The sleep nobody wants to disturb
At first, Isbister has every reason to be relieved. Graham wanted sleep with a desperation that made ordinary conversation difficult. Now he has stopped talking, stopped moving and stopped describing the relentless activity in his mind. Waking him might undo the first good thing that has happened all afternoon.
Isbister tries to fit the event back into the habits of a normal evening. He occupies himself with his sketches and notices the time. Supper approaches. Graham does not answer a quiet invitation, but that still seems compatible with exhaustion. Someone who has been awake for six nights might reasonably sleep through a meal.
Rather than disturb him, Isbister goes outside. Through the open window he can see the seated figure. Boscastle continues around them: children pass, voices carry from the harbour, evening settles over the houses. The sound and movement outside make the unchanged posture inside more conspicuous. Graham remains exactly where Isbister left him.
A question without an answer
There is a point at which consideration becomes unease. Isbister returns to the room and listens. He cannot hear breathing. When he bends close, he finds Graham's eyes open, their pupils rolled out of sight beneath the lids. This no longer resembles the peaceful rest he had hoped to protect.
He takes Graham by the shoulder and asks the question that names this record. It is almost impossibly small beside what it will come to mean. Isbister is not asking whether someone can sleep across centuries. He is trying to find out whether the man in front of him is still alive.
Graham gives no response. Isbister calls for the landlady, asks for a lamp and sends for medical help. The room changes character in an instant. What was a guest's welcome refuge becomes a place of alarm, examination and unanswered questions.
The distinction matters: Graham is discovered in a chair, not placed deliberately into an experimental apparatus. The medical intervention follows the mystery. No inventor has arranged this disappearance from ordinary time, and no one present has consented to the future it will create.
Reading the record
This is a scene about the limits of observation. Isbister has watched Graham closely enough to know that something has changed, but not closely enough to say what the change is. Stillness can mean relief, illness or death. The same visible body supports each possibility until some further evidence arrives.
The pacing makes the reader share his hesitation. An immediate diagnosis would turn the trance into a mechanism. Instead, the novel lets an evening pass while its characters struggle to name what they are seeing. Their uncertainty is the doorway into the larger story.
The question also has a long afterlife. For generations, people will look at Graham's body and build explanations, institutions and hopes around his silence. Isbister is the first person to do so, but his concern is the most direct: not what the Sleeper's property means, nor who might benefit from his condition, but whether this stranger can be reached. That human question precedes every political answer the future will supply.