The story that el-Masri tells them by way of explanation, on this evening in late May 2004, is extraordinary: a story of how an unemployed German car salesman from the town of Ulm went on a New Year’s holiday to Macedonia, was seized by Macedonian police at the border, held incommunicado for weeks without charge, then beaten, stripped, shackled and blindfolded and flown to a jail in Afghanistan, run by Afghans but controlled by Americans. Five months after first being seized, he says, still with no explanation or charge, he was flown back to Europe and dumped in an unknown country that turned out to be Albania.

What really happened? With no way to prove his story, el-Masri’s account remains in the balance, a terrifying snapshot of America’s “war on terror.” It is certain that he returned home to Ulm from Albania in May 2004, and that he was taken off a bus from Germany at the Macedonian border on New Year’s Eve 2003. The only person who has offered a clear explanation for what happened in the five months in between is el-Masri himself. Yet that may change.

The German authorities are now taking his allegations very seriously. They are subjecting a sample from el-Masri’s hair to radioisotope analysis, which can reveal, down to a particular country, the source of a person’s food and drink over a period of time. Discussions are also underway about bringing to Germany two men whom el-Masri has identified as being with him in the Afghan prison, and who were also subsequently released. The fact that the German authorities do regard Ulm as an area of potentially dangerous radical Islamic activity — a number of premises were raided and alleged Islamic activists were arrested on Wednesday — only emphasizes the concern that Germany has over the el-Masri case.

So far U.S. authorities have neither confirmed nor denied el-Masri’s story, although German investigators first requested information about the case in autumn. The FBI office in the U.S. Embassy in Berlin did not return calls Thursday.

On Tuesday the Guardian was the first European news organization to interview el-Masri, at the Ulm offices of his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic. In a conversation lasting more than four hours, el-Masri conveyed a powerful impression of sincerity: If his story is not true, he must be an actor of genius. He broke down in sobs as he described the moment he was abducted by masked men and put on a plane, excused himself to vomit as he recalled the filthy water he was given to drink in jail and brightened as he described the hours before his return to Germany. Often he would pick up a pen and sketch the layout of a room or building.

If true, the abduction would add to our understanding of a pattern of U.S. behavior frightening in its implications both for America and for the rest of the world. The former director of the CIA, George Tenet, told the 9/11 Commission last year that even before Sept. 11 the United States had abducted more than 70 foreigners it considered terrorists — a process Washington has declared legal under the label “extraordinary rendition.”

An investigation by the Washington Post last year suggested that the U.S. held 9,000 people overseas in an archipelago of known prisons (such as Abu Ghraib in Iraq) and unknown ones run by the Pentagon, the CIA or other organizations. But this figure does not include others “rendered” to third-party governments who then act as subcontractors for Washington, enabling the U.S. to effectively torture detainees while technically denying that it carries out torture.

El-Masri’s ordeal began, he says, when he decided to escape, for one week over New Year’s, the stress of living in a single room in Ulm as the unemployed father of a family of six. On a friend’s recommendation he bought a cheap bus ticket to Skopje, capital of Macedonia, intending to find a hotel when he got there.

The bus left the borders of the E.U. and crossed Serbia without incident. Then, at the Macedonian border, at 3 p.m., el-Masri was called off the bus. Now 41, he has lived in Germany for 20 years, the last 10 as a citizen. “I didn’t feel bad,” he says. “I just thought it was a mistake.”

He was taken to a room with a table and chairs, where four men whom he took to be Slavic searched his luggage and questioned him in poor English, asking him about links to Islamic organizations. Several hours later, flanked by armed police, he was driven to a city he assumes was Skopje and escorted to the hotel room where he was to spend the next few weeks. “I asked if I was arrested,” says el-Masri. “They said: ‘Can you see handcuffs?’”

El-Masri was kept prisoner in the room for 23 days; Macedonian civilian police were constantly present, and he was subject to repeated interrogations about his links to Islamic organizations — he says he has none — and about the mosque in Ulm where he worships.

After about 10 days, a Macedonian Mr. Nice appeared. “He said it was taking a long time, too much time — let’s make an end to it, and let’s make a deal. ‘We have to say you are a member of al-Qaida … then we’ll put you on a plane and take you back to Germany.’ I refused, naturally. It would have been suicide to sign.”

