rom the thraldom of their own creation in a deep and welcome
swoon.

Time had moved wearily onward, the chiding winds had many times waved
the dry locks of his hair to and fro about his brow, as if to bid him
awaken and arise, ere he again recovered his consciousness. Once more
aroused to the knowledge of his position and the sensation of his
wound, he slowly raised himself upon his uninjured arm, and looked
wildly around for the faintest appearance of a gleam of light. But the
winding and uneven nature of the track which he had formed to lead him
through the wall, effectually prevented the moonbeams, then floating
into the outermost of the cavities that he had made, from reaching the
place where he now lay. Not a single object was even faintly
distinguishable around him. Darkness hemmed him in, in rayless and
triumphant obscurity, on every side.

The first agonies of the injury he had received had resolved themselves
into one dull, heavy, unchanging sensation of pain. The vision that
had overwhelmed his senses was now, in a vast and shadowy form, present
only to his memory, filling the darkness with fearful recollections,
and not with dismal forms; and urging on him a restless, headlong
yearning to effect his escape from the lonely and unhallowed sepulchre,
the prison of solitude and death, that his own fatal exertions
threatened him with, should he linger much longer in the caverns of the
wall.

'I must pass from this darkness into light--I must breathe the air of
the sky, or I shall perish in the damps of this vault,' he exclaimed in
a hoarse, moaning voice, as he raised himself gradually and painfully
into a creeping position; and turning round slowly, commenced his
meditated retreat.

His brain still whirled with the emotions that had so lately
overwhelmed his mind; his right hand hung helplessly by his side,
dragged after him like a prisoner's chain, and lacerated by the uneven
surface of the ground over which it was slowly drawn, as--supporting
himself on his left arm, and creeping forward a few inches at a
time--he set forth on his toilsome journey.

Here, he paused bewildered in the darkness; there, he either checked
himself by a convulsive effort from falling headlong into the unknown
deeps beneath him, or lost the little ground he had gained in labour
and agony, by retracing his way at the bidding of some unexpected
obstacle. Now he gnashed his teeth in anguish, now he cursed in
despair, now he was