4 KudoZ points awarded for this answer. Comment: "Thanks to you both for your time and trouble. Gary's proposal penned in Boston (thanks) seems to me to be good linguistically, but marred by some drawbacks on the technical side because it is more relevent to a typesetting context and, perhaps more importantly, the "thing" described in my text is, to my mind, a concrete noun rather than a state or condition. As for what the "thing" is, I remain in considerable doubt, but after much humming and hawing, a certain amount of head-scratching, and the utterance of a variety of expletives manufactured in Birmingham (GB), I used the word "pillars" (thinking along the same lines as mammetta49 - thanks). I am very unsure of this solution however, so the translation was delivered with a note that will, I hope, save me from recrimination at some future date. Maximum respect Derek"