A bowl of milk and some sponge fingers appeared beside him.

‘Wash your hands first.’

The speaker was invisible. The voice was unmistakably that of a servant of position. He was propelled toward a jet of water which cascaded from a hole in the wall, brimmed a rocky basin, and vanished with a gurgle. He implored the speaker to appear, asked why he was made captive, thanked for the milk. He was speaking to the empty air. The jet of water splashed, gurgled, and went its way. While his back was turned a truss of dry fern had been spread out beside the milk. It smelled of sun and the outer world. The milk, too, was restorative, the sponge fingers so exquisitely light that they melted in his mouth. A sense of purpose returned to him: he must wind his watch. He pulled it out. It had stopped. Till that moment, he had been perplexed, or angry, or cut to the heart; but he had not felt intimidated: it had been too storylike for that. Now he fell into the blankness of despair. He was lost, lost! His watch, sole ally of his rational man, had stopped. He sat with its accustomed weight in his hand and looked at its dead face. An expedient of fear, disguised as common sense, sneaked into his mind. It would be possible to set it going again, its hands adjusted to a conjectural position. The conjecture need not be far out, and in any case he would be sure of a measure of time. With an odd scruple of honour, he buried the dead watch in his pocket.

Presently they came back again—or were back again. He was stripped of his clothes, his wig was pulled off203, he was again propelled to the jet of water and washed. The water cascaded over his head and shoulders; soapsuds exploded in his ears and stung his eyes. There must have been half a dozen of them at work on him, hissing as though they were grooming a horse and tut-tutting at the dirt ingrained on his knees and elbows. When they had washed and dried him they cut his nails, cleaned his teeth, and handed him his clothes. The clothes smelled rancid; he was averse to putting them on, but did so because he was chilled. He was also very hungry. No food appeared. Instead, there came a new relay of fingerers, who stripped him once more and began to measure him; he felt the tape slipped round him, laid along him. The hope that he was being measured for new clothes was unfounded. He was being measured from motives of biological curiosity: the length of his nose, the span of his nostrils, the girth of each toe, the exact position in relation to spine and thighbone of the mole on his buttock, the dimensions of the callus on his pen finger. They also took his pulse and counted his teeth.