With a sensation of unutterable disgust, he suspended his body by the left hand, and dashed the monster down the abyss with one quick motion of his hand.
The impulse with which he flung the serpent from his grasp, caused his body to quiver and tremble over the abyss, while the sinews of the left hand seemed bursting from the skin, as with the nervous grasp of despair, the doomed lord strove to recover the stone lately clutched by the other hand.
With one wild sweep he regained his grasp, springing heavily on the jutting rock in the action, while a deep rumbling sound disturbed the silence of the well. Another moment passed. Well was it for Adrian that he had refrained from trusting to the rock for support. The massive stone slowly swung to and fro, trembling over the depths of the well, and then with a crash like thunder, went whizzing down the abyss.
Up, up, from the fathomless depths, thundering and shrieking, arose the deafening echoes, yelling like spirit-voices in the ear of the trembling man, as he swayed to and fro over the blackness of the void.
It was a moment ere Adrian might recall his wandering thoughts.
He looked over his shoulder, he gazed upon the opposite side of the well. God of Mercy, was it a dream, a phantasmal creation of fancy, a mocking delusion of his crazed brain? There, before his very eyes, gilding the opposite side of the wall, a golden space, large as the human hand, shone in his very face.
“It is the light of day!” muttered Adrian, as his heart rose to his very throat; “it is, it is the light of day!”
“Ha, ha, ha! water!” the shriek came yelling from the room far, far, far above—“water, water!”
Grasping the stones below, Adrian descended another yard, when a ray of light shone on his face from a crevice in the wall to which he hung, trembling with a new joy, quivering in every nerve with a new life.
He thrust his right hand into the hollow of the crevice, and as a large flat stone fell echoing before him, a gush of light streamed through the wide aperture into the darkness of the abyss.