Early on, the soldier enters one of the nomad's tents uninvited and violates cultural norms by ripping off an Arab woman's veil, after which she scratches his face.
By arranging millions of these tiny transformations on the printed plates, the light that enters one end comes out the other structured in such a way that the system can tell whether it's a 1, 2, 3 and so on with better than 90percentt accuracy.
The industry now fears the knock-on effect of poor sales figures as it enters one of the most crucial periods of the year, with two months of fashion shows that are vastly expensive for the brands that stage the collections, the stores and journalists who travel to them.
In his life of Dickens, for example, there is a chapter in which Dickens enters one of his own novels, another in which Ackroyd interviews Dickens on a London street and a third in which a "true conversation" among Dickens, Wilde, Chatterton and Eliot is recorded.
They speak quietly, gently reminding me that what enters one side of a prism looks and feels quite different from what emerges on the other.
Stripped naked, Mr. Okulitch enters one telepod in a trance and emerges from the other amid smoke and eerie light.
