railway. He looked a little sheepish when I pointed this out. It turned out that, originally, there had been a line running through the Alps and across the plains but he felt that the evidence of Man’s audacity detracted from the scenes’ natural majesty. And so, following one of the great engineering feats of all time, the model trains now ran in a tunnel under the mountains and grassy veldt, to emerge in Colorado where they were immediately menaced by moustachioed bandits.