precisely the same spot on Daoud's shin he had struck twice
before.

Daoud bellowed and felt the tingling and saw the glow in his leg, and
the Soma, the drug created by his spirit, preserved his sanity.

How small Erculio looked, crouched down on the stone floor. So man must
look to God. God was so infinitely far above man, the miracle was that
God was mindful of man at all. But God was inside of man--inside of each
human being--as well as above him.

_It is blasphemy to liken myself to God._

He called to mind the Koran's admonition, _There is none like unto Him_.

His mind occupied with God, he barely noticed the activities of the
spiderlike creature that crawled about on the floor below him as he hung
like a trapped fly. Erculio worked on his legs for a long time, bruising
the shins with his heavy stick until Daoud thought both legs must be
broken. Then the torturer pressed a red-hot poker against the soles of
his feet.

Erculio had the guards let Daoud down and force him to walk on his
burned feet to the rack table, where they chained him facedown and
stretched him till the ligaments that held his bones together were ready
to snap.

The Mask of Clay screamed and pleaded for mercy and insisted he had
already told them everything. But the pain lay as far from his
consciousness as the sea lies from the desert tent of a Bedouin.

Erculio applied more instruments to Daoud's body, inflicting many kinds
of pain--burning, stabbing, bruising, crushing. He kept Daoud awake, and
Daoud knew that hours must have gone by, perhaps the whole night.

Daoud's outcries grew hoarser and weaker, and at last Erculio's efforts
brought forth nothing from him but soft groans and whimpers.

Daoud saw the clerk, Vincenzo, rise yawning and leave as another clerk,
also shaven-headed, but with a short brown beard, came in to replace
him. He saw the two guards in yellow and blue sit down on the floor,
their backs to the wall, and doze off. He saw after a time the second
clerk lower his head on his folded arms. He saw all this while Erculio
pranced about him, hurting him and hurting him.

Erculio looked around at the others in the chamber. He left off pushing
a needle into Daoud's ankle and rushed over to the guards and shouted at
them to wake up. He poked them with his stick. They cursed him and
kicked at him and went back to sleep. He scurried to the sleeping clerk.

"You are supposed to be writing down everything the prisoner says