But el-Masri was accused of having been to a terror training camp in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, of having a fake passport and of being in reality a citizen of Egypt. On the evening of Jan. 23, 2004, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, put in a car and told he was going to Germany. He was driven to a place where he heard the sound of a plane, then heard the voice of one of the Macedonians saying he would have a medical examination. “I heard the door being closed,” says el-Masri. “And then they beat me from all sides, from everywhere, with hands and feet. With knives or scissors they took away my clothes. In silence. The beating, I think, was just to humiliate me, to hurt me, to make me afraid, to make me silent. They stripped me naked. I was terrified. They tried to take off my pants. I tried to stop them, so they beat me again. And when I was naked I heard a camera.”

El-Masri breaks down as he recalls the moment when the men carried out an intrusive anal search. He was dressed in a daiper, a short-sleeved, short-legged suit and a belt. His feet were shackled and his hands were chained to the belt. His ears were plugged, and ear defenders were placed over them and a clip put on his nose. A hood was put over his blindfold. His arms raised painfully high behind his back, he was driven to an aircraft, where he was thrown down onto a bare metal floor, chained and bound, and given an injection. He was dimly aware of a landing and takeoff and a second injection before the plane landed again and he was put into the trunk of a car.

El-Masri arrived in what he later found to be his cell by being pushed violently against the wall, thrown to the floor, having feet placed on his head and his back and having his chains removed. The cell was to be his home for the next four months. From the graffiti on the wall — in Arabic script, but not Arabic — and the Afghan dress of the guards, he deduced that he was in Afghanistan. There was nothing in the cell except a blanket, a filthy plastic mat and a bottle of tainted water so vile that the memory of it makes him literally gag.

El-Masri soon discovered that the prison, though technically Afghan, was run from behind the scenes by the United States. His first encounter with an American was with a masked individual who spoke English with what el-Masri believes was an American accent. He had a Palestinian translator. The American took a blood sample and photographed el-Masri naked again.

“I asked him if I could have fresh water,” said el-Masri. “And he said: ‘It’s not our problem, it’s a problem of the Afghan people.’ I said: ‘Afghanistan doesn’t have planes to kidnap people in Europe and bring them here, so it’s not the problem of the Afghan people.’”

By whispering through the door and exchanging messages on pieces of toilet paper, el-Masri found out a few details about his fellow prisoners: two Saudi brothers of Pakistani origin who had been imprisoned for two years, two Tanzanians, a Pakistani, a Yemeni and several Afghans. (Gnjidic says two of the prisoners have been traced, but he didn’t want to identify them for fear of putting their lives at risk.) El-Masri says the first of many interrogations was carried out by a masked man with a south Lebanese accent, with seven or eight silent observers in black masks listening in. “He said: ‘Do you know where you are?’ And I answered: ‘Yes, I know, I’m in Kabul.’ So he said: ‘It’s a country without laws. And nobody knows that you are here. Do you know what this means?’”

Repeatedly, he would be asked the same questions, challenging his identity, accusing him of attending terrorist training camps. Some of the interrogators, el-Masri believes, were American.

After about a month, el-Masri met two unmasked Americans whom other prisoners referred to as the “Doctor” and the “Boss.” The Doctor was a tall, pale man in his 60s with gray, collar-length hair. The Boss was younger, with red hair and blue eyes, about 5 feet 10 inches and wearing glasses. Then, in March, el-Masri and the other prisoners began a hunger strike. After 27 days of starvation, he was taken in chains one night to meet the Americans and a senior Afghan. Near to hysteria, el-Masri said they had to let him go, put him before a U.S. court, let him speak to somebody from the German government or watch him starve to death.

The Boss told him he had to get Washington’s permission to help him, but was clearly angry, saying: “He shouldn’t be here. He’s in the wrong place.” “I had the impression that the Doctor thought I wasn’t guilty, and had sent a report saying so even after the second interrogation,” says el-Masri. Yet he was taken back to his cell, where he continued his hunger strike. Conditions in the cell improved, with a bed and a new carpet, but he was barely able to move. On the 37th day he was force-fed chocolate-flavored nutrients through a tube stuffed up his nose. El-Masri began to eat again, and the Americans brought him fresh water and promised that he would be released within three weeks.

