which he examined all the tiles of his cell, with the gratifying
conclusion that they were all the same shape and size; but was
greatly puzzled about the angle in the wall at the end, and also
about an iron peg or spike that stood out from the wall, the
object of which he does not know to this day. Then he had a
period of mere madness not to be written of by decent men, but
only by those few dirty novelists hallooed on by the infernal
huntsman to hunt down and humiliate human nature. This also
passed, but left behind it a feverish distaste for many of the
mere objects around him. Long after he had returned to sanity and
such hopeless cheerfulness as a man might have on a desert
island, he disliked the regular squares of the pattern of wall
and floor and the triangle that terminated his corridor. Above
all, he had a hatred, 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