The round pane was covered on the washroom side – the doctor’s observatory – by two solid wooden shutters closed by a bolt.

He groped forward and firmly turned the handle with the professional precision he would have employed in turning the endless screw of a speculum.

The shutters parted noiselessly, in the same way as butterflies’ wings open.

The window glowed with the golden fire of all the lamps in the hall, and seemed like a star new-risen on the limited horizon of the doctor’s table.

In this light Bathybius’ eyelids fluttered slightly; his eyes were vague, or rather perpetually fixed upon some invisible point, and their expression was that which, by some unexplained coincidence, is common to most great physicians and a few dangerous monomaniacs living in perpetual confinement. With his handsome, fleshy surgeon’s hands, one of which was laden with heavy signet rings, he smoothed apart his flowing white sideburns. He put a sheet of paper on the table, ready for his notes, took out his fountain pen, consulted his watch, and settled down to wait.

Although Bathybius knew perfectly well, being of a grave and thoughtful nature, that he was merely about to observe, on the other side of his round window, some human beings in the most normally and miserably human of attitudes, he advanced toward the window as he would have approached the eyepiece of some prodigious telescope borne up beneath its quivering cupola by colossal wheels and gears, and directed at an unexplored world.

“Now, now,” he muttered to himself, “let’s not get carried away.”

And to drive the vision from his mind, and at the same time see his writing table more clearly, he plugged in a small, turquoise-shaded lamp.

The next night he was most astonished to find, among his papers, and freshly written in his own hand, the strange, scientifico-lyrico-philosophical elucubration that follows. It would seem that he wrote it during his long periods of idleness – that lengthy hour during which the lovers were eating so voraciously, and the ten consecutive hours during which they were sleeping. It is also not impossible that his personality underwent a singular bifurcation, and that one side of him was timing, supervising, analyzing, recording, and checking technical details at every visit of the Indian to the washroom, and the other side of him was generalizing and transforming his impressions into this literary form, which was most unusual for him:

GOD IS INFINITELY SMALL

Who maintains this? Surely not a man.

For man created God, the God he believes in, at any rate, he created him, and it was not God who created man (this is common knowledge today); man created God in his own image and likeness, enlarged to a degree where the human mind can no longer conceive of dimensions.

This does not mean that the God that man conceived is devoid of dimensions.