It was the sort of day when your shadow appeared and disappeared around you in a surreptitious dance designed to test your powers of observation. Above, floating in a rippling violet sky, fleets of white clouds clustered together before breaking away in little flotillas and whisking themselves off toward the shallow curve of the horizon.

Against regulations I'd removed my breathing gear. Jabalpur Johar had the habit of making us break the rules, it was in the planet's nature it seemed. Reaching the top of the knoll my skin prickled up in the heat of the sun and the back of my shirt ran slick with the effort of the climb. Breathless I stopped and turned.

The forest canopy dipped away below me in a floating field of golds and umbers that turned one way then the other as the breeze caught the tree tops. Down in the valley the nose of the Beagle, brightly glittering in the vibrant sunlight, poked its nose inelegantly though the tree line.

I turned my head and listened. Over the rush of the breeze I could hear the bangs and shouts of Ogilvy and Kitt as they set up the testing gear.

As I turned to climb higher, I jumped. Standing behind me was a man who I'd not heard approach. He was small, elderly, with a shock of white hair and skin brown as autumn and crinkled as a windblown leaf. His yellow tunic, neatly buttoned his chest to his neck, embroidered with brightly coloured birds seemed as out of place here as my tear proof drenlon suit.

'Who are you?' my voice fell in doubt at coming across anther human so unexpectedly.

He smiled, white teeth bright against his dark skin. Not a smile of humour but of suggestion. He cocked an eye and bent his head as if expecting me to say something more.

It sort of jumped into my head, I knew the name, after all it was the same as the planet's and I dug it from the dimmest recess of my schoolboy days. 'Jabalpur Johar? You're Jabalpur Johar?'

His smiled widened, he pressed his palms together as if to say a prayer and bobbed his head.

'What on earth....how are you here?' I floundered. 'Were you left by a ship, are you with anyone.'

'I'm quite alone,' his voice was so soft I had to lean toward him to hear. 'I have a camp,' he raised a thin fingered hand and pointed up the hill. 'Why don't you get your friends and come and join me.' He turned and slowly made his way across the grass. Almost as an afterthought he turned and called, 'I'll make some food, you'd like that?'

'Yes, sure.' I called and watched as he slid into the foliage and disappeared.

'He said what?' Ogilvy was sweating, beads of perspiration forming like little jewels in the lines on his forehead, as if rewarding him for his exertion on climbing the hill.

'Food, he said he'd make us a meal, for god's sake Ogilvy take that breathing gear off, it'll kill you in this heat.'

'Regulations,' Ogilvy muttered back at me through his mask.

'Roast chicken, I hope, with stuffing, you did ask him for that?' said Kitt cynically as he causally reached up and snapped off the catch that held the mask to Ogilvy's face. Ogilvy stumbled and cursed and tried to put the mask back on. Kitt held up the catch and grinned. 'Give it up, Ogilvy, then he lowered his voice and whispered, 'Don't worry, we won't tell on you, you won't lose your bonus for ducking a regulation.'

'Better not,' Ogilvy relented and rubbed his face before turning to me. 'Jabalpur Johar?'

'Yes, I told you.' Out of the corner of my eye I caught Kitt making little whizzy shapes round his head with one finger. 'I'm not crazy, Kitt. I saw him here.'

'Jabalpur Johar, the astronomer?'

'Yes, that's it, the astronomer,' I clicked my fingers. 'Now I remember he's an astronomer, that's what he is.'

'Of course he's an astronomer, how do you think he got a planet named after him?'

'But here's here, now. I met him in this clearing!'

'Of course he is,' winked Kitt. His forehead furrowed in puzzlement, 'what's that smell?'

It wasn't far up to the camp. A short tramp through the woods led us to a clearing. In it stood a single white tent with the awning open. Inside there was a small wooden chest and a camp bed with a neatly folded blanket placed on top. The little man sat crossed legged, bent over an open camp fire. Over the clattering of tin pots he seemed not to notice us until we were almost upon him, then he looked up, assessed us quickly through his bright emerald eyes and beckoned us forward 'Good, good you are here. Please, sit, sit.'

'This is Ogilvy and Kitt, my shipmates.'

'Yes of course, welcome,' he pressed his hands together and give a little bow and then spread them to show us where to sit.

