The traveler was not particularly enthralled by the apparatus and he paced back and forth behind the condemned man with almost visible indifference while the officer made the final preparations, one moment crawling beneath the apparatus that was deeply embedded in the ground, another climbing a ladder to inspect its uppermost parts. These were tasks that could really have been left to a mechanic, but the officer performed them with energetic eagerness, perhaps because he was a devoted admirer of the apparatus or because, for whatever other reasons, the work could be entrusted to no one else. “Now everything’s ready!” he called out at last, and climbed down from the ladder. He had worked up a sweat and was breathing with his mouth wide open; he had also tucked two very fine ladies’ handkerchiefs under the collar of his uniform. “Surely these uniforms are too heavy for the tropics,” said the traveler instead of inquiring, as the officer expected, about the apparatus. “Of course,” the officer said, washing the oil and grease from his hands in a nearby bucket of water, “but they represent home for us; we don’t want to forget about our homeland—but now just take a look at this machine,” he immediately added, drying his hands on a towel and simultaneously indicating the apparatus. “Up to this point I have to do some of the operations by hand, but from now on the apparatus works entirely by itself.” The traveler nodded and followed the officer. Then the officer, seeking to prepare himself for all eventualities, said: “Naturally there are sometimes problems; I hope of course there won’t be any problems today, but one must allow for the possibility. The apparatus should work continually for twelve hours, but even if anything does go wrong, it will be something minor and easy to repair at once.”
“Won’t you sit down?” he inquired at last, pulling out a cane chair from a whole heap of them and offering it to the traveler, who was unable to refuse. The traveler was now sitting at the edge of a pit, and he glanced cursorily in its direction. It was not very deep. On one side of the pit, the excavated earth had been piled up to form an embankment, on the other side of the pit stood the apparatus. “I don’t know,” said the officer, “whether the commandant has already explained the apparatus to you.” The traveler made a vague gesture with his hand, and the officer could not have asked for anything better, for now he was free to explain the apparatus himself. “This apparatus,” he said, grabbing hold of the crankshaft and leaning against it, “was the invention of our former commandant. I myself was involved in the very first experiments and also shared in the work all the way to its completion, but the credit for the invention belongs to him alone. Have you ever heard of our former commandant? No? Well, it wouldn’t be too much to say that the organization of the whole penal colony is his work. We who were his friends knew long before his death that the organization of the colony was so perfectly self-contained that his successor, even if he had a thousand new schemes brewing in his head, would find it impossible to alter a thing from the old system, at least for many years to come. Our prediction has indeed come true, and the new commandant has had to acknowledge as much. It’s too bad you never met the old commandant!—but,” the officer interrupted himself, “I’m rambling, and here is his apparatus standing right in front of us. It consists, as you can see, of three parts. In the course of time each part has acquired its own nickname. The lower part is called the bed, the upper one is the designer, and this one in the middle here that hovers between them is called the harrow.” “The harrow?” asked the traveler. He had not been listening very intently; the sun beat down brutally into the shadeless valley and it was difficult to collect one’s thoughts. He had to admire the officer all the more: He wore his snugly fitting dress uniform, hung with braiding weighted with epaulettes; he expounded on his subject with zeal and tightened a few screws here and there with a screwdriver while he spoke. As for the soldier, he seemed to be in much the same condition as the traveler: He had wound the condemned man’s chain around both his wrists and propped himself up with one hand on his rifle; his head hung down and he took no notice of anything. The traveler was not surprised by this, as the officer was speaking in French and certainly neither the soldier nor the condemned man understood French. It was therefore that much more remarkable that the condemned man nevertheless strove to follow the officer’s explanations. With a drowsy sort of persistence he directed his gaze wherever the officer pointed, and when the traveler broke in with his question, he, like the officer, looked at the traveler.