His extraordinary agitation continues. He is unable to calm down. It is a long time since they left him, but the swine has not brought his supper yet.

He is lying on the bench, the bench where Stig lay. His innermost being seems to have been turned topsyturvy. He is aware and receptive. He has been granted a brief, wonderful visitation that has evoked a part of him of which he was ignorant. He has joined in, that is all he knows. A stranger has visited him and aroused a new longing in him to join in, and made him capable of doing so. So now he cannot stay here any more. He must get away. How? He does not know, but he cannot stay here. For he intends to join in.

A shell seems to be cracking inside him, and he has joined in. This stranger visited him on his way towards annihilation, and was in possession of unprecedented power. The prisoner lying here feels he is one with all the others. He has not been roused to take part for the sake of acclaim, but to face struggle and terror. Torture and terror are abroad, and he must attempt to share them with the man who is suffering this ordeal.

He understands this so clearly that he realizes what is happening to the tired man who was here. It makes him throw himself down on the bench and listen, holding his breath. It makes him strike the stone wall in futility: a splendid, dull sound that brings no swine to the door, but it means he is joining in.

What is happening at this moment is boring its way through him along secret channels. As soon as he knocks he is answered by knocking from somewhere else. Merely a sound-wave through the stone.

But it comes through! To and through him, lying on the bench. He remembers how he thought the stone was alive last night. It wasn’t my imagination, he tells himself. But now it’s different; now he has got in touch. He hasn’t the key, but he has contact. As soon as he knocks there is an answer.

‘Listen,’ he says out loud.

It is coming from all directions. The more he listens, the more he discovers. He no longer knows anything about the ways in which news is spread here inside the stone, how those in the know can help by reporting that such and such a person is under ordeal, and how it will be whispered and tapped and written about. He has forgotten, but he is joining in because Stig came to him and aroused him. He is one with all the others who are sharing this choking hour with someone. He feels their presence, and the feeling increases until he becomes a truer witness than the others who are struggling elsewhere, with definite plans for this and that, their heads full of such things.

He simply accepts, and feels, and the others seem to be so sensitive to everything that comes from him that as soon as he knocks he receives an answer, even though he has been knocking senselessly. A human being has visited him, and he is filled with the experience. That is all he knows.