came to myself the scene had not greatly
changed. I was lying at the bottom and against one wall of a circular
pit, now about a thousand feet in diameter and nearly twice as deep. The
wall all around I could see was almost perpendicular, and it seemed
impossible to ascend its smooth, shining sides. The action of the drug
had evidently worn off, for everything was quite still.

"My fear had now left me, for I remembered this circular pit quite well.
I walked over to its center, and looking around and up to its top I
estimated distances carefully. Then I took two more of the pills.

"Immediately the familiar, sickening, crawling sensation began again. As
the walls closed in upon me, I kept carefully in the center of the pit.
Steadily they crept in. Now only a few hundred feet away! Now only a few
paces--and then I reached out and touched both sides at once with my
hands.

"I tell you, gentlemen, it was a terrifying sensation to stand in that
well (as it now seemed), and feel its walls closing up with irresistible
force. But now the upper edge was within reach of my fingers. I leaped
upward and hung for a moment, then pulled myself up and scrabbled out,
tumbling in a heap on the ground above. As I recovered myself, I looked
again at the hole out of which I had escaped; it was hardly big enough
to contain my fist.

"I knew, now, I was at the bottom of the scratch. But how different it
looked than before. It seemed this time a long, narrow canon, hardly
more than sixty feet across. I glanced up and saw the blue sky overhead,
flooded with light, that I knew was the space of this room above the
ring.

"The problem now was quite a different one than getting out of the pit,
for I saw that the scratch was so deep in proportion to its width that
if I let myself get too big, I would be crushed by its walls before I
could jump out. It would be necessary, therefore, to stay comparatively
small and climb up its side.

"I selected what appeared to be an especially rough section, and took a
portion of another of the pills. Then I started to climb. After an hour
the buskins on my feet were torn to fragments, and I was bruised and
battered as you saw me. I see, now, how I could have made both the
descent into the ring, and my journey back with comparatively little
effort, but I did the best I knew at the time.

"When the canon was about ten feet in width, and I had been climbing
arduously for several hours, I found myself hardly