that sight. Chief
Inspector Heat, an efficient officer of his department, stood his ground,
but for a whole minute he did not advance. A local constable in uniform
cast a sidelong glance, and said, with stolid simplicity:

"He's all there. Every bit of him. It was a job."

He had been the first man on the spot after the explosion. He mentioned
the fact again. He had seen something like a heavy flash of lightning in
the fog. At that time he was standing at the door of the King William
Street Lodge talking to the keeper. The concussion made him tingle all
over. He ran between the trees towards the Observatory. "As fast as my
legs would carry me," he repeated twice.

Chief Inspector Heat, bending forward over the table in a gingerly and
horrified manner, let him run on. The hospital porter and another man
turned down the corners of the cloth, and stepped aside. The Chief
Inspector's eyes searched the gruesome detail of that heap of mixed
things, which seemed to have been collected in shambles and rag shops.

"You used a shovel," he remarked, observing a sprinkling of small gravel,
tiny brown bits of bark, and particles of splintered wood as fine as
needles.

"Had to in one place," said the stolid constable. "I sent a keeper to
fetch a spade. When he heard me scraping the ground with it he leaned
his forehead against a tree, and was as sick as a dog."

The Chief Inspector, stooping guardedly over the table, fought down the
unpleasant sensation in his throat. The shattering violence of
destruction which had made of that body a heap of nameless fragments
affected his feelings with a sense of ruthless cruelty, though his reason
told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning. The
man, whoever he was, had died instantaneously; and yet it seemed
impossible to believe that a human body could have reached that state of
disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony.
No physiologist, and still less of a metaphysician, Chief Inspector Heat
rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar
conception of time. Instantaneous! He remembered all he had ever read
in popular publications of long and terrifying dreams dreamed in the
instant of waking; of the whole past life lived with frightful intensity
by a drowning man as his doomed head bobs up, streaming, for the last
time. The inexplicable mysteries of conscious existence beset Chief
Inspector