'Jabalpur, how did you get here?' Kitt quizzed him as he sat down on a cut log. 'We were told the planet was uninhabited.'

'I have rice? You like rice and vegetables? The vegetables are from here, perfectly safe to eat I assure you.'

'Yes, I'm sure,' Kitt leaned forward and inhaled patiently, 'we just wanted to know how you got here, supply ship, crash, something like that?'

Jabalpur waved aside the steam coming from the pot. 'Yes, yes something like that.'

'Yes, but which?'

'The herbs I use I get from the valley down where your ship is, this is a form of fennel and this sage,' he waved some green fronds at Kitt.

Ogilvy gave me an expansive shrug and mouthed, 'Old man, lost it.'

As the sun descended we ate in silence, the food was good. When we were finished Jabalpur collected out plates and sat crossed legged on a faded patterned rug while he scoured the plates with sand. Ogilvy rummaged with the fire as the shadows lengthened and the darkness crept in upon us.

Not looking up from his labours Jabalpur said, 'It's a nice place this, unspoilt, peaceful. Perfect in fact. As God intended. You do believe in a god don't you?' He lent forward and stoked the fire sending a flurry of bright embers streaming up into the darkness.

'No, perhaps, I'm not sure,' I floundered.

Jabalpur looked slightly perplexed. 'But you have some rational explanation,' he waved a fork in the air at the twinkling stars, 'for all of this?'

'It's just nature, planets, stars and stuff.' Kit's answer sounded more inane than mine.

'Chance then, is it? The creation of all this? The wonder you see around you. Is this like home where you come from?'

'No, you know that?' I said

'How so.'

Ogilvy looked up from his fire making, his face flushed red in the heat.' You know Jabalpur, you came from India. How long have you been here to have forgotten what's it like back there? The cities, the people and not enough space anywhere, none of that's changed...' In response to Jabalpur's blank look Ogilvy's voice was rising in frustration. 'Come on man, you can't have forgotten.' He said sharply. I raised my hand to quieten him and he tailed off.

'And why are you here? Jabalpur asked.

'We are a geological surveying team, Jabalpur,' I said quietly as if speaking to a child who would not understand. 'Looking for ores and minerals.'

'And what would happen if you found them here, your ores and minerals. To my beautiful planet?

I suddenly found myself embarrassed. I didn't want to offend the old man, he seemed so lost from reality. Like Ogilvy I wondered how long he'd been out here, alone. His glittering eyes searched each of us for an answer to his question. Kitt was looking at fingernails, Ogilvy shuffled on his log seat, snapped twigs and threw them in the fire.

'I thought so,' sighed Jabalpur as if he'd found the answer to his question in our expressions and found it wanting. I helped him as he got unsteadily to his feet. 'Wait here for a moment' he said. He went to his tent, opened the box and returned bearing a large book in his arms, 'Come, come. See here, gather around, I have something to show you.'

He rested the book between his knees as we took our places alongside him on his rug. The book was thick, bound in a silver alloy that glowed red in the firelight. Etched on its surface was a planet with the continent's marked out. I didn't recognise it, it was not Earth nor Jabalpur Johar.

Jabalpur caressed the edges of the book for a moment before opening it, it was obviously a treasured possession. The pages were paper thin, almost like tissue. He had to hold each page down to stop the night breeze flipping hurriedly through the pages.

The manuscript the book contained was how I might have imagined the old Earth Gospels prepared by monks in the Middle Ages to look. Prepared by monks over hundreds of hours each illustration lovingly created, each letter crafted to perfection. As Jabalpur turned the pages in the firelight the letters and designs seemed to lift, glow and twist in the air before us, giving the oddest feeling of dissociation from reality. 'Don't touch,' offered Jabalpur as I reached out to grasp the floating text, 'just look, the effect is better to help understanding.' He guided my hand away.