They brought a native German speaker to the prison. “I asked him: ‘Are you from the German authorities?’ He said: ‘I do not want to answer that question.’ When I asked him if the German authorities knew that I was there, he answered: ‘I can’t answer this question.’” (Hofmann, the prosecutor, says the German security services do not admit to any knowledge of an agent visiting el-Masri in prison.)

It was to be more than a week before el-Masri finally got out of the prison; the German told him one of the obstacles to his speedy release was the Americans’ determination not to leave any evidence that he had ever been there. He was flown to Albania in what he thinks was a small passenger jet, blindfolded and in plastic handcuffs.

When el-Masri got back to Ulm, he found his wife and four children had disappeared. They had returned to Lebanon. He traced them, brought them back and told his wife his story. “It was a crime, it was humiliating, and it was inhuman, although I think that in Afghanistan I was treated better than the other prisoners. Somebody in the prison told me that before I came somebody died under torture. Those responsible have to take responsibility and should be held to account.”

Hofmann and his investigative team now have two tasks: to find evidence supporting or disproving el-Masri’s story and, if they can show it is true, to work out whom to charge with kidnapping. But how do you charge a government? “For the moment,” says Hofmann, “I have to believe the story, because there is no evidence that it is not true.”

Crossing the ridge, the aircraft began sledding downward sharply toward the narrow strip of coast worst affected by the disaster. There were signs of life below, even motorbikes moving along the fragments of coast road that escaped destruction.

Some sights were deceptive. An expanse of tall green-fringed palms turned out to conceal the sinister blanket of salty gray mud that has devoured the coastland like mold. The surf washing mildly over the boundaries of old rice fields looked as if it was there to stay: The area’s very maps will need to be redrawn.

In a storm of dry leaves, the pilot set the Seahawk down according to the coordinates he was given. It was an unexpectedly Arcadian scene: a lush, deserted clearing in the foothills. In minutes, the helicopter’s rotors still turning, the whole cargo of food and water was piled in a neat mound on the grass. But where were the people?

As so often in real horror stories, the tragedy is interspersed with moments of farce. Idris and Jesse Cash, one of the helicopter crewmen, found a gate leading to a comfortable-looking farm. A well-fed woman came up and looked in surprise at the pile of aid in the clearing. In the background, her son, a fleshy boy almost as wide as he was tall, studied the boxes of biscuits with interest.

Somehow, there had been a kink in the operation. Closer to the sea, the woman urged; the refugees from the tsunami were more than a mile up the coast. Cash turned round and marched back to the helicopter. Within a few minutes, sweat rolling down everyone’s foreheads in the heat, the food and water were reloaded onto the helicopter and it was in the air again. As the helicopter ate up the distance, shattered houses came into view and, scattered here and there on the slopes, the corrugated metal and plastic sheeting lean-tos of refugees from the waves.

Some of the buildings in the village of Ladong had escaped the merciless waves because they were clustered on higher ground, and they had clearly become a focus for survivors. As the aircraft approached, figures began to run and wave at it. When it set down on Ladong’s football field, there were only a handful of children there. “America!” said one boy, wonderingly, pointing at the helicopter and nodding. Cash tried to marshal them firmly into a line just beyond the circumference of the whirling rotor blades. The idea was that they would come up to the door of the helicopter, take a box and make way for the next boy.

So it began, for about two seconds. Then the others began pouring onto the field, hundreds of men, women and children. They began grabbing the aid boxes in darting lunges toward the helicopter cabin door, laughing and grinning at their friends when they got one, as if they had won a prize in a game.

It quickly became clear that the game had a desperate edge. These lean, intense-eyed people, starving and thirsty for clean water, were prepared to fight each other for the packages. Time and again they mobbed the cabin door, while Idris, Cash and his fellow crewman Vince Rodriguez screamed at them to get back above the din of the engine.

But they understood there were not enough boxes for everyone, and they would not stand back. One man stood on a helicopter wheel, putting his head perilously close to the spinning rotor blades. The pilot looked back anxiously. The thump of the rotors intensified the hysteria.

At one point the crowd seemed ready to fall back and sit, waiting their turn, but only for a moment. An older man with the light of excitement and fear in his eyes and an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace appeared to sit cross-legged and then bound to his feet almost in the same motion as he saw that other refugees were not playing by the Americans’ rules.

