 The main character, Denys Winterset, a promising young official in the Colonial Service at Africa in the 1950s, travels the Cape to Cairo Railway where he meets a mysterious stranger, and is invited to join a secret society which has the ability to alter time.This society, which calls itself the Otherhood, was originally endowed by Cecil Rhodes in 1893 to preserve and expand the British Empire.Invited to the Otherhood's secret headquarters, located out of normal time and space, Winterset is told that there had been "An Original Situation", whose description suggests our own familiar history.