After this, he thought, they will cut me open and anatomize me. But when they had finished their measurements and repeated some in order to be sure of them, they were gone—silently as they had come, silent as they had been throughout their leisurely, meticulous investigation.

Then came a bowl of soup, bread, cheese, and bullace plums. After that—how long after he had no watch to tell him—came nightfall. In the darkness he was woken by the sound of a desperate voice: a shout of despair which had broken from him in a dream, re-echoing from the vault overhead. He recognized it, and heard it die away.

He had renounced chronometry. It was not so easy to renounce habit. From habit, he continued to pull out his watch and consult its dead face. Each time, he said to himself, ‘I won’t do that again,’ but he went on doing it; for how long he could not have said, but certainly for several months, for the fern they brought him for his bedding had lost any smell of the warm summered earth. He judged by the hollowness of the wind and the lessening of the mysterious daylight, which came and went in the windowless gallery where he lay like the flow and ebb of a tide, that it must be well past Martinmas. By now his absence from the Faculty would have been remarked on, one or another of his pupils accounting for it by saying he had been stolen by the fairies; the hypothesis would have come to the ears of the Professor of History, who would have poured reason on it. Legend supplants reason: in days to come there would be a tradition that a Lecturer in Rhetoric at the University of Aberdeen had been stolen by the fairies—as, indeed, he had been. It was easier to speculate on what was going on in the outer world than on his own circumstances. He saw his food appear (there was never enough of it), he heard the wind blowing, he heard the water splash into the rocky basin with an unchanging voice; he felt himself washed, and saw every fragment of litter, every crumb and cobweb, removed by invisible hands and de facto becoming invisible: his attendants (he had come to think of them as such) had a Presbyterian zealotry for cleanliness. His beard was cultivated daily. He had never thought to have a beard, only beggars and peasants were bearded; he supposed it was let grow as a badge of captivity. It was combed and trimmed, and anointed with oils like Aaron’s. In a moment of curiosity, he pulled out a hair. He was swarthy, but the hair was bright red. He grew attached to his beard; it replaced the mouse or the spiders which ameliorate the lot of ordinary prisoners. But it was reaped off, and after that they kept him clean-shaven.