CHAPTER XXXV
The Lapse of Years
In a Dungeon
In that dungeon I lay for two years![37] How I lived, or how I bore existence, I can now have no conception. I was not mad, nor altogether insensible to things about me, nor even without occasional inclination for the common objects of our being. I used to look for the glimmer of daylight that was suffered to enter my cell. The reflection of the moon in a pool, of which, by climbing to the loophole, I could gain a glimpse, was waited for with some feeble feeling of pleasure, but my animal appetites were more fully alive than ever. An hour’s delay of the miserable provision that was thrown through my bars made me wretched. I devoured it like a wild beast, and then longed through the dreary hours for its coming again!
I made no attempt to escape. I dragged myself once to the entrance of the dungeon, found it secured by an iron door, and never tried it again. If every bar had been broken, I scarcely know whether I should have attempted to pass it. Even in my more reasoning hours, I felt no desire to move. Destiny was upon me. My doom was marked in characters which nothing but blindness could fail to read; and to struggle with fate, what was it but to prepare for new misfortune?
The Prince of Naphtali is Free
The memory of my wife and children sometimes broke through the icy apathy with which I labored to encrust my mind. Tears flowed; nature stung my heart; I groaned, and made the vault ring with the cries of the exile from earth and heaven. But this passed away, and I was again the self-divorced man, without a tie to bind him to transitory things. I heard the thunder and the winds; the lightnings sometimes startled me from my savage sleep. But what were they to me! I was dreadfully secure from the fiercest rage of nature. There were nights when I conceived that I could distinguish the roarings of the ocean, and, shuddering, seemed to hear the cries of drowning men. But those, too, passed away. I swept remembrance from my mind, and felt a sort of vague enjoyment in the effort to defy the last power of evil. Cold, heat, hunger, waking, sleep, were the calendar of my year, the only points in which I was sensible of existence; I felt like some of those torpid animals which, buried in stones from the creation, live on until the creation shall be no more.
But this sullenness was only for the waking hour; night had its old, implacable dominion over me; full of vivid misery, crowded with the bitter-sweet of memory, I wandered free among those forms in which my spirit had found matchless loveliness. Then the cruel caprice of fancy would sting me; in the very concord of enchanting sounds there would come a funereal voice; in the circle of the happy, I was appalled by some hideous visage uttering words of mystery. A spectral form would hang upon my steps and tell me that I was undone.
From one of those miserable slumbers I was roused by a voice pronouncing my name. I at first confounded it with the wanderings of sleep. But a chilling touch upon my forehead completely aroused me. It was night, yet my eyes, accustomed to darkness, gradually discovered the first intruder who ever stood within my living grave; nothing human could look more like the dead. A breathing skeleton stood before me. The skin clung to his bones; misery was in every feature; the voice was scarcely above a whisper.