Then the handout was over and the Indonesians, deeply grateful and desperately feeling there should be more, moved back. Some had boxes and some did not, and people of both kinds waved as the helicopter prepared to take off. One thin boy wearing nothing but a pair of shorts looked me in the eyes and patted his stomach urgently, as if perhaps it had not been understood that he was hungry.

The Seahawk’s third and final stop was at a hilltop refugee camp with some 150 survivors. Besides delivering aid the U.S. helicopters are bringing the infirm, the sick, the injured and the pregnant away from the isolated camps and villages and ferrying them to the relative security of camps on the other side of the mountains. No one was in urgent need of evacuation. But one woman, Edans, said: “We don’t have enough food, clothes or medicine. Thousands are dead. The whole village has gone.” Cash promised to return with food, and the Seahawk took off again. Within a few minutes, it was back at Banda Aceh, being reloaded.

The turnaround of the helicopter was too swift, and the noise of the rotors too loud, to allow an interview of any of the crew. During a brief lull earlier, Dave Matthews, a crewman on another Seahawk, described how they had been forced to abort the pickup of an injured refugee when the helicopter was mobbed by a desperate crowd. “I don’t want to go back to the ship,” he said. “There’s too much to be done. I wish I could fly 24 hours a day.”

“I walked the whole night,” she says. “I wanted to stay alive! It was terrifying. I reached the [Chechen] village of Stary Atagi at dawn. I stayed there for a day and a night, keeping my head down …” She talks about it for a while, then seems to check herself, feeling perhaps that telling a stranger about one of the numerous occasions in her career as a journalist that she faced a threat of imprisonment or serious harm is irrelevant to the serious business of reporting. “These are just details,” she says, finally.

In the bland setting of a publisher’s London flat, you can see in Politkovskaya, one of the bravest of Russia’s many brave journalists, the different ages of her life, and her looking serious in each of them: the bookish student of the 1970s; the earnest, curious young Soviet reporter; the journalist who embraced the freedoms of perestroika in the late 1980s; the veteran of Russia’s recent conflicts who returns time and again to Chechnya to enrage the Kremlin leadership as it seeks to make of Vladimir Putin an infallible khan.

Her seriousness is not just her frown, her severe glasses and her full head of gray hair. It’s the tension, anger and impatience in her whole body, making clear that her sense of the continual injustice being perpetrated in her homeland never leaves her, that she can’t shut it out in a way almost all British journalists, even the campaigning, radical kind, can.

It’s a surprise, then, to see her start to laugh and make fun of the Guardian’s photographer when he gets her to pose for him. “Photographers always do that,” she says, in her hesitant English. “They get people to do things they don’t normally do.” The photographer gets quite annoyed and you realize that Politkovskaya is still young (she’s 46). And still hopeful.

The author picture on the back of her new book, “Putin’s Russia,” is so self-consciously tragic, and its subject matter so bleak, that I ask her whether she thinks it might take generations for her country to become truly free. “I wouldn’t ever want to say it would take generations,” she says. “I want to be able to live the life of a human being, where every individual is respected, in my lifetime.”

Politkovskaya was born in New York, where her Soviet Ukrainian parents were U.N. diplomats, in 1958, five years after the death of Stalin. She was sent back home to be educated and after school entered one of the most prestigious university departments in the USSR, the journalism faculty of Moscow State University. Among its other advantages, her parents’ diplomatic status enabled them to smuggle banned books into the country for her, and she was able to write her dissertation about a normally forbidden poet, émigré Marina Tsvetayeva.

After graduation, Politkovskaya worked for the daily Izvestiya, then moved to the in-house paper of state airline monopoly Aeroflot. “Every journalist got a free ticket all year round; you could go on any plane and fly wherever you wanted. Thanks to this I saw the whole of our huge country. I was a girl from a diplomatic family, a reader, a bit of a swot; I didn’t know life at all.”

With the coming of perestroika, Politkovskaya switched to the independent press that began to emerge and flourish: first Obshchaya Gazeta, then Novaya Gazeta (“New Newspaper”). None of the terrible things that have happened in Russia since the coming to power of the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 have persuaded Politkovskaya that it would have been better to preserve the USSR.

“From an economic point of view, life became very difficult,” she says, “but politically it wasn’t shocking at all. It was simple happiness, that you could read and think and write whatever you wanted. It was a joy. You need to endure a great deal in the way of economic hardship for the sake of freedom.”