The book we read that so entranced that first night Jabalpur called The Talus, The Light. It conveyed, in a strange mixture of curvilinear scripts and beautifully drawn pictograms a whole array of ideas. Part esoteric, part scientific, part theological it is scattered with mathematical equations on subjects as varied as the origin of life, the constituents of matter, the harnessing and transmutation of forms of energy. It does not speak of god, not as such, no creator is mentioned but it infers all things are linked in nature, time and space. All these things work to a greater design and this design should not be corrupted. It suggests the essence of nature as it has been created is to fulfil a purpose and it that should be adhered to for the ultimate purpose of the design to be revealed. In this theorem the planets and life found within them should be left to their course and not be unduly influenced by outside agencies. As a work, it is spectacularly visionary.

For a month I think it was, we stopped work on the geological survey. Facing the wrath of the company didn't even enter our minds. Every night we'd spend with Jabalpur pouring over the book. Jabalpur, with his soft voice explaining all its intricacies, all its subtleties. Light, energy, time, and most of all, the care of the planets. Planetary husbandry he called it with a wry smile, pleased with himself as the coiner of a new phrase.

At the time it never occurred to us where it came from. Maybe I assumed out here, stranded alone this brilliant old man had become mystic to a point where he'd travelled far in his mind and somehow managed to trap his weighty visions on the feather light paper of the book. I'd look over his frail form every evening as he cooked our evening meal and take it for granted that he was our guide and we were his followers. That was just the way it was.

Jabalpur Johar, the Indian mystic, the fragile, creased old Magi, his teachings, the book, impacted us all. Ogilvy perhaps the greatest, as the most mathematically inclined of us all. He would work all day through the equations he had picked up from the book. He'd um and ah, scratch his newly grown beard and occasionally shout 'God's lightening!' a reference, he told us to the Michelangelo work where God reaches out to Adam and brings him life. Each proof Ogilvy found in the Talus bought with it the cry and a drum of delight as he beat the table with his open palms.

Kitt, perhaps the most introspective of our group began drawing the flora and fauna of the forest. This new found interest gave him a gentle solace that allowed him to sit at length staring entranced at just one leaf he had picked up from the woodland floor as if he has never encountered such a form before. I once saw him standing alone listening to the thrumming of the wind through the trees with a smile on his face moving his arms up and down in rhythm of a conductor of the elemental forces of the planet.

For me it was the stars that held a newly attained allure. Often as Jabalpur taught us I found my gaze drawn up to the skies by the drifting embers of the fire to the patterns of the stars held so snugly in nights black awning. I was held by the sight of those distant suns and the hosts of spinning planets they clutched so tentatively in their grasp and what I might find should I be able to go there. I had the urge to step into the Beagle and head deep into the cosmos and search and search to quench some indescribable yearning. I knew the Beagle could not carry me that far but somehow I felt sure The Talus would open the doors to make that possible.

When we left, it was clear he was not going to come with us. Standing by the towering Beagle he shook his head to reject all the comforts we offered him with an enigmatic smile. We each tried to shake his hand but he resisted, placed his hands together and bowed. We reciprocated. The book he gave us I locked in the cabin under my bunk, wrapped in a fireproof cloth. I had to get it home safely.

Entering space came with the sudden onset of weightlessness. We peered back onto the simmering globe of Jabalpur Johar our minds set on the strange man we had left behind. Then in frustration I slapped my hand against the bulkhead. 'We never got his picture! We're going to appear a right bunch of numpkins when we get back.'

'We have the book, that should be enough.' Ogilvy span around and called up the light cube. 'Here, I'll search the archives.' In a moment up popped a picture of Jabalpur. Taken at what appeared to be a university graduation function stood a man a head shorter than his students, his yellow tunic immaculately pressed, those sharp eyes staring out at us from under a mop of wild white hair.

'This picture,' said Ogilvy, his fingers tracing the text on the cube, 'was taken over hundred years ago. Jabalpur Johar the astronomer, is credited with discovering the planet from the observatory at Ladakh, in India. He died at home an old man.' He blew out a breath and turned to us. 'He never left Earth.'

We floated in silence, each consumed by our own thoughts

'It may seem preposterous, but you don't think.....?' began Kitt slowly.

'I do, Kitt. '

'God's lightening!' whispered Ogilvy.

We are, I guess, the new disciples, the book we carry is a new bible that will allow us to create a new type of religion, one that will allow us to make our way through the planets without the destruction that has followed us thus far.

I feel Jabalpur would have felt proud of his discovery of his little planet. The first one where human kind encountered an alien race.