At last I understood. I had come to realize the fact that my sleep had been a prolonged one; it might have lasted weeks—even months, I had thought, as with cataleptics; but an entire century! that idea had been too incredibly grotesque for consideration. That Sir Spofforth, with whom, it seemed, I had dined almost yesterday, had gone, ages ago, to his long home; Lazaroff; Esther, whom I loved; that generations had come into birth and died ... it seemed too cruel a jest. I wept. I raved and called for Esther. Surely a hundred years had never passed, turning her brown hair to gray, lining her gentle face, bringing at last the gift of death to her, while I lay underground, encased in steel and air!
I cried aloud in terror. I hammered helplessly upon the walls. Again I called Esther, Lazaroff, George. There was no answer of any kind.
Presently a ray of light quivered through the hole, falling upon the heap of debris that blocked the stairway. The yellow beam moved onward, and now it bathed the thin branches of the little twisted tree that, by the aid of those few minutes of sunlight daily, had ventured into life. It had grown cunningly sidewise, so as to expose the maximum of wood to the light. I watched the ray till it went out; I wanted to show the plant to Lazaroff, to ask him whether the mechanics of heliotropism could suffice to answer the problem of the tree’s brainless consciousness; and my chagrin that this whim could not be fulfilled assumed an absurd significance. It was, in fact, the realization of this loss of responsiveness to the reality of the situation that constantly urged me to find some way of escape when I might have relapsed otherwise into an acquiescence which would have brought insanity and death.
The stairs being gone, I turned my consideration to the cellar roof. To reach this it would be necessary to drag one of the planks beneath the hole and scramble up, clinging to the sides with my fingers and bracing my feet against the wall. This feat was not a difficult one for a normal man, but for me clearly impossible. I must wait until I became stronger.
It is a strange thing, but I had not associated the need of waiting with the idea of food until I found the box of biscuit. I stumbled upon the box by the accident of scratching my wrist against the edge as I crawled along the wall. I saw the corner projecting from a mound of earth, and, scraping some of the dirt away, I lifted the pine-wood lid.
Inside the box I found a quantity of biscuit which seemed to have been baked recently. It was crisp, and too hard for me to break. I dipped a piece in the stagnant water, and, as I swallowed the first morsels, became aware of my ravenous hunger.
I can hardly estimate the duration of the imprisonment that followed. It was of days and nights which succeeded each the other in monotonous succession, during which, like a hibernating beast, I crouched and groped within the cellar, dozing and shivering, and gnawing incessantly at my food. Only those few minutes of sunshine daily saved my reason, I am convinced now. My evening clothes, which at first had appeared to have suffered no injury during my century of sleep, had begun to disintegrate, and hung upon me in tattered fragments. It was a period of despair, with very little alternating hope. Sometimes I prayed wildly beneath the crucifix, sometimes, in an access of madness, I cried for Esther and Lazaroff again. And for whole hours I convinced myself that this was a dream.
But my strength returned with amazing swiftness. As in the case of a typhoid convalescent, every particle of food seemed to build up my body. I must have put on pounds each day. The barrel framework of my ribs filled out, the muscles showed their old outlines beneath the skin, the fluid rushed into the joints and restored their suppleness. And daily I practiced exercises. I managed to drag one of the benches beneath the hole at last, and, standing on this, tried often to draw myself up; but on each occasion my struggles only brought down a shower of earth and stones, and I resigned myself to a period of further waiting, watching for dawn like a troglodyte, and for the sun like a fire-worshiper.
In the end my escape developed in a manner the least imaginable. It began with my discovery of a second box in another of the mounds. I opened it hastily, in the greedy anticipation of finding something more palatable than biscuit.
Instead of this I found a number of strange batons of wood. They resembled policemen’s truncheons, but each had a tiny rounded plate of glass near the head, and there evidently was some sort of mechanism near the handle, for there was a push-button, fitted with a heavy guard of brass, so strong that I could not raise it with my fingers. It was indeed providential that I was unable to do so.