The adventures of Tintin, by the great Belgian artist Hergé, are enjoyed the world over; for the linguist, they offer the added attraction of providing tantalizing glimpses of a previously undocumented language, Syldavian.

Hergé never, to my knowledge, provided any grammatical sketch of this language, and other sources on Syldavian are precious few. I have taken the liberty of laying out the known facts on this fascinating language.

One of the country's most prized monuments was taken in 1937 when Italian soldiers marched into Axum in northern Ethiopia on the orders of Italy's fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

The 100-tonne obelisk, which marked the beginning of Ethiopian civilisation nearly 2,000 years ago, was hauled off in several huge pieces and shipped to Rome.

And I knew all at once what cathedrals were and were supposed to be, in the minds of their original architects: nothing less than airports for God to land at.

Cathedrals are airports. Like airports, there was at least one in every major city or population center. They were great civic works, huge undertakings of fundraising, resource-management, engineering. Their aisles, landing strips picked out not in high-intensity blue but in flickering candlelight. I don't want to take the metaphor too far, make it too crushingly literal, but I think now of cathedrals (and mosques, temples, shrines, iglesias and storefront full-gospel churches in the high press of their services) as nodes of a numinous travel network perpendicular to ordinary space and time. In the proper frame of reference, to enter them is to cross a threshold and be taken somewhere else, just as surely as I do when I board a jetliner. That's what I mean by "sacred."