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 was
screwing his eye to peer at this grey and greasy twilight he was
astonished to see another human finger very long and lean come
down from above towards the broken pipe and hook it up to
something higher. The lighted aperture was abruptly blackened and
blocked, presumably by a face and mouth, for something human