At the same time, clutching instinctively at the overhanging rocks, which delay, but cannot halt our flight, we feel ourselves slipping. I hear once again Clay's cry of consternation; I hear the uproar of sliding earth and rock; I feel my arms and shoulders bruised and mangled; I have a sense of suffocation, a sense of being buried beneath tons of dead matter; then, all at once, a veil of quietness, of vacancy, of oblivion blots out my consciousness.
CHAPTER II
A Mysterious Light
I have always marvelled that Clay and I lived through the cataclysm. But probably we owe our survival to the fact that the fissure, far from being perpendicular, sloped at an angle of only thirty or forty degrees, so that, while rolling over and over in our descent, we were at least spared a direct drop.
At all events, we finally did come to a stop without receiving any fatal hurt. It may have been minutes, or it may have been hours, before I recovered consciousness; but when at length I came to myself, it was with a dull aching in the head, and with a sensation of soreness in every limb and muscle.
"Where am I?" I gasped, still but hazily aware of what had happened, and with the sickly, absurd feeling that perhaps I had died and was reawakening in the Afterlife. And it was only the sound of another human voice that brought me once more to my senses.
"Where are you? Would to God I knew!—down in hell, I guess!" came in mumbled accents from an unseen figure.
"Much hurt, Phil?" I jerked out, striving vainly to locate my friend amid the impenetrable blackness. And, as I spoke, I moved to a sitting position and made my first effort to extricate myself from the rocks and dust that buried me almost waist-deep.
"No, not hurt much!" came Clay's drawled reply. "A few little cuts and bruises, more or less, and one black eye. But what does that amount to? Couldn't use the eye down here, anyway!"