Sentence No. 117 · 22 July 2026
Always there was this feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realised that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle — The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice how two commas frame the middle appositive 'a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy' — it expands on 'unseen force' and must sit between them. The participial phrase beginning 'holding us so lightly' then modifies that net, so it follows directly after.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 8 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. An investigator senses an invisible web tightening around his companions. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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