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Alistair Maclean
‘If you were a genuine army colonel,’ Pilgrim said, ‘instead of one of the most bogus and unconvincing frauds I’ve ever seen, you’d rate three stars for this. Excellently done, my dear Fawcett, excellently done.’
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‘Let’s go and watch him on the high wire or whatever. If he’s half as good out there – well, he’s our man.’
The exhibition hall that housed the three-ring circus was completely full. The air was alive with music, this time more than tolerable music from a very competent orchestra, an air that was charged with tension and excitement and anticipation, with thousands of young children transported into an enchanted fairyland – almost, indeed, to the extent their grandparents were. Everything glittered, but it was no cheap tinsel glitter, but a background that seemed the integral and inevitable part of everything a circus should be. Apart from the dun-coloured sand in the three rings, a dazzling rainbow of colours caught the eye even more than the music the ear. Circling the ring were beautiful and beautifully dressed girls on the most outrageously caparisoned elephants and if there was any colour in the spectrum that the designer had omitted it wasn’t apparent to the eye. In the rings themselves clowns and pierrots vied with each other in the ludicrousness of their antics and the ridiculousness of their costumes, while both of them vied with the tumblers and the stately procession of stilt-walkers. The audience watched it all in fascination – albeit with an element of impatience, for this spectacle, magnificent as it was, was only the warm-up, the prelude to the action to come. There is no atmosphere in the world quite like that of the charged atmosphere in the big top just before the performance begins.
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