"There is no such thing as physical exhaustion.... Hunger and thirst
may weight us down, but with the right kind of inspiration a man can
do miraculous things.... I began rolling up balls of mud from the
tunnel and carrying them into the cistern until my tongue hung out
of my mouth.... With those balls I started making a winding stairway
around the wall of this cistern until I had a dozen steps completed
... then the girls began making the balls and bringing them in to me
like muddy little hod-carriers.... My masonry took on proportions as
the minutes dragged by.... Finally we have a stairway four feet wide
and extending from the bottom to within four feet of the top as I
write these lines with the girls sitting a few steps below me in the
slowly hardening clay.... We can all hear plainly the tramping of feet
on the planking overhead.... It is a kind of shuffling one hears when
seated somewhere beneath the dancers in a ballroom, and it may mean
that we are headed directly toward the LION'S DEN."...