, with tears. How long this state of
insensibility lasted, it is quite impossible for me now to say. I had no
means left to me of taking any account of time. Never since the creation
of the world had such a solitude as mine existed. I was completely
abandoned.

After my fall I lost much blood. I felt myself flooded with the
life-giving liquid. My first sensation was perhaps a natural one. Why
was I not dead? Because I was alive, there was something left to do. I
tried to make up my mind to think no longer. As far as I was able, I
drove away all ideas, and utterly overcome by pain and grief, I crouched
against the granite wall.

I just commenced to feel the fainting coming on again, and the sensation
that this was the last struggle before complete annihilation--when, on a
sudden, a violent uproar reached my ears. It had some resemblance to the
prolonged rumbling voice of thunder, and I clearly distinguished
sonorous voices, lost one after the other, in the distant depths of the
gulf.

Whence came this noise? Naturally, it was to be supposed from new
phenomena which were taking place in the bosom of the solid mass of
Mother Earth! The explosion of some gaseous vapors, or the fall of some
solid, of the granitic or other rock.

Again I listened with deep attention. I was extremely anxious to hear if
this strange and inexplicable sound was likely to be renewed! A whole
quarter of an hour elapsed in painful expectation. Deep and solemn
silence reigned in the tunnel. So still that I could hear the beatings
of my own heart! I waited, waited with a strange kind of hopefulness.

Suddenly my ear, which leaned accidentally against the wall, appeared to
catch, as it were, the faintest echo of a sound. I thought that I heard
vague, incoherent and distant voices. I quivered all over with
excitement and hope!

"It must be hallucination," I cried. "It cannot be! it is not true!"

But no! By listening more attentively, I really did convince myself that
what I heard was truly the sound of human voices. To make any meaning
out of the sound, however, was beyond my power. I was too weak even to
hear distinctly. Still it was a positive fact that someone was speaking.
Of that I was quite certain.

There was a moment of fear. A dread fell upon my soul that it might be
my own words brought back to me by a distant echo. Perhaps without
knowing it, I might have been crying aloud. I resolutely closed my lips,
and once more placed my ear t