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hole. Behind us, the house seemed to have become larger and hollower. Dark turned to go inside; he stood leaning forward with a hand on either side of the door, swaying, and peering in. Then he plunged through the skin of the room’s accumulated obscurity. I heard a crash in the hall, heavy uneven footfalls on the stairs; then a long silence. His voice fell from a window above my head: ‘Keys twisted by anticipation of difficult locks! Half my lifetime, filing and hammering , testing and laying aside! For a door that stands open!’
    A lavatory cistern cried out overhead, and one among the black stems climbing the house was filled with whispers rushing to earth. By degrees a clarity was restored, through which I could read Dark’s stumbling on the stairs, clutching at a doorknob, opening a refrigerator , slamming it shut. I refilled my glass, and watched the increasingly convincing constructions of the moonlight.
    Dark fell back into his chair. ‘… but we will not now leave our collection of ingenious keys; we are tired, dulled …’
    Later he stirred again: ‘The earth rounds the sun in such a calm; why can we not keep our feet? What was it Marx said about philosophers and the world? “The problem, however …’”
    ‘The problem, however, isto be part of it‚’ I suggested.
    He swung his blurred face towards me with slow suspicion. ‘Plainly, your generation isless fuddled. One can celebrate the actual, or live it unexamined … or leave it unexamined … or leave it …’
    Dark was asleep. A quarter of a day must have passed since sunset , for the full moon had cleared the house, and stood directly over us.
IV
    Instruments of interrogation had been deployed against my return. Midgley seated me at the focus of an array of metal full of hungry eyes and round mouths toothed about with digits; here and there a precisely pointed tongue flickered in anticipation of my story. At my elbow a tiny oblong window gave onto a Pythagorean world of numbers tumbling in a greenish glow. In front of me clustered dials of different sizes, protruding on stalks or sunk like lilies into glassy surfaces; some bore upon their faces miniature replicas of t hemselves . I took it that I was facing lie-detectors of all degrees of acuity , that automatic pens were poised to scale the fevers of the imaginative faculty, that compass needles would unwaveringly point out anomalies produced by my buried selves in the magnetic field of truth. However, when Midgley had swung microphones on mechanical arms around my face, and had thrown a master-switch whose current convulsed the apparatus, but spared me, I was allowed to tell my tale without interruption.
    Afterwards Midgley ran his eye along the reeled-out ribbon of numerical commentary. A little cross-checking enabled him to say, ‘I don’t believe you were carried on a pole.’
    ‘Perhaps that was a mere traveller’s tale‚’ I suggested. ‘On theother hand, although such a mode of transport wouldn’t do for the city, it seemed quite natural for the jungle. I suppose your contraption didn’t believe the bit about the talking fish? I’d be interested to know if it thought I took all that slippery mud too personally. Maybe the sunset was in bad taste? There are other questions a machine like yours could usefully answer. To whose absence, for example, would it attribute my loneliness? The sense of defeat I found in Dark – was that a projection of my own hidden forebodings , or a reality evoked by the contrast of my unquenched youthfulness ?’
    But Midgley’s attention seemed suddenly to have turned inward, leaving his surface inert. Little flecks of music were drifting in from the enormous afternoon preparing outside. I freed myself from the dead circuitry and stood up to stretch. ‘Wake up, or we’ll miss the procession,’ I said, and stepped around him to the door. Some connection was restored in his interior; he seized a fat briefcase and ran after me down the stairs,