The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called ‘now’.

To speak of the catastrophe was an offense under the new regulations. The rule was to choose not to know. Remembering how I myself had wished to forget on another occasion, I understood the euphoric blindness without condoning it.

And suddenly the idea comes into your head that perhaps now, at this very moment while you are passing by, in one of the rooms behind those drab shutters, at a worm-eaten desk, among bundles of papers tied up with red or green tape, with scratchy old-fashioned penstrokes, your fate is being inscribed.

Hell had at least been familiar; she knew that, if she’d been capable of feeling anything, she would have felt afraid of this irresistible force that had picked her up like a scrap of paper and was sweeping her into the void, right out of the world as she knew it, as if whirling her off the earth altogether.

You don’t like it here? Why didn’t you keep out, then, for God’s sake, while you had the chance? Anyhow, it’s no good moaning and snivelling now. Put a good face on it. Be tough. Show the crowd you can take it. You’re an individualist, aren’t you? To hell with the crowd. What do you care about them? You’re here because you’ve got no time for the crowd. What do you care about them and their damnfool heaven? To hell with heaven, anyway.

Like people who from a bridge watch fish swimming below them, we saw the outside world as an alien element where we could take no part. Isolated behind the glass of our lonely window we looked down on the daily life which was not for us.

It was the summer, and Clare Bryant was happy. In the midst of the world which seemed so vast and dangerous to her, so full of change and precariousness, she had found one enduring rock to which her thin arms could cling.

Below, the fjord was an impossible icy volcano erupting the baleful fire of the swallowed sun.

The men’s tanned faces, the faces of the women, bright with cosmetics, all suddenly appeared similar, as though wearing identical masks; hard, smiling, decorative, devoid of feeling. Not one of the seemed capable of expressing affection or pity or any of the softer emotions. They frightened her, these gay, hard, animated, worldly masks; she would always be a stranger among them, lost, ill-at-ease, out of place.

Perhaps I am the victim of some mysterious political, religious or financial machination – some vast and shadowy plot, whose ramifications are so obscure as to appear to the uninitiated to be quite outside reason, requiring, for instance, something as apparently senseless as the destruction of everybody with red hair or with a mole on his left leg.