Hardly had the new countries of the former Soviet Union begun to stand on their feet, however, than a series of internal wars broke out. The most savage of them, continuing to this day, involves various attempts by Russian government troops to regain control over the small region of Chechnya. Politkovskaya became one of the most dogged reporters of that conflict.

Russians speak of two Chechen wars: the first, under Boris Yeltsin, from 1994 to 1996, ended with a peace deal and troop withdrawal under pressure from the media and public. When Putin invaded for a second time, in 1999, he took steps to ensure that the media would not embarrass him with reports about the reality of Russia’s brutality in Chechnya. If, as Politkovskaya believes, stopping the first Chechen war was the Russian media’s greatest achievement in the relatively free Yeltsin years, the second Chechen war has been its greatest disaster. Once an independent voice among many, Novaya Gazeta is now among the few Russian media outlets that have not yet been intimidated into toeing the Kremlin line.

The second Chechen war began by costing Politkovskaya her marriage. She returned home to Moscow one day in 1999, fresh from reporting on a long-range Russian rocket attack in Grozny that had hit a market and a maternity hospital, killing scores of people, including women and children, to hear her husband tell her: “I can’t take this anymore.”

Recently, it almost cost her her life when, on her way to Beslan in the early hours of the school hostage crisis, she was slipped poison in a cup of tea. In between, she has experienced countless death threats from Russian troops, Chechen fighters and the other, more shadowy armed groups operating in the margins of the war. The kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rapes and tortures she has reported on in Chechnya have left her convinced that Putin’s policies are engendering the terrorists they are supposed to eliminate.

“To this day there’s torture in any FSB branch in Chechnya, like the so-called telephone, where they pass an electric current through a person’s body. I’ve seen hundreds of people who’ve been through this torture. Some have been tortured in such an intricate way that it’s hard for me to believe that it was done by people who went to the same sort of schools that I did, who read the same textbooks.”

Politkovskaya has no regrets about the times she has stepped outside the role of reporter in recent Chechen terrorist attacks — as a negotiator in the Moscow theater siege, and as a would-be negotiator at Beslan, before she was poisoned. “Yes, I went beyond my journalistic role,” she says. “But it would be quite wrong to say that doing so was a bad move from a journalistic point of view. By setting aside my role as journalist I learned so much that I would never have found out being just a plain journalist, who stands in the crowd along with everyone else.”

She has harsh words for what she sees as the West’s kid-glove treatment of Putin and Russia. “Most of the time they forget the word Chechnya. They only remember it when there’s a terrorist act. And then it’s, ‘Oh!’ And they start their full coverage up again. But virtually nobody reports on what is really going on in that zone, in Chechnya, and the growth of terrorism. The truth is that the methods employed in Putin’s anti-terrorist operation are generating a wave of terrorism the like of which we have never experienced.”

The George W. Bush-Tony Blair “war on terror” has been of enormous help to Putin, Politkovskaya says. Many people in Russia gained perverse comfort from the pictures of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. “I’ve heard it many times. In Russia you hear people talking about it with pride: that ‘we treated the blacks like this before the Americans did, and we were right, because they are international terrorists.’

“Putin’s begun to try to prove on the world stage that he’s also fighting international terrorists, that he’s just a part of this fashionable war. And he’s been successful. He was Blair’s best friend for a while. When, after Beslan, he began to state that we were seeing virtually the hand of Osama bin Laden, it was appalling. What’s bin Laden got to do with it? The Russian government created these beasts, brought them up, and they came to Beslan and behaved like beasts.”

The only way for the West to regain moral authority, Politkovskaya argues, would be for it to treat Putin as it treats Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic, bullying president of Russia’s neighbor Belarus — not with sanctions, but a more personal, tailored form of ostracism. “It’s impossible to talk on the one hand about the monstrous scale of victims in Chechnya and the spawning of terrorism and then lay out the red carpet, embrace Putin and tell him: ‘We’re with you, you’re the best.’ That shouldn’t be happening. I understand, our country’s a big market; it’s very attractive. I understand it very well. But we’re not second-class people, we’re people like you, and we want to live.”

Broad-shouldered men with jackboots and flowing capes dash across the mud. Barbie-doll elven women in pink miniskirts and bra tops loiter by the woodsheds. Each of these electronic incarnations on the screen represents an actual person somewhere in the world. The real individual could be anywhere on the globe. Here, they are all Adenites.

