Unfortunately, when I arrived at this conclusion, it was 4:00 am, and I was not online at home at the time. So, I decided to work with the basic general knowledge that I remembered from school. As far as I could remember it was believed that the continents had once formed one single land-mass called 'Pangea', which had broken apart millions of years ago and continued to move apart at an imperceptibly slow rate, or in 'geological time', propelled by the expansion of the Atlantic seabeds along their deep underwater fault lines. At other fault lines, the seabeds collided with coastlines and slipped back under them, pushing up fold mountain ranges and creating volcanic belts in the process.

I thought I had remembered my geography quite well and, although I suspected it was a bit out of date, it was enough to work with.

But I did not have maps of the seabeds or faultlines available to me at 4:00 am, so I decided to work only with the world political map that I had in a pocket atlas.

In keeping with my premise of mirroring the Earth's continent movement to match the journey of my immortal characters, my plan was that I would reconstruct the landmasses around the Pacific instead of the Atlantic, and then, when I could next get online or to a bookshop, I would compare my parallel Earth's 'Pangea' to the postulated real one - and all in an attempt to make some kind of sense of this sprawling, epic 'White Monkey' world that I had created in the depths of my mind - depths from which my immortal characters had somehow pointed me to the Ring Of Fire.

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