The exhaustion in his face after successive rum-sodden, sleepless nights, and his squalid skinniness gave the impression that his clothes had outgrown his body. Dionisio pushed the doors with unexpected vigour and Conde lost sight of himself and his physiological musings at the same time as he felt a violent searing pain in his chest, because there before his eyes stood a splendid array of glass-doored, wooden bookcases, where hundreds, thousands of dark volumes rested and ascended to the lofty ceiling, the gold letters of their identities still glinting, neither subdued by the island’s insidious damp nor exhausted by the passage of time.

Paralysed by that vision, conscious of his breath’s halting rhythms, Conde wondered whether he’d have the strength, then ventured three cautious steps forward. When he crossed the threshold, he realized, in state of total shock, that the quantity of shelves packed with volumes extended down every side of the room, covering the roughly thirty-six square yards of wall. It was at that precise moment of more than justifiable emotion and awe, that the tumultuous symptoms of his hunch hit him – a feeling quite distinct from any surprise prompted by books or business, with the power to suggest that something extraordinary was lurking there clamouring for his presence.

“What do you think?”

Paralysed by the physical impact of his hunch, Conde didn’t hear Dionisio’s question.

“Well, what do you make of it?” the man persisted, standing in the Count’s field of vision.

“Simply fantastic,” he muttered finally, as his excitement led him to suspect he was most certainly in the presence of an extraordinary vein, one of those you’re always seeking and which you find once in a lifetime, if ever. Experience screamed to him that it must hold unimaginable surprises, for if only five per cent of those books turned out to have special worth, he was potentially looking at twenty or thirty bibliographical treasures, able on their own to kill – or at least fend off for a good while – the hunger now torturing the Ferreros and himself.