For no clear reason, an elf woman starts beating Theguardian with a sword. Tapping away at the keyboard, I try to explain that I am not, as I appear to be, a novice knight with the build of an American footballer in silver plate armour, dragging a sword the size of a broom handle, but a reporter in London. The elf woman stops attacking me and, without a word, teleports away into nothingness. This keeps happening. But I must persist. This is not an abstract electronic quest. This is not about points on a scoreboard or racing for a finish line. This is about money.

Most of us are familiar with the idea of conventional computer games: you buy, borrow or steal a piece of software for a desktop computer or a PlayStation-like console, load it up, and use a keyboard or mouse or joystick to steer a character through a challenge. You race a car round a course, or run a football team, or kill monsters, or slay gunmen. The game ends: you start again, or buy another. You can play with a friend, or with a few friends over the internet — but it’s still a game that ends and, for those dissatisfied with reality as it is, that’s not good enough.

Now, most notably in east Asia but increasingly in the US and Europe, another kind of computer game is gaining ground which, financially and emotionally, blurs the boundary between the real and the computer-generated. In the software business, the games go by the indigestible acronym MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), but they are more easily understood as virtual worlds. Aden is a virtual world in an online game called Lineage, created and run by a Korean company, NCsoft. Lineage’s four million mainly east Asian subscribers make it the biggest, although the more recent Japanese virtual world of Vana’diel, in the game Final Fantasy XI, which has a large following in the US and is about to launch in Britain, recently passed the 500,000-inhabitant mark.

The most curious element of the virtual worlds is not the fortunes they are making for their creators, though these are real and remarkable enough; NCSoft’s profits run at #5m a month: unlike conventional computer games, which players pay for only once, virtual world residents pay a monthly fee, typically about #10, for the right to stay alive in these privately run existences.

No, what is most bizarre about the virtual worlds, in which all players were supposed to start out equal and acquire wealth and status by their own efforts, is that the inequality of the real world is sluicing into them. Players who are wealthy in the real world are using real money to buy virtual goods and virtual characters from players who are real-world poor. Players who, in the real world, are time-rich and cash-poor are putting in hours of graft in the virtual world, killing virtual monsters, seeking out virtual treasure and giving themselves IT worker’s lumbago to produce nonexistent magical weapons and characters, which can then be sold for thousands of dollars on the internet.

At first encounter, the virtual-world concept seems simple — an ingenious merger between two familiar PC-age institutions: the fantasy role-playing game and the internet chatroom. At any one time, thousands of people are online in the same virtual world as you, dressed up as magicians or dwarves. Sometimes you chat to each other, sometimes you try to kill each other, sometimes you gang up to fight another gang for control of a castle. Sometimes you sit on someone’s lap and talk.

But just as you are more likely to be killed if you are poorly equipped and inexperienced, so you are less likely to be chatted to and invited to join a gang if you are poorly equipped and inexperienced. In order to get equipment and experience, it is necessary to carry out dull, repetitive tasks, like slaying goblins, or testing your sword against a training post.

With my ridiculous armoury in the twilight squalor of small-town Aden, as the novice knight Theguardian, I begin to have a strange, familiar feeling. As I hack away, clicking the cursor over and over again and watching Theguardian’s claymore wearily whacking a virtual straw dummy, I start to think: “This is not a game. This is not fun. This is hard, dull work.” The virtual Protestant in me thinks: “If I don’t do this, I won’t get anywhere in this world.” At which point I think: “Couldn’t I pay someone else to do it for me while I go and do something more worthwhile?”

This is exactly the point at which the virtual and real worlds collide. A US economist, Edward Castronova, who spent months roaming the virtual world of Norrath in Sony’s game EverQuest, used exchange rates based on black market internet prices for virtual goods, virtual money and pre-developed characters to calculate that Norrath’s real-world GNP per capita makes it wealthier, citizen for citizen, than China or India.

He found that almost a third of adult subscribers spend more time in Norrath in a typical week than they do working for pay in the real world. He writes: “One can almost believe that many people do live there, wherever it is, and not on earth.”

