deep as the hell he did not believe in, for the objectless
iron peg in the wall.

But in all his moods, sane or insane, intolerant or stoical, he
never really doubted this: that the machine held him as light and as
hopelessly as he had from his birth been held by the hopeless cosmos of
his own creed. He knew well the ruthless and inexhaustible resources of
our scientific civilization. He no more expected rescue from a medical
certificate than rescue from the solar system. In many of his Robinson
Crusoe moods he thought kindly of MacIan as of some quarrelsome
school-fellow who had long been dead. He thought of leaving in the cell
when he died a rigid record of his opinions, and when he began to
write them down on scraps of envelope in his pocket, he was startled
to discover how much they had changed. Then he remembered the Beauchamp
Tower, and tried to write his blazing scepticism on the wall, and
discovered that it was all shiny tiles on which nothing could be either
drawn or carved. Then for an instant there hung and broke above him like
a high wave the whole horror of scientific imprisonment, which manages
to deny a man not only liberty, but every accidental comfort of bondage.
In the old filthy dungeons men could carve their prayers or protests in
the rock. Here the white and slippery walls escaped even from bearing
witness. The old prisoners could make a pet of a mouse or a beetle
strayed out of a hole. Here the unpierceable walls were washed every
morning by an automatic sluice. There was no natural corruption and
no merciful decay by which a living thing could enter in. Then James
Turnbull looked up and saw the high invincible hatefulness of the
society in which he lived, and saw the hatefulness of something else
also, which he told himself again and again was not the cosmos in which
he believed. But all the time he had never once doubted that the five
sides of his cell were for him the wall of the world henceforward, and
it gave him a shock of surprise even to discover the faint light through
the aperture in the ventilation tube. But he had forgotten how close
efficiency has to pack everything together and how easily, therefore, a
pipe here or there may leak.

Turnbull thrust his first finger down the aperture, and at last managed
to make a slight further fissure in the piping. The light that came up
from beyond was very faint, and apparently indirect; it seemed to fall
from some hole or window higher up. As he