esolution
to move any one of the other sound limbs in his body. At one moment
his deep, sobbing, stifled respirations, syllabled horrible and
half-formed curses--at another, his panting breaths suddenly died away
within him; and then he could hear the blood dripping slowly from his
shoulder, with dismal regularity, into a little pool that it had formed
already by his side.

The shrill breezes which wound through the crevices in the wall before
him, were now felt only on his wounded limb. They touched its surface
like innumerable splinters of thin, sharp ice; they penetrated his
flesh like rushing sparks struck out of a sea of molten lead. There
were moments, during the first pangs of this agony, when if he had been
possessed of a weapon and of the strength to use it, he would have
sacrificed his ambition for ever by depriving himself of life.

But this desire to end his torments with his existence lasted not long.
Gradually, the anguish in his body awakened a wilder and stronger
distemper in his mind, and then the two agonies, physical and mental,
rioted over him together in fierce rivalry, divesting him of all
thoughts but such as were by their own agency created or aroused.

For some time he lay helpless in his misery, alternately venting by
stifled groans the unalleviated torment of his wounds, and lamenting
with curses the failure of his enterprise, at the very moment of its
apparent success. At length, the pangs that struck through him seemed
to grow gradually less frequent; he hardly knew now from what part of
his frame they more immediately proceeded. Insensibly, his faculties of
thinking and feeling grew blunted; then he remained a little while in a
mysterious unrefreshing repose of body and mind; and then his
disordered senses, left unguided and unrestrained, became the victims
of a sudden and terrible delusion.

The blank darkness around him appeared, after an interval, to be
gradually dawning into a dull light, thick and misty, like the
reflections on clouds which threaten a thunderstorm at the close of
evening. Soon, this atmosphere seemed to be crossed and streaked with
a fantastic trellis-work of white, seething vapour. Then the mass of
brick-work which had struck him down, grew visible at his side,
enlarged to an enormous bulk, and endued with a power of self-motion,
by which it mysteriously swelled and shrank, and raised and depressed
itself, without quitting for a moment its position near him.