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passed the circus where Usibepu’s Zulus were appearing - it must have been the one `Professor’ Zitter had in mind
- he toyed with the idea of going in to see the performance, but
then let it drop. What did he care if anegro could do magic tricks!
It was not a lust for novelty that was racking his nerves, there
was something in the air, something intangible, imponderable
that whipped him up into a nervous frenzy: the same noxious
fumes which, even before he had come to Holland, he had found
so suffocating that his thoughts had automatically turned
towards suicide.
    He wondered where it came from this time. Had he caught it,
like an infection, from the Jewish emigrants he had seen?
    He felt it must be the same mysterious influence which had
driven him from his home that sent these religious fanatics on
a wild chase over the face of the earth; only the individual
motivation was different.
    It was well before the War when he had first had this eerie
sensation, as if something was squeezing his brain, only at that
time it had still been possible to suppress it by throwing himself
into work or pleasure. He had found various ways of explaining
it away: it was wanderlust, it was nervous exhaustion, it was the
result of his unhealthy way of life; when war raised its bloody
standard over the Continent he assumed it had been a premonition of the carnage. But why, now the War was over, was the
sensation becoming daily more intense and driving him to despair? And not only Hauberrisser himself, almost everyone he
talked to about it had a similar tale to tell.
    They had all confidently assumed that when peace descended
on the nations of the world it would also return to the hearts of
men. Precisely the opposite had occurred.
    As usual the empty-headed were loudest in proclaiming their
shallow explanation that the fever raging in the hearts and minds
of the survivors was merely the result of the disturbance of their
comfortable existence. The cause went much deeper.

    Spectres, monstrous yet without form and only discernible
through the devastation they wrought, had been called up by
faceless and power-hungry bureaucrats in their secret seances
and had devoured millions of innocent victims before returning
to the sleep from which they had been roused. But there was
another phantom, still more horrible, that had long since caught
the foul stench of a decaying civilisation in its gaping nostrils
and now raised its snake-wreathed countenance from the abyss
where it had lain, to mock humanity with the realisation that the
juggernaut they had driven for the last four years in the belief
it would clear the world for a new generation of free men was
a treadmill in which they were trapped for all time.
    During the last few weeks Hauberrisser had managed to turn
a blind eye to his world-weariness. Against all appearances he
had convinced himself he could live the life of a hermit, of an
uninvolved bystander, here, in the middle of a city which almost
overnight the pressure of events had transformed from a centre
of international trade into the place where deranged minds from
all over the world gathered to give free rein to their wildest
fantasies. He had even succeeded in carrying out his plan to a
certain extent but then, triggered off by some slight circumstance, the old tiredness had descended on him once again, more
stifling than before; the sight of the giddy crowds around him
whirling their senseless way through life only served to increase
his weariness.
    His eyes were suddenly opened to the shock of the distorted
expressions on the faces crowding round him. Those were not
the expressions he remembered, the expressions of people in
pursuit of pleasure, hurrying to forget their troubles at some
entertainment. Their faces were already irrevocably marked by
a sense of dislocation.
    The struggle for existence carves different lines and furrows
on the face of mankind. These reminded him of the