It had never occurred to me, until that moment, to have any sympathy with a trapped rat. But I could feel boundless sympathy as a huge brush, malodorous with some vile-smelling concoction, was thrust through the opening directly at my face.
I do not know whether I cried out in my terror. But I do know that my hands, as I struggled to evade that foul oncoming weapon, lost their precarious grip on the ledge. And, the next instant, I had gone shooting off into the darkness.
To this day, I believe that it is a miracle that I survived. Certainly, the gods of good fortune were with me in the ensuing plunge. I could easily have broken my head or caved in my ribs against the steel projections of the ventilating system. Only sheer lucky chance, and the fact that the ventilating tubes were not perpendicular, saved me from what, in the words of the natives, would have been a sudden and horrible "turnover." Down, down, down, I shot, skimming around curves, banging against unseen bends and corners, tumbling head over heels in a mad dash, wherein it was impossible to regain my balance. Surely, no circus performer ever took so strange, so perilous a dive! Only now and then could I momentarily check my speed, when the tube, for a few feet, became almost horizontal; but always it would dip sharply again, and I would go falling once more through the darkness.
It seemed that I had traveled thus for miles when suddenly, with a terrific bang, I collided with a wall, and came to a halt, stunned, bruised, and bleeding in fifty places. With painful difficulty, I picked myself up, while noting with relief a slit of light through the partition I had just struck. It was, in fact, not a wall at all, but a partly opened door!
Then, as my dazed senses gradually cleared, I became aware of something familiar in my surroundings. Did this not resemble the ventilating duct, which opened on the office where I had worked, and which I had so disliked to clean with a mop?
Still feeling somewhat dizzy, I crept out of the doorway and found myself in a large, well-lighted chamber—not, indeed, my former place of employment, but so similar that I knew it to be another office of the Ventilation Company.
Before I had had time to reflect on my plight, or wonder what next to do, I was startled to see four or five men who, drawn by the noise of my arrival, came rushing out of several adjoining rooms.
Upon seeing me, they stopped short with loud, excited cries, whose import I could not quite gather. I only knew that they were employees of the Ventilation Company; that they were pointing in much agitation to my pitiful self, with my torn clothes and blood-smeared features—and that, in another moment, they would seize me and carry me away to some new punishment.
Had I had the energy, I would have crawled back into the ventilating tube for safety. But so weak had I become that I could only fall sagging to the floor and wait despairingly while the chalk-faces drew near.
"Who in the name of Thuno Flâtum are you? Where did you come from?" demanded the foremost of the strangers, as he regarded my battered form. "You know, it's forbidden to enter the ventilating ducts!"