"What does he say himself? There's only one removable glass to a helmet and that's in front—an inch thick and screws tight in a gun-metal socket. It's guarded with a gridiron of bars—same as the two side glasses. He wants to break it, but he can't. He wants to unscrew it, but he can't. He wants to cut himself loose, but he has no knife. Do you see him—by Joe!—do you see him twistin' and writhin' and fightin' for his life in there—with one good arm?"
"Why—" cried Jeckol, in sudden appalled perception. "He couldn't even eat. He's starving inside that suit!"
"Starving?" echoed Bartlet, from colorless lips. "God—if that was all! He's dying of thirst by inches!"...
I do not know how it struck Jeckol, but it seemed to me as if a blackness came in upon the sun.
"Go on," urged Bartlet. "Go on!"
But it was not so easy to go on. Peters found whole pages of the Book impossible to decipher. At places it lapsed to a mere jumble of sprawling characters. Again the soft lead was hopelessly blurred over, where the pages had been often thumbed, or perhaps crumbled and thrown aside. He shuffled them hastily and we hung upon his search.
... uneasy god. They got me tied up now to keep me safe [words missing] joke, to pass out here like a rat under a bell jar. Not me. I don't mean to....
Curious. When Peters resumed the thread, when he read that eloquent line, those of us who had known Jim Albro nodded solemnly, one to another, as if sharing a profound and secret thrill. For this was the man's real triumph—and we felt it then, regardless of the outcome—that alone, beyond any conceivable aid for the first time in his life, speechless, helpless, at the end of all those amiable arts which had given him his way so often with men and devils, and women, too, Jim Albro was still the Jim Albro "that you couldn't keep down."
His body was consuming and shriveling with its own heat. He had to scheme for each scant breath he drew, spreading the dress and collapsing it at short intervals to renew the foul air. He had to view the tempting tribute laid out before the altar: juicy mangoes and figs and sugar cane, wild berries and young drinking coconuts freshly opened, with the new, cool milk frothing up at the brim. He had to receive the homage of a people, and to count by the wheeling sun how many hours of torment were left him. Worse than all, he had to withstand the pitiless irony of it, the derisive grin of fate that drives men mad. He did these things, and he would not yield. He did not mean to. And lest you should think the phrase a mere flourish—observe the testimony of the Book....