"Using Edouard Glissant's notion of a history as a 'prophetic vision of the past' ... [this chapter] demonstrates how ... Oscar and Lucinda balances its prophetic vision on an allegorical journey which depicts the teleological, often visionary, but deeply contradictory progress of European civilization. The journey of Oscar's glass church up the Bellinger River is an allegory of imperial history itself : the classic journey of civilization into the wild on its historic mission to bring light into the darkness." (p.5)