t
the hideous truth freeze me from head to foot like ice. I had shaken
off the long coma which for many hours had stricken me with corpselike
rigidity. Yes, I could move; my hands could feel the boards of my
coffin; my lips parted; words came to me, and instinctively I called out
Marguerite's name. It was a scream I raised. In that deal box my voice
took so hoarse and weird a sound that it terrified me. Oh, my God, was
this thing true? I was able to walk, speak, cry out that I was living,
and yet my voice could not be heard; I was entombed under the earth.

I made a desperate effort to remain calm and reflect. Was there no means
of getting out? Then my dream began afresh in my troubled brain. The
fanciful air shaft with the blue bit of sky overhead was mingled with
the real grave in which I was lying. I stared at the darkness with
widely opened eyes; perhaps I might discover a hole, a slit, a glimmer
of light, but only sparks of fire flitted through that night, with rays
that broadened and then faded away. I was in a somber abyss again. With
returning lucidity I struggled against these fatal visions. Indeed, I
should need all my reason if I meant to try to save myself.

The most immediate peril lay in an increasing sense of suffocation. If
I had been able to live so long without air it was owing to suspended
animation, which had changed all the normal conditions of my existence,
but now that my heart beat and my lungs breathed I should die,
asphyxiated, if I did not promptly liberate myself. I also suffered from
cold and dreaded lest I should succumb to the mortal numbness of
those who fall asleep in the snow, never to wake again. Still, while
unceasingly realizing the necessity of remaining calm, I felt maddening
blasts sweep through my brain, and to quiet my senses I exhorted myself
to patience, trying to remember the circumstances of my burial. Probably
the ground had been bought for five years, and this would be against my
chances of self-deliverance, for I remembered having noticed at Nantes
that in the trenches of the common graves one end of the last lowered
coffins protruded into the next open cavity, in which case I should only
have had to break through one plank. But if I were in a separate hole,
filled up above me with earth, the obstacles would prove too great. Had
I not been told that the dead were buried six feet deep in Paris? How
was I to get through the enormous mass of soil above me? Even if I
succeed