programme under the debris at the rear (he certainly did not sleep
or eat in the shop). One or two lower rooms were left fairly intact.
The outward aspect of the place was formless; it grew to be no more
than a mound in time; the charred timbers, one or two still standing,
lean and naked against the sky, lost their blackness and faded to a
silvery gray. It would have seemed strange, had they not grown
accustomed to the thought, to imagine that blind man, like a mole,
or some slow slug, turning himself mysteriously in the bowels of
that gray mound--that time-silvered "eye-sore."

When they saw him, however, he was in the shop. They opened the door
to take in their work (when other cobblers turned them off), and
they saw him seated in his chair in the half darkness, his whole
person, legs, torso, neck, head, as motionless as the vegetable of
which we have spoken--only his hands and his bare arms endowed with
visible life. The gloom had bleached the skin to the colour of damp
ivory, and against the background of his immobility they moved with
a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably. No, they were never
still. One wondered what they could be at. Surely he could not have
had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in
motion. Even far into the night. Tap-tap-tap! Blows continuous and
powerful. On what? On nothing? On the bare iron last? And for what
purpose? To what conceivable end?

Well, one could imagine those arms, growing paler, also growing
thicker and more formidable with that unceasing labour; the muscles
feeding themselves omnivorously on their own waste, the cords
toughening, the bone-tissues revitalizing themselves without end.
One could imagine the whole aspiration of that mute and motionless
man pouring itself out into those pallid arms, and the arms taking it
up with a kind of blind greed. Storing it up. Against a day!

"That _cachorra_! One day--"

What were the thoughts of the man? What moved within that motionless
cranium covered with long hair? Who can say? Behind everything, of
course, stood that bitterness against the world--the blind
world--blinder than he would ever be. And against "that _cachorra_."
But this was no longer a thought; it was the man.

Just as all muscular aspiration flowed into his arms, so all the
energies of his senses turned to his ears. The man had become, you
might say, two arms and two ears. Can you imagine a man listening,
intently, through the wak