Officially, the companies that run the virtual worlds don’t approve of the selling for real money of virtual items: according to their rules, players who are caught doing it will be kicked out. Lance Stites, of NCsoft’s US subsidiary in Texas, points out that if the firm acknowledged a real value for unreal things, it could face legal action from players. “If something’s got real-world value at some point, we’ve got an obligation,” he says.

Yet the buying and selling of online goods and avatars is being carried out so brazenly that it is hard to believe the corporations are as worried as they claim. A Hong Kong-based company, IGE Ltd, employs 50 people exclusively in buying and selling nonexistent wands, weapons, cloaks and virtual currency from virtual worlds such as EverQuest. Another firm, Team VIP, will sell you 10m adena — the virtual currency in use in Lineage — for 250 real US dollars. A third site, mysupersales.com, offers EverQuest “spider venom” for $699.30. The venom isn’t real, nor are its effects, and, more intriguingly, any “advantage” that the buyer might gain from using it would seem to be confined entirely to the microcircuits of a humming server in San Diego, California.

Mysupersales.com specialises in selling avatars — virtual characters which a subscriber has brought to in-game wealth and power at the expense of real-world advantages, such as a social life. One recent avatar being sold was a level 74 magician for Final Fantasy XI. The asking price, for a collection of numbers in a computer that will never exist outside a fantasy world, was $1,299.99.

If it seems extraordinary that anyone would consider paying the best part of #700 for a virtual magician, you are unfamiliar with the lurid tales of the addictiveness of virtuality. EverQuest is popularly known as “Evercrack” among hardcore Norrathians. “The sad truth is that, in many ways, EverQuest is better than real life,” an anonymous 36-year-old woman player told a US psychological researcher, Nicholas Yee. “It is easier to succeed in EQ, I can be beautiful, fit and healthy in EQ  in real life I am chronically ill and there isn’t much fun or achievement to be had.”

Some date the origin of virtual worlds to the dawn of the internet itself, pointing to the work of a group of Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed students at Essex University in 1979, led by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle. They were the first to work out how their simple text-based computer fantasy games could be played simultaneously by multiple players around the world, linked by early international computer networks.

For the next two decades, however, the increase in the power of home computers outpaced the increase in the speed of the internet that connected them. Only recently, with the widespread availability of cheap, fast internet connections  broadband  has it become possible for thousands of players, thousands of miles apart, to talk, band together and overcome the same virtual challenges, in the same vividly created virtual world, at the same time.

South Korea has led the world in broadband access, and most of the four million players of Lineage are Korean. It was in Korea last year that a 22-year-old man, identified by JoonAng Daily as Mr Jin, was arrested for playing the new version of Lineage, Lineage 2, in an internet cafe without paying. He started playing the game on November 29 and was finally dragged from the computer on December 17, 438 hours and 38 minutes later. Police reported that he had not washed during that time.

According to the Korean national police agency’s Cyber Terror Response Centre, 70% of crimes committed by young people are related to virtual worlds, mostly attempts to steal virtual money and virtual items. In October 2002 a 24-year-old man, Kim Kyung-jae, died of a DVT-like illness after playing an online game, Mu, virtually nonstop for three and a half days. “I told him not to spend so much time on the internet,” his mother told the BBC. “He just said, ‘Yes, Mum’, but kept on playing.” (According to Lance Stites of NCsoft the company has taken steps to encourage players to keep the distinction between real and virtual worlds clear. Now, messages appear periodically on screen reminding subscribers to “stretch your legs and see the sunshine once in a while”.)

The lure of the virtual worlds is not difficult to understand. They resemble real life in that there is no specific, common goal, no “game over”. There are quests, tasks, narratives, but the game continues when and whether these are completed. The only remaining goal, then, is to find out why you are there in the first place; and because, unlike real life, the gods, the bureaucrats and the bosses are one and the same, there is a sense that one day you might actually be told the meaning of virtual life, that the grand design might be revealed. “A competition has arisen between earth and the virtual worlds,” writes Castronova, “and for many, earth is the lesser option.”

Back in Aden, I have made some progress. I have reached a larger, busier town, where other player characters are crying out their wares for sale. SELLING KILLER RABBIT keeps scrolling through my message box. That is one of the intelligible cries. Mostly it sounds like the pit of a futures exchange. A squat green creature going by the name of Yogurt is screaming over and over: “49 brings 105 rough 132 iron.” Yogurt agrees to talk. “Let me get dressed,” he says, and returns a few moments later in the form of a black-robed wizard with a blue light on the end of a stick. Lineage, Yogurt explains, allows players to disguise themselves as monsters once they reach a certain level, hence his homunculus disguise.

