Because the machine was working so silently, it became virtually unnoticeable. The traveler looked over at the soldier and the condemned man. The condemned was the livelier of the two, every facet of the machine interested him—one moment he was bending down, the next reaching up, his forefinger always extended to point something out to the soldier. This made the traveler extremely uncomfortable. He was determined to stay here till the end, but he couldn’t bear the sight of those two for long. “Go on home,” he said. The soldier might have been willing to do so, but the condemned man considered the order a punishment. With clasped hands he begged to be allowed to stay, and when the traveler, shaking his head, did not relent, he even went down on his knees. The traveler realized that giving orders was useless and was at the point of going over to chase the pair away. Just then he heard a noise in the designer above him. He looked up. Was it that troublesome gear after all? But it was something else. The cover of the designer rose slowly and then fell completely open. The teeth of a gear wheel emerged and rose higher, soon the whole wheel could be seen. It was as if some monumental force were compressing the designer so that there was no more room for this wheel—the wheel spun to the edge of the designer, fell, and rolled a little ways in the sand before it toppled onto its side. But a second wheel was already following it, with many others rolling after it—large ones, small ones, some so tiny they were hard to see; the same thing happened with all of them. One kept imagining that the designer was finally empty, but then a fresh, particularly numerous group would come into view, climb out, fall, spin in the sand, and lie still. In the thrall of this spectacle, the condemned man completely forgot the traveler’s order. He was fascinated by the wheels and kept trying to catch one, urging the soldier at the same time to help him; but he always drew back his hand in alarm, for another wheel would immediately come speeding along and frighten him, at least when it started to roll.
The traveler on the other hand was deeply troubled—the machine was obviously falling apart—its silent operation was an illusion. He had the feeling that it was now his duty to take care of the officer, since he was no longer capable of looking after himself. However, while the chaos of the gear wheels claimed all his attention, he had failed to keep an eye on the rest of the machine; now that the last wheel had left the designer, he went over to the harrow and had a new and even less welcome surprise. The harrow wasn’t writing at all but just stabbing, and the bed wasn’t rolling the body over but thrusting it up, quivering, into the needles. The traveler wanted to do something, bring the whole machine to a stop if possible, because this was not the exquisite torture the officer had wished for; this was out-and-out murder. He reached out, but at that moment the harrow rose with the body already spitted upon it and swung to the side as it usually only did at the twelfth hour. Blood flowed in a hundred streams—not mixed with water, the water jets had also failed to function this time—and the last function failed to complete itself, the body did not drop from the long needles: It hung over the pit, streaming with blood, without falling. The harrow tried to return to its original position, but as if it also noticed that it had not unloaded its burden, it stayed where it was, suspended over the pit. “Come and help!” the traveler shouted to the soldier and the condemned man, and grabbed the officer by the feet. He wanted to push against the feet from this side while the other two took hold of the head from the other side so the officer could gently be removed from the needles. But the others couldn’t make up their minds to come right away; the condemned man had even turned away. The traveler was compelled to go over to them and force them to get in position by the officer’s head. And from this vantage point he had to look, almost against his will, at the face of the corpse. It was as it had been in life (no sign of the promised deliverance could be detected). What all the others had found in the machine, the officer had not; his lips were clamped together, the eyes were open and bore the same expression as in life, a quiet, convinced look; and through the forehead was the point of the great iron spike.