So I put it out.
Back came the choking, heavy darkness so thick I could feel it, and with it came my panic, nudging my elbow, making me sweat again.
I sat there in that awful dank darkness for what seemed an hour, smoking the cigarette, watching the glowing end, con-centrating on it and trying to forget the black walls that pressed in on me.
When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I switched on the torch. I had sweated right through my clothes, and my watch told me I’d been sitting in the darkness for eight minutes.
I began to get worried then: really worried. If I was ready to walk up a wall after eight minutes of darkness, what would I be like in an hour, a day or even two days?
I put the torch on the floor by my side and laid hold of the chain again. I pulled and jerked at it in a mounting frenzy, until I heard myself yelling curses at it. I stopped that, and sat down again. I felt as if I’d run ten miles; even the muscles in my legs were fluttering. Then I heard something.
Up to now the only sound in this old shaft, a hundred feet below ground, had been my breathing, the thump-thump- thump of my heart and the fainter tick of my watch. But now a new sound made me turn my head and look into the darkness.
I listened, holding my breath, my mouth half open, my heart hammering. Nothing. Slowly I reached for the torch, sent the beam down the long tunnel. Still nothing. I turned off the light and waited. Minutes ticked by. Then it came again: a gentle rustle, something moving cautiously, a pebble dislodged: sharp, violent sounds in the silence; sounds that wouldn’t have been heard except for the quiet of this shaft where a feather settling on the ground would have been a disturbance.
I touched the button on the torch. The beam cut into the darkness like a razor cutting into flesh.
For a split second I saw something that looked like two glow-ing sparks: something that could have been the eyes of some animal; then they vanished, and I was struggling up on my knees, leaning forward, peering, trying to see.