Her own situation was as bad, nay worse. In the tomb there would be no light to show the sombre robes of death gradually closing down upon her. There would be no danger of the fierce fiery agony of flame before all was over. There would be from the first no hope of deliverance.
Here she was helpless, and could see the smoke growing denser and denser every moment, the weight upon her chest increasing with every tumultuous inspiration. Around her head, across her brow, a band of burning hot metal seemed gradually tightening and bursting in upon her brain.
She could hear the sound of the flames flapping and beating in muffled distant riot below, and yet she could not move.
She had read once of a man buried up to the head in the sand of the seashore for scurvy, powerless to stir, and so left by his companions while they went away for an hour. Towards this miserable man presently glides a serpent out of some sedges above high-water mark. That situation had filled her mind with ineffable horror. Her case now was still more terrible, for there was no companion who might chance to return in time. Besides, until the last moment the man in the sand might hope the serpent would not strike, that the reptile was not hungry. Here the fire would strike infallibly; flames were always hungry, voracious, in satiable.
The oppression grew more suffocating. She was lying on her back, and she felt as though an intolerable mass of lead were crushing in her chest. The band across her forehead tightened, and she could not persuade herself that the bone of her skull had not been driven in upon her beating brain. Her hands seemed as though they were swollen to ten times their size. She could no longer move her arms with ease.
At length she felt as if the inexorable hand of death had seized her throat and was squeezing and closing up her windpipe.
She kept her eyes fixed on the light. This was the only thing that told of life. She could see nothing else.
It was not a light now, but a blue blur upon the darkness. It faded to a patch of faintly luminous smoke. She closed her eyes for a moment to clear her sight. The motion of the lids pained her exquisitely, and made the redhot band across her beating forehead burn more fiercely, more crushingly than ever into her brain.
With a groan she opened her eyes.
All was dark! The light had gone out, extinguished by the smoke.