In real life, Yogurt the wizard is a 26-year-old American, hunched over a computer in Okinawa, Japan, at one in the morning (it’s mid-afternoon in London). Yogurt won’t tell me what he does for a real-world living, although almost all the young American males in Okinawa are serving members of the US military. He could be tall, short, fat, thin, spotty, black, white. He could be a she. (About half the male players in EverQuest and a quarter of the females have at least one avatar of the opposite sex.) All I know is that in the real world Yogurt is unable to cast spells and will never meet a Zombie Lord of Fear. Yogurt has inhabited the virtual world of Aden for six years.

I ask where all the Koreans are. Yogurt points out a peculiarity of the virtual worlds: that their vast subscriber populations are divided up over a number of different servers. Each contains the same virtual world, with the same landscape, magic and monsters, but each has a different set of players. The Koreans have Korean-language Adens; we are on a server that provides an English-language Aden. Each server can deal with about 5,000 players at one time.

“The Korean servers are very overpopulated, from what I hear,” says Yogurt. “I kind of like it here. It’s nice and relaxing.” Behind us there are scenes of terrible carnage involving elves, magicians, giant spiders and a group of characters who look like sumo wrestlers. The clash of weapons sounds from the speakers and the screen flashes with explosions. Another giant spider and a werewolf cut across our path, a disembodied eye shimmies through the air, the fighting continues and a wizard makes it snow. Is it always like this? “No,” says Yogurt. “Just when 12-year-olds get bored.”

Yogurt is a member of one of the gangs of players — known as blood pledges in Lineage  which are a feature of the virtual worlds. Some two dozen people, unlikely to meet each other in reality, unite their avatars to kill monsters, win status and wealth, take a virtual house in a virtual town together and go on virtual picnics in the virtual countryside. “It’s the people who make it fun. The game itself is boring. It always has been,” says Yogurt.

Yogurt and another member of his pledge, Slowmotion, whose real self is in Miami, take Theguardian on a teleport tour of Aden. We go into a bar in a virtual town called Giran. The place is empty. It is impossible to drink virtual beer anyway. Nor can we sit down. “My legs don’t bend,” says Yogurt.

Yogurt and Slowmotion take me to a cathedral where characters can get virtually married. “This is another aspect of the game that I frankly think is dumb, but come on in,” says Yogurt, and we walk inside a conventional Christian space with rows of pews facing an altar. “This guy says blah blah blah, you may now f_ck that bi_ch,” says Slowmotion, a busy, fidgety avatar whose current form is a green dwarf but who acts and talks like South Park’s Eric Cartman.

The last stop is a place called Lawful Temple, a pool in a forest where characters can learn spells. Slowmotion dashes off after a wild boar that has crossed his field of vision and slays it. Yogurt and I are hanging out by the pool. A certain street-corner aimlessness infuses the mood, and a certain bitterness — virtual politics, of a kind. Yogurt has already told me how much he hates the new version of Lineage, which has drawn some of his pledge buddies away into another world where he no longer meets them. Old-time virtual-world inhabitants grumble about the capitalist-bureaucrat gods who control their virtual existence. The players are the ones who have devoted great tracts of their real lives to the game; but ultimately the game belongs to the corporations, not the players. They can break up old worlds by luring players into new ones. Ultimately, they can close down a world altogether, killing the last die- hard inhabitants — and all their years of toil and emotional investment — with the flick of a switch.

“Is this going to go on for ever, you and this game?” asks Theguardian.

“Well, I pay $15 a month, about two times the cost of a movie ticket,” says Yogurt.

“Are you worried they might close this world down one day?”

“Nope.”

My screen is small, and it is hard to see the Lawful Temple with the bright afternoon light coming in from the London street outside. It’s just before noon in Florida but in Okinawa, in the darkness in the small hours of the morning, the virtual trees in the virtual forest around the virtual ornamental pool must look more vivid than “RL”, as hardcore online players call real life. “Lineage isn’t reality?” asks Yogurt rhetorically. He looks around, by typing “(looks round)”, and laughs, by typing “hehe”. I think he means that it is.