It was to Stan as if he had been roused out of his trance-like sleep to hear all this, as the great, ruddy, moon-like lantern burned more hotly into his eyes; and then all was closed in darkness, silence, and oblivion once more.
Cock-a-doodle-doo—oo—oo!
A long-drawn crow, hoarse and croaky as ever cochin-china fowl uttered after heavily flapping its wings, and Stan was back in Old England, dull, aching, stupidly drowsy, and in a confused way feeling that he was by a farmyard with the window open.
But his eyelids did not part, and those of his brain seemed to be quite dark still, for he had not the most remote conception of anything more.
And so he lay in a hutched-up, awkward position, with the back of his head against some upright bamboos, without stirring. It was almost dark, but the cool grey of the coming morning was filtering down into a vile, close yard, and spreading slowly in through the bars of a great cage, divided in two by the uprights against which the lad had sunk; and as slowly as the light stole into the great cage, so stole in the prisoner’s power to think.
At last it began to seem—it can be called nothing else—that something was fidgeting his hair about. At first there was a gentle touch or two as if it were parted, and then something tickled close up to the crown, and Stan gave his head a twitch, but he did not open his eyes.
The tickling sensation ceased, however, and he was slowly sinking back into oblivion, when the fidgeting and tickling began again, making him jerk his head.
Again the fidgeting feeling passed off, and he was nearly unconscious once more, when he was aroused, and this time he opened his eyes wonderingly, to grasp some notion of there being a softly diffused and faint light gradually coming down in a sloping way through thick bars; and then there was the tickling, and the stirring of his hair.
Wakefulness and reason were slowly asserting themselves now, making the lad turn his head slightly on one side and try to look up.
He did so in a dreamy kind of belief that he was somewhere in a place with a huge spider, one far bigger than he had ever imagined before; that it was hanging from the ceiling; that it kept on lowering its legs till they were near enough to touch his head; and that then it began to softly stir his hair.