And everywhere, among all these greens, on pedestals and pillars, glinted the most extravagant array of machinery – gadgets, blades, wheels, tubes, gears, spindles, all made of cold, rigid metal.

Jacinto patted the cushions on the sofa, where he plumped himself down with a weariness I had never known in him before.

‘Sit down, Zé Fernandes, sit down! After a separation of seven years we have a lot to catch up on! Seven years in Guiães! What on earth did you do there?’

‘And what about you, Jacinto, what have you been up to?’

My friend gave a slight shrug. He had lived; he had serenely fulfilled all the necessary functions, both material and spiritual.

‘And you’ve certainly acquired more civilisation, Jacinto! No. 202 is quite extraordinary!’

He glanced around with eyes that no longer sparkled with their old vivacity.

‘Yes, it’s comfortable enough, but there’s still much that’s lacking. Humanity is so badly equipped, Zé Fernandes … and life, well, life resists.’

Suddenly, in one corner, a telephone bell tinkled. And while my friend bent over the mouthpiece, impatiently repeating ‘Hello? Hello? Are you there?’ I proceeded to investigate his vast desk and its strange legion of miniature machines in nickel, steel, copper and iron, all equipped with teeth, blades, rings, hooks and pincers – all highly expressive, but whose uses remained a mystery. When I picked one up and tried to make it work, a malevolent barb immediately pricked my finger. Then, from another corner, came an urgent, almost frantic tick-tick-tick. Jacinto, his mouth still pressed to the phone, said to me:

‘It’s the telegraph machine … next to the divan. There should be a strip of paper coming out of it.’

And indeed, on top of a column perched a glass dome containing a lively, diligent machine, busy dribbling onto the carpet a long tapeworm of paper with letters on it, which I, rustic that I was, immediately snatched up in astonishment. The line of blue-printed letters was announcing to my friend Jacinto that the Russian frigate Azoff had put in at Marseilles with mechanical problems.

Jacinto had by now given up on the telephone. I asked anxiously if the problems encountered by the Azoff affected him directly.

‘The Azoff ? Me? No! It’s just a bit of news.’

Then, consulting the monumental clock that stood at the far end of the Library and marked the time in all the capitals of the world and the positions of all the planets, he announced:

‘I have to write a letter, just six lines or so. You’ll wait, won’t you, Zé Fernandes? You’ll find all the newspapers from Paris, last night’s editions, and this morning’s papers from London. Oh, and there are some pictures in that leather folder with the metal clips.’

I, however, preferred to take an inventory of the study, which, in my profane rustic state, I found as thrilling as an initiation. On either side of Jacinto’s chair hung thick speaking tubes, through which he doubtless issued his orders to the staff of No. 202. From the foot of the desk, soft, fat cables snaked over the carpet, scurrying into the shadows like startled cobras. On a bench, and reflected in its varnished surface as if in the water of a well, stood a Writing Machine, and further off a vast Adding Machine, with rows of holes from which protruded stiff, metal numbers, patiently waiting. Then I was drawn back to the strange, lone, four-sided bookshelf I had noticed before, standing as if in the middle of a plain like a tower with a beacon on top. The whole of one side was packed with Dictionaries, the other with Manuals, the third with Guides, among which, as I discovered when I opened it, was a street map of Samarkand. It was a solid tower of information! On other shelves I found other pieces of apparatus, each more incomprehensible than the last: one was made from sheets of gelatine, between which the lines of what might have been a love letter lay limp and fading; another had a fearsome chopping blade suspended above a poor, half-bound book, as if primed and ready to decapitate it; another propped up the gaping mouth of a tube, wide open to the voices of the invisible. Gleaming wires clung to lintels, coiled around architraves, then disappeared up through the ceiling into space. They were all either tapping into universal forces or else transmitting them. Nature was meekly marshalling all its energies in order to serve my friend in his own home!

Jacinto cried out impatiently:

‘Oh, these wretched electric pens!’

As he angrily crumpled up the letter he had begun, I escaped, breathless, into the Library. What a storehouse of the products of Reason and the Imagination! There lay more than thirty thousand volumes, all doubtless essential to anyone wishing to be considered a cultivated human being.