SUFFOCATION--THE DARK PIT.
"Where the deuce am I?" was my first thought and exclamation on
rallying my scattered energies.
I was painfully certain of entombment under a mountain of fallen
masonry, which, for aught that I could foresee, might not in these
times of trouble be removed for years. The air soon became close and
oppressive. I began an examination of the trap into which I had
fallen, by feeling all round me with outspread hands; for the
darkness was as dense as if I had been shut up in a block of marble.
The ceiling--if it could be called so--was composed of beams of hard
wood planked over, being evidently the floor of an apartment above;
and by the dull, dead sound those planks returned, when striking on
them with the hilt of my sword, I became convinced that the whole
debris of a fallen house was heaped above me! Of this I was the more
certain on discovering that the trapdoor, through which I had passed,
was choked up by fragments of torn partitions, beams and stones,
which I could grasp with my hands when standing upon a barrel over
which I had stumbled in the dark. Around me were four stone walls,
forming an area of about twenty feet by fifteen, and below me was the
damp earth. I was undoubtedly buried alive in a cellar, from which
escape seemed hopeless.
As this terrible conviction came home to my mind, the perspiration
oozed from every pore, and a pang of agony entered my heart like a
sharp poniard. My emotions cannot be described, and thoughts that
were bitter and heart-rending came crowding upon me like a torrent.
Ernestine, whom I would never see more--whose voice I would never
hear again--and whose dark eye would never turn to mine with its mild
inquiring glance, or its glad and roguish smile, was left among rough
soldiers and rougher sailors on board of Christian's wandering fleet,
exposed to danger and perhaps to insult; for when I was dead to whom
could she turn with confidence for protection? And Gabrielle, too!
Gabrielle, whom I had hoped to free and restore to her, would now be
left hopelessly the prisoner of Merodé, exposed to greater perils,
and such as it was impossible to consider with calmness or
contemplate with patience.
Doubtless brave Ian Dhu might protect Ernestine and free Gabrielle,
even as I would have done; but, remembering the dangers that
surrounded him only an hour ago, and the musket shots I had heard, it
was more than probable that he and all who were with him had fallen
in combat, and were now lying in the ruined street--perhaps not
twenty yards from me. Whether he and Kœningheim too had escaped,
or perished by the explosion, was all a mystery to me; but the former
seemed next to an impossibility; and I pictured the anguish of
Ernestine when morning stole into the dull and comfortless cabin of
the _Anna Catharina_--when the bright sun came to gladden the grey
waters--when the waves rolled in light, and Denmark's flat but wooded
shores were sparkling in the sunny haze--when hour after hour would
steal away, and when I did not come! What would be her emotions when
the terrible truth was told her by some survivor of our Raid to Kiel?
The atmosphere of the place gradually became closer and more
difficult to inhale; at times I thought this was fancy--at others,
reality; but perhaps my nervous and excited state exaggerated the
truth. I thought with horror of the pangs of hunger and thirst to be
endured before I should die; my fate, ignominious and unhonoured; my
unshared, solitary, and unimagined agonies--even my grave might never
be known. My death might be mourned for while I was yet alive; for I
calculated on living for many days yet to come.
Again and again all these thoughts, and others of home and my dear
native country, recurred to me; again and again they returned, each
time with renewed poignancy and bitterness, and the anticipation of
dying there unknown, was as bad for a time as those of hunger and
thirst. The vulgar fear of being devoured by rats was not the least
of my torments; for of these vermin, I had born in me a powerful and
unconquerable aversion.
The air seemed to grow stifling. I shouted with that loud hallo
which, many a time and oft, I had sent far through the Highland deer
forests; but my own voice sounded dull and faint, as it was returned
upon my ear.
Overburdened by thought and anxiety, my heart became sick and weary;
my head ached as the oppression of the atmosphere became greater; and
I have no doubt that the effect of my recent wound--the contusion
received at Eckernfiörd--greatly contributed to exaggerate all that
the darkness, mystery, loneliness, and the anticipation of a most
horrible death, could produce on an active imagination.
The Imperialists would think no more of me than of the last year's
leaves; and the idea of their digging for me, even if Kœningheim
escaped, seemed simply absurd.
I endeavoured to picture the slow agonies of a death by hunger and
thirst, but shrunk from the task, and remembered to have heard my
mother tell me, that when David Duke of Rothesay was found dead in
the vault of Falkland-tower, in his hunger and madness he had gnawed
and torn with his teeth the flesh from his left arm. Could I ever be
reduced to such a state?
My bones might lie for ten, twenty, or even a hundred years, before
discovery; and I thought grimly of the speculation they might excite,
when some grave pathologist delivered his opinion, and when men spoke
of the wars of other times--those wars of which their sires had
spoken, and in which their grandsires fought; and I remembered the
various instances of bones being brought to light under similar
circumstances, and under my own observation, the vague mystery and
fear with which these poor reliques of humanity were regarded by
those who endeavoured in vain to conjecture the story that belonged
to them; the crime perpetrated, or the wrong endured--the story that
none could tell, and which would never be known until the last
trumpet rent the earth to its centre.
