He stared at this mysterious couch, trying to understand it, to realize it.
He rose from the narrow bed on which he sat, and advanced to the centre of the cell--to the centre, but no further than that.
Around his waist a circlet of light steel was welded, and from it thin steel chains ran through light handcuffs upon his wrists, and were joined to steel bands which were locked upon his ankles. And all these chains, hardly thicker than stout watch-chains, but terribly strong, were caught up to a pulley that hung far above his head and, in its turn, gave its central chain to another pulley and swivel fixed in the roof.
In the half of his cell where his little bed was fixed, the prisoner had fair liberty of movement, despite his shackles. He could sit or lie, use his hands with some freedom. But whenever he attempted to cross the invisible line which divided one part of the cell from the other, the chains tightened and forbade him.
He stood now, straining to the limit of his bonds, gazing at the long couch of black wood, with its rubber feet, its clamps and collar at the head.
Above the mysterious couch, upon a triangular shelf by the door, was something that gleamed and shone brightly. It was a cap of metal, shaped like a huge acorn cup, or a bishop's mitre. From an ivory stud in the centre of the peak, coils of silk-covered wire ran to a china plug in the wall.
Rathbone stood upright for several minutes gazing at these things. Then with a long, hopeless sigh, to the accompanying jingle of his fetters, he turned and sat down once more upon his bed.
As prisoners do, he had contracted the habit of talking aloud to himself. It was a poor comfort--this mournful echo of one's own voice!--but it seemed to make the profound solitude more bearable for a moment. He began a miserable monologue now.
"I _must_ understand it!" he said. "That is the first step of all, if I am to keep my brain, if there is ever to be the slightest chance of escape, I must understand this terrible and secret business.
"Let me go through the whole thing slowly and in order."
He began to reconstruct the scenes of his frequent torture, with the logic and precision with which he would have worked out a proposition of Euclid. It was the only way in which he could keep a grip upon a failing mind; a logical process of thought alone could solve this horrid mystery.