28. The next page of the diary is badly blurred and torn, but the
following can be made out:
"We are all about played out.... The boy is exhausted and lying over
in a little excavation upon his sisters' wraps, his fingers bleeding
and one eye blinded with the sand.... The passageway behind us is
almost closed up.... In front of us we have hit a solid wall.... The
exhausted mother is binding her boy's hands with a portion of her
petticoat.... As she kneels there, with the faint flicker of a light
falling on her finely chiseled profile, she resembles Botticelli's
_magnificent_ Madonna in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence.... The
picture is completed by the dark background and the solicitous
attitude of the girls as they cluster around the sufferer.... With a
little imagination one can delineate the jeweled crown which the two
girlish angels are holding above her head.... Pathos, resignation and
a sort of recreating FAITH are painted against that threatening wall
and overhanging dirt.... If that should fall WE ARE ALL BOUND TO
SUFFOCATE before any help can come.... My 'prisoner' is not a bit
discouraged, however.... He is using his jackknife against the
concrete wall with great patience and whistling softly and slowly an
air from 'The Blessing of the Waters.'... WATER!... I know those
girls are CHOKING for a drink as I have been for the last ten hours
myself.... Still, not one of them has murmured at our grief and
Anastasie has become quite chummy in pretending to cheer ME up....
Aristocracy or Royalty, even, with Democracy in a tunnel, makes us ALL
of one size! Under certain conditions a man of my education and
family connections MIGHT be privileged to forget the veiled lady of
Buckingham and accept these endearing little attentions with some
guarantee of hope.... But WHAT IF WE ALL ARE BURIED HERE like the
happy families of Herculaneum and Pompeii?... Future inquisitive
scientists may find this diary with our _bones_ and classify us as
a species of an extinct Tartar tribe!... The wall my prisoner is
gouging out _seems to be getting wet_...."