I must have lain there a full hour, slowly gathering my senses. The back of my head was very sore, for it seemed as though I had received a heavy blow, while my elbows and knees seemed cut and bruised.
In the close darkness I tried to discover where I was, but my brain was swimming with an excruciating pain in the top of my skull.
Slowly, very slowly, recollections of the past came back to me—remembrance of that terrible, final half-hour.
Yes, Joy! I was still alive; the loathsome reptile's fang had not produced death. It may have bitten some object and evacuated its venom just prior to biting me. That was the theory which occurred to me, and I believe it to be the correct one.
I could raise my hand, too. I was no longer paralysed. I could speak. I shouted, but my voice seemed deadened and stifled.
On feeling my head I found that I had a long scalp-wound, upon which the blood was congealed. My clothes were rent, and as I groped about I quickly found that my prison was a circular wall of stone, wet and slimy, about four feet across, and that I was half reclining in water with soft, yielding mud beneath me, while the air seemed close and foul.
The roof above me seemed high, for my voice appeared to ascend very far. I looked above me and high up, so high that I could only just distinguish it was a tiny ray of light—the light of day.
With frantic fingers I felt those circular walls, thick with the encrustations and slime of ages. Then all of a sudden the truth flashed upon me. My enemies, believing me dead, had thrown me down a well!
I shouted and shouted, yelled again and again. But my voice only echoed high up, and no one came to my assistance.
My legs, immersed as they were in icy-cold water, were cramped and benumbed, so that I had no feeling in them, while my hands were wet and cold, and my head hot as fire.