I began to feel weak, helpless, and confused, and listened with
agonised intensity to catch any sound, however distant; and then, as
before, it seemed as if many a voice with which I was familiar came
to me. My mind wandered, I imagined myself again on board the king's
ship, and amid the smoke, carnage, and boom of the cannonade. Then
came other ideas of strife--an imaginary conflict; Ian with his
eagle's plume, red-bearded Angus M'Alpine, Kildon with his M'Kenzies,
M'Coll of that Ilk, and all the gallant hearts of our regiment were
by my side. I heard the yell of Torquil's pipe; I saw the tartans
waving, the red musketry flashing as its echoes rolled over hill and
valley; I saw the gleam of steel, and felt the glow of the bright
warm sun of a summer noon, as it shone on the broad arena of a bloody
battle. I brandished my sword--I shouted. Kœningheim was again
before me; his steel rang on mine, and I was conscious that Bandolo,
poniard in hand, was gliding near me like a serpent.
All this wild vision and its excitement evaporated, and I believe
that I must have slept; for long after, on awakening once again to
the horrors of that dark and living tomb, and worse than all to my
own tormenting thoughts, I found myself lying on the damp ground.
Was it night or was it day on the upper earth? In that palpable
darkness, no one could tell.
I listened, and heard my heart beating. At times I thought there
came other sounds to me, in my loneliness. Once a horse's hoofs rang
on the pavement; a dragoon had perhaps passed through an adjacent
street. At another time I heard the faint note of a trumpet; and
these sounds served but to increase my fretful eagerness to be free.
I do not think that I prayed aloud to Heaven to help me; but many a
deep, pious, and fervent thought swelled my heart; and after a time I
took courage, and searched my whole prison minutely again for some
crack, joint, or cranny, by which a passage might be forced.
Around me the walls were as solid as stone could make them; above me
were the oaken beams and jointed planks, rendered quite as solid and
immovable by the superincumbent load of a fallen house.
I sat down again in despair. My head was still aching, and my breast
was oppressed by the difficulty experienced in respiration; my
weakness and helplessness increased; sensations of suffocation were
coming on, and at length I lay on the earth in the belief that I was
dying. My soul trembled at the terrible conviction that I was on the
verge of eternity, and I endeavoured to pray, but my thoughts and
words were all too incoherent for utterance.
Wild visions floated before me, with long blanks and pauses between;
and during these blanks I now believe that I must have been
insensible.
My tongue was parched and burning; then imaginary fountains of pure
water gushed and sparkled in the sunshine, as they poured over cool
and mossy rocks into deep and shady dells; in some instances, when I
approached them, the water seemed to vanish, and the bare and arid
rock alone remained; in others, I was bound and fettered hand and
foot, unable to move, and saw the gurgling water winding between
flowery borders into the shady recesses of a wooded dell. I
stretched my hands towards it; but a mighty incubus weighed down my
limbs, then the vision passed away, and I lay prostrate and gasping
amid a dark, a moist, and noxious atmosphere.
Many hours must thus have passed away--not less, perhaps, than
six-and-thirty. I imagined that Ernestine spoke to me from time to
time, and I heard her voice coming as from a vast distance. She was
laughing, and we were among summer fields where the yellow corn was
waving; where the green trees rustled their heavy foliage in the warm
breeze, and the glossy ravens were wheeling aloft into a blue and
sunny sky.
Then I heard the sound of other voices, the clink of axes and grating
of shovels; I thought that the hour of deliverance was at hand; that
I was about to be dug out, and restored to the upper world, and I
laughed with joy. The German soldiers were jesting and singing at
their work, as they seemed to draw nearer and nearer to me.
Then I heard Kœningheim say that their labour was in vain, and
might be relinquished, for by this time I must assuredly be dead--and
I heard them retire! Methought I strove to shout, to let them hear
that I still lived, but my tongue clove to the roof of my parched
throat--my hard and baked lips refused their office, and the horror
of the dream awoke me for an instant to the life I had been assured
was gradually passing away from me.
Still the same darkness, the same solemn stillness, the same
mysterious and horrible abandonment. I sank again; but the old
vision returned with the clank of shovels and axes, the rattle of
stones and crow-bars, with a laugh or an oath, as the German pioneers
cleared away the rubbish, till their feet and implements sounded
distinctly on the planks of oak. Oh! it was a delicious and a joyous
dream!
Then all at once there burst upon my half-blinded eyes a stream of
glorious sunlight, with the pure and refreshing air, as one pickaxe
was inserted, and a plank torn up; then, but not till then, did I
learn that it was no dream, but a dear reality, and that I was saved!
I heard three or four soldiers drop after each other into the pit;
strong hands were laid upon me, and I was lifted up from among the
ruins; then a horn of Neckar wine was given me, for I was faint and
trembling. I soon revived, but with the utmost difficulty retained
my eyes open, after such a long immersion in Cimmerian gloom; and I
was so feeble, that Kœningheim and one of his officers had to
support me between them, as they conveyed me through the ruined
street towards the castle of Kiel.