e crooked chimney, and the porch with
jasmine growing over one side and boys' love on the other; and I saw
my father and my mother where they sat and faced each other across the
hearthplace, and thought, maybe, of their son, so that there came over
me a great and miserable longing to return to them; and, like the
prodigal son when he ate husks among the swine, I repented of my
rebellion and running away, and in that hour I took a resolution that
if I ever outlived the night I would leave the wicked land of India
for ever, and go back to my own country, and ask my father to forgive
me, as I knew my mother had forgiven me long ago.

Such were the thoughts that, by fits and starts, passed through me
during the first hours of the death struggle; but the worst horror of
that awful night came presently. In the recesses of the chamber,
furthest from the windows, a harder evil than the heat was the
intolerable foulness of the air. Even where I was standing it had
become an excruciating pain to breathe, and my breast felt as though
laced about with iron bands. In the interior many had by this time
dropped down, not so much suffocated as poisoned by the fetid gas they
were compelled to inhale. And now at length I detected a new,
indescribably nauseous odour, added to the acrid smell of the place.
At first I tried to conceal even from my own mind what this was. But
not for long. In a very few minutes the secret was known to all there.
The unhappy man I had seen trodden down had been dead for about half
an hour, and his body was already corrupt.

Then that whole den of madmen broke loose, raving and cursing; some
imploring God to strike them dead, others casting the most foul and
savage insults at the guards without, if by that means they might
tempt them to fire in through the windows and put an end to what they
endured. They struck at one another, they clutched each other's hair,
surging and trampling one another down to gain an inch nearer the
miserable air-holes which afforded the only chance of life. The floor
was choked with corpses, among which the survivors were entangled in
one seething mass. As for me, I became light-headed, and had only one
blind instinct left, to strike down any man who attempted to thrust
Marian from her breathing ground. I was aware that she had lost her
senses and sunk down between me and the wall; yet I went on battling,
as in some dreadful nightmare, with the furious forms that rose up and
loomed