There he floats, immersed save his head: and his smooth face shining at me ... pulling, pulling.
The grip of my will upon my muscles weakens. I hunch a little looking down from the height. The man is smiling at me now. It is as if he reads this hunch of my body down toward him as the first step of my defeat. He smiles. The strain of my legs shoots upward to my back. Pain. The round head in the kiln beckons in a horrid caricature of bidding. I am growing weak. Anguish. My knees are bent. My neck is forward and my arms thrust out. Torture racks my body: my muscles are corrupted. They press and shriek to tumble in the kiln. My will and my mind fight naked on the other side ... stript of strength, stript of body ... to defend me against the pull of the man within the kiln.
I am at the end. All of my body urges down and forward. The muscles of my back no longer hurt: they are numb, they are sheer urgency to leap. Pain lives now only in my forehead: my body is dead as if already it had joined the man in the slime of death. But my brow holds back. It is a flame of resistance: it is molten pain, knowing that it must fight, knowing it must be shrewd to cheat my body of its enamoured death.
My body is about to plunge within the kiln. My body is a single clamor to be done. The smile of the white head is a bland broad smile. The head thrusts back, beckoning, ghastly at ease.
My body is about to plunge into the kiln. My mind is very shrewd at this threshold of death. Beyond the kiln, the field goes on upon a lower plane, over the clutter of broken rocks and stone. In an ecstatic moment, as my legs flex to leap, my will possesses them.
I leap. My body in that instant is the essence of my will. I leap high. I leap far. Not the kiln, the rocks beyond the kiln are in my eyes....
I have leaped over the kiln. My body crumples on the rocks. I embrace their harshness with caressing hands: my lips tear, grateful, on their sharpness. This fierce pain in my ankle, twisted as it struck, is sweet to me.
I lift myself, and turn. The kiln is behind me: and there is no one in it.