‘Yes, yes, yes,’ says the swine, about to reach for the lock. But he turns and comes closer. ‘You’d better keep quiet,’ he says, ‘or else –.’

His arm is raised already. But it does not fall. The swine has not struck him yet.

‘Eat your supper,’ he says, and goes.

Sometimes he says ‘Time for bed’. Now he’s out of the room. The supper he brought is standing uselessly on the table under the lamp. It’ll have to stay there. The prisoner is lying on the bench hiding his face in his hands.

Listen, he thinks, already weaker himself.

Far away the heart is beating, as strange and flawed as a bell under water.

Stop! Don’t they see it’s a heart?…

But the darkness merely engulfs it in another avalanche, as before. And every time it reappears out of the darkness, as if nothing can break it.

Perhaps that’s how it is? it occurs to him. Perhaps it will beat for ever. Perhaps it cannot be destroyed. Listen, there it is. The darkness is fighting it. It’s no use, it reappears again, to go on beating.

Listen, it’s there….

He is scarcely aware of himself now. He is merely lying there, far, far inside the walls. Here it always seems to be evening, but now it really is evening as well. Up in the lamp the light forms a glowing serpent, wide as a hair’s breadth; a soundless angry little glint of an incredible world outside. It shines down on the dusty grey back on the bench.

My son, he thinks.

His father, he thinks.

I must see them. Because I can’t stand it any longer. I’m finished.

He seems quite spent. All he has shared and struggled with during this bitter afternoon has raged through him and possessed him. He shudders violently. Then he lies still once more.

Don’t they see what they’re doing? he whispers.

Avalanche follows avalanche. All the darkness is in commotion as well.

A shudder.

‘No!’ he says, taut, with all he has left. No! No! It sounds meaningless. The final wild refusal between each avalanche.

He starts up, as far as his strength allows: silence. No knocking in the stone. Is it long since it stopped? He does not know. He did not notice when it stopped. It is over now at any rate. He is alone.

From his own exhaustion he imagines the others lying emptied, worn out. Each in his hole in the wall and unable to join in any more. They have no message to send.

All of them have tired of it. They have not managed to hold out.

Then he understands that the reason is different. He turns cold. These people around him know so much more than he does; they know it is over. And that is why silence has fallen. Emptied as they were.

The desire for this has been racking him hour after hour, yet the realization is like a blow on his forehead.

The stone is dead. He is alone, he and the angry glint up in the lamp, and then all the dust.