第21章 THE ESCAPE(3)

The line was knotted at intervals of eighteen inches; and to the inexpert it may seem as if it should have been even easy to descend.The trouble was, this devil of a piece of rope appeared to be inspired, not with life alone, but with a personal malignity against myself.It turned to the one side, paused for a moment, and then spun me like a toasting-jack to the other; slipped like an eel from the clasp of my feet; kept me all the time in the most outrageous fury of exertion; and dashed me at intervals against the face of the rock.I had no eyes to see with; and I doubt if there was anything to see but darkness.I must occasionally have caught a gasp of breath, but it was quite unconscious.And the whole forces of my mind were so consumed with losing hold and getting it again, that I could scarce have told whether I was going up or coming down.

Of a sudden I knocked against the cliff with such a thump as almost bereft me of my sense; and, as reason twinkled back, I was amazed to find that I was in a state of rest, that the face of the precipice here inclined outwards at an angle which relieved me almost wholly of the burthen of my own weight, and that one of my feet was safely planted on a ledge.I drew one of the sweetest breaths in my experience, hugged myself against the rope, and closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy of relief.It occurred to me next to see how far I was advanced on my unlucky journey, a point on which I had not a shadow of a guess.I looked up: there was nothing above me but the blackness of the night and the fog.I craned timidly forward and looked down.There, upon a floor of darkness, I beheld a certain pattern of hazy lights, some of them aligned as in thoroughfares, others standing apart as in solitary houses; and before I could well realise it, or had in the least estimated my distance, a wave of nausea and vertigo warned me to lie back and close my eyes.In this situation I had really but the one wish, and that was: something else to think of! Strange to say, I got it: a veil was torn from my mind, and I saw what a fool I was - what fools we had all been - and that I had no business to be thus dangling between earth and heaven by my arms.The only thing to have done was to have attached me to a rope and lowered me, and I had never the wit to see it till that moment!

I filled my lungs, got a good hold on my rope, and once more launched myself on the descent.As it chanced, the worst of the danger was at an end, and I was so fortunate as to be never again exposed to any violent concussion.Soon after I must have passed within a little distance of a bush of wallflower, for the scent of it came over me with that impression of reality which characterises scents in darkness.This made me a second landmark, the ledge being my first.I began accordingly to compute intervals of time:

so much to the ledge, so much again to the wallflower, so much more below.If I were not at the bottom of the rock, I calculated I must be near indeed to the end of the rope, and there was no doubt that I was not far from the end of my own resources.I began to be light-headed and to be tempted to let go, - now arguing that I was certainly arrived within a few feet of the level and could safely risk a fall, anon persuaded I was still close at the top and it was idle to continue longer on the rock.In the midst of which I came to a bearing on plain ground, and had nearly wept aloud.My hands were as good as flayed, my courage entirely exhausted, and, what with the long strain and the sudden relief, my limbs shook under me with more than the violence of ague, and I was glad to cling to the rope.

But this was no time to give way.I had (by God's single mercy)