Utterly unable to know, or even to suspect, the life lived by the town's inhabitants, on which they had not a vestige of information, it was only exceptionally that the workmen asked to leave their city. Among them lived nine black slaves of both sexes, prisoners like themselves, who helped the women with their domestic work. The workpeople were, in short, happier than they had been in their native land, engaged in work so congenial that sometimes they would spontaneously continue it far into the night.

The workmen had only one chief, their Director, a Frenchman called Marcel Camaret, whom they looked upon almost as a god.

Alone among the Factory's inhabitants, Marcel Camaret was free to come and go at will, both about the streets and about the country round Blackland. Although he was not slow to use his freedom and to walk about wrapped in thought, it should not be inferred that he was better informed than the personnel under him regarding the peculiar habits of the town, of which he did not so much as know the name.

One day a workman asked him what it was. Camaret reflected deeply for a moment; then, to the great astonishment of his employee, he replied: "Well, really, I don't know either."

Never until then had he thought of wondering about such a detail. What's more, after the question had been put to him he never thought of it again.

He was a strange person, this Marcel Camaret.

He seemed about forty years old. Medium in height, with straight shoulders and flat chested, his scanty dull blond hair gave him an aspect of frail delicacy. His gestures were slight, his calm imperturbable, and he spoke, with a childlike timidity, in a weak gentle voice which, whatever the circumstances, never rose to tones of anger, or even of impatience. He always kept his head bent towards his left shoulder as though he felt it too heavy, and his face, which was pale and insipid, with a delicate sickly look, possessed only one beauty: attractive blue eyes which suggested lofty thoughts.

A careful observer would have noticed something else in those splendid eyes. At certain moments a vague troubled gleam passed over them, and for an instant they took on a lost look. Anyone who had surprised that look would not have failed to suspect that Marcel Camaret was insane, and perhaps after all he would not have been far wrong. Is it not a very small distance, indeed, between super-intelligence and insanity? Does not genius border on madness?

In spite of his timidity, his bodily weakness and his gentleness, Marcel Camaret was endowed with boundless energy. The greater misfortunes, the most imminent dangers, the most cruel privations, left him unmoved. This was because he did not know about them. His clear blue eyes were always turned inwards and saw nothing of what happened around him. He lived beyond time, in a fantastic world peopled with wild imaginations. He thought. He thought deeply, he thought exclusively and always. Marcel Camaret was nothing but a thinking machine, a machine mighty, inoffensive and terrible.

So absentminded that he could have given points to St. Berain; he was so "foreign" to all that constitutes material life he had more than once tumbled into the Red River, thinking he was crossing a bridge. His servant, whose monkey-like appearance had earned him the name of Jacko, could not make him take his meals at regular hours. Marcel Camaret ate when he felt hungry, and slept when he felt sleepy, which was as likely to be noon as at midnight.

Ten years earlier, circumstances had brought him into the path of Harry Killer. A remarkable device able to produce rain was then among his imaginings. He did not hesitate to describe his dreams to anyone who would listen to them, and Harry Killer, with some others, had heard of this invention while it was still a mere theory. But, while the others only laughed at such madness, Harry Killer had taken it seriously, so much so that he had made it the basis of his schemes.

If Harry Killer was a bandit, he was at least a bandit with a wide outlook, and at least he had the merit of understanding how he might make use of an unrecognized genius. Chance having placed Camaret in his power, he had dazzled the scientists eyes with the realization of his dreams. Taking him to the desert spot where Blackland was to rise, he had said: "Make the promised rain fall here!" And the rain had obediently begun to fall.

Since then Camaret had lived in a perpetual fever. All his visions had materialized one by one. After the rain machine, his brain had produced a hundred other inventions from which Harry Killer had profited, without their inventor's ever troubling about how they were used.

Though no inventor can be held responsible for the evil of which he was the indirect cause, whoever invented the revolver must have realized that such a weapon could and must slay, and it was clearly with that end in mind that he had thought of it.

Such was not true of Marcel Camaret. If it had ever occurred to him to design a cannon whose range would be greater and whose projectile heavier than ever before, he would gladly have calculated the proportions of the weapon, the weight and design of the shell and the quantity of the explosive, without having seen in this anything more than a curiosity of ballistics.