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Thinking that this was just an interesting optical illusion, I stepped to one side to see if it persisted. As if I were blind, I held out my arms and felt all the walls. I bent down to pick up some of the pieces of tile I had knocked off the wall when I made the opening. After touching and retouching that part of the wall repeatedly, I had to accept the fact that it had been repaired.

Could I have been so fascinated by the blue splendor of the room, so interested in the working of the motors, that I did not hear a mason rebuilding the wall?

I moved closer. I felt the coolness of the tile against my ear, and heard an interminable silence, as if the other side had disappeared.

The iron bar that I had used to break the wall was on the floor where I had dropped it the first time I entered the room. "Lucky no one saw it!" I said, pathetically unaware of the situation. "If they had, they probably would have taken it away!"

Again I pressed my ear to this wall that seemed to be intact. Reassured by the silence, I looked for the spot where I had made the opening, and then I began to tap on the wall, thinking that it would be easier to break the fresh plaster. I tapped for a long time, with increasing desperation. The tile was invulnerable. The strongest, most violent blows echoed against the hardness and did not open even a superficial crack or loosen a tiny fragment of the blue glaze.

I rested for a moment and tried to control my nerves.

Then I resumed my efforts, moving to other parts of the wall. Chips fell, and, when large pieces of the wall began to come down, I kept on pounding, bleary-eyed, with an urgency that was far greater than the size of the iron bar, until the resistance of the wall (which seemed unaffected by the force of my repeated pounding) pushed me to the floor, frantic and exhausted. First I saw, then I touched, the pieces of masonry— they were smooth on one side, harsh, earthy on the other: then, in a vision so lucid it seemed ephemeral and supernatural, my eyes saw the blue continuity of the tile, the undamaged and whole wall, the closed room.

I pounded some more. In some places pieces of the wall broke off, but they did not reveal any sort of cavity. In fact, in the twinkling of an eye the wall was perfect again, achieving that invulnerable hardness I had already observed in the place where I had made the original opening.

I shouted, "Help!" I lunged at the wall several times, and it knocked me down. I had an imbecilic attack of tears. I was overcome by the horror of being in an enchanted place and by the confused realization that its vengeful magic was effective in spite of my disbelief.

Harassed by the terrible blue walls, I looked up at the skylight. I saw, first without understanding and then with fear, a cedar branch split apart and become two branches,- then the two branches were fused, as docile as ghosts, to become one branch again. I said out loud or thought very clearly: "I shall never be able to get out. I am in an enchanted place." But then I felt ashamed, like a person who has carried a joke too far, and I understood:

These walls—like Faustine, Morel, the fish in the aquarium, one of the suns and one of the moons, the book by Belidor—are projections of the machines. They coincide with the walls made by the masons (they are the same walls taken by the machines and then projected on themselves). Where I have broken or removed the first wall, the projected one remains. Since it is a projection nothing can pierce or eliminate it as long as the motors are running.

If I destroy the first wall, the machine room will be open when the motors stop running—it will no longer be a room, but the corner of a room. But when the motors begin again the wall will reappear, and it will be impenetrable.

Morel must have planned the double-wall protection to keep anyone from reaching the machines that control his

immortality. But his study of the tides was deficient (it was probably made during a different solar