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 “Don’t shout, please,” without turning round from the table.

“I’m not shouting,” said Prokop, and closed his eyes. Inside his head the blows had become faster and more painful.

It appeared that he was moving with the minimum velocity of light; in some way his heart was compressed. But that was only the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction, he explained to himself; soon he would become as flat as a pancake. And suddenly there appeared in front of him countless glass prisms; no, they were only endless, highly polished planes which intersected at sharp angles like models of crystals. He was thrown against the edge of one of them with terrible speed. “Look out!” he shouted to himself, for in a thousandth of a second he would be smashed to pieces; but at that moment he flew at an enormous speed towards the apex of a huge pyramid. Thrown back from this like a beam of light, he was cast against a wall as smooth as glass, slid along it, whizzed madly along walls set at angles, was hurled back against he knew not what. Cast away again he was falling on to a sharp angle, but at the last moment was thrown upwards again. Now he struck his head on a Euclidean plane and now fell headlong downwards, downwards into darkness. A sudden blow, a painful shuddering of his whole body, but he immediately picked himself up and took to flight. He tore along a labyrinthine passage and heard behind him the noise made by his pursuers; the passage became narrower and narrower, its walls came together with a frightful and inevitable movement; he became as thin as an awl,