Then, when silence had sunk deep and nothing happened for two and a half hours, it suddenly occurred to him that this was the end of his life.  He was hidden and sealed up in this little crack of stone until the flesh should fall off his bones.  He was dead, and the world had won.

His cell was of an oblong shape, but very long in comparison with its width.  It was just wide enough to permit the arms to be fully extended with the dumb-bells, which were hung up on the left wall, very dusty.  It was, however, long enough for a man to walk one thirty-fifth part of a mile if he traversed it entirely.  On the same principle a row of fixed holes, quite close together, let in to the cells by pipes what was alleged to be the freshest air.  For these great scientific organizers insisted that a man should be healthy even if he was miserable.  They provided a walk long enough to give him exercise and holes large enough to give him oxygen.  There their interest in human nature suddenly ceased.  It seemed never to have occurred to them that the benefit of exercise belongs partly to the benefit of liberty.  They had not entertained the suggestion that the open air is only one of the advantages of the open sky.  They administered air in secret, but in sufficient doses, as if it were a medicine.  They suggested walking, as if no man had ever felt inclined to walk.  Above all, the asylum authorities insisted on their own extraordinary cleanliness.  Every morning, while Turnbull was still half asleep on his iron bedstead which was lifted half-way up the wall and clamped to it with iron, four sluices or metal mouths opened above him at the four corners of the chamber and washed it white of any defilement.  Turnbull’s solitary soul surged up against this sickening daily solemnity.

“I am buried alive!” he cried, bitterly; “they have hidden me under mountains.  I shall be here till I rot.  Why the blazes should it matter to them whether I am dirty or clean.”

Every morning and evening an iron hatchway opened in his oblong cell, and a brown hairy hand or two thrust in a plate of perfectly cooked lentils and a big bowl of cocoa.  He was not underfed any more than he was underexercised or asphyxiated.  He had ample walking space, ample air, ample and even filling food.  The only objection was that he had nothing to walk towards, nothing to feast about, and no reason whatever for drawing the breath of life.

Even the shape of his cell especially irritated him.  It was a long, narrow parallelogram, which had a flat wall at one end and ought to have had a flat wall at the other; but that end was broken by a wedge or angle of space, like the prow of a ship.  After three days of silence and cocoa, this angle at the end began to infuriate Turnbull.  It maddened him to think that two lines came together and pointed at nothing.  After the fifth day he was reckless, and poked his head into the corner.  After twenty-five days he almost broke his head against it.  Then he became quite cool and stupid again, and began to examine it like a sort of Robinson Crusoe.