the Book, so far as its unnumbered and
fugitive entries can be arranged--the first part and the only part quite
comprehensible, before the haze of distress and anxiety has dimmed our
image of that strange god, whose mortality was all too real. He began
its composition that same night, picking up the Snider cartridge and the
bark strips while still he had some measure of liberty. Perhaps he
foresaw that he would want to leave the record. Perhaps he merely sought
distraction, and he had need of it.

Squatting above his own altar, he prepared his own epistle. Around his
sanctuary slept a guard of devil doctors, priests, sorcerers--he uses
all three terms. No sleep for Albro. But while he wrestled there alone
through long hours he found the pluck to jot those early notes by the
flare of a guttering torch, beguiling the pain of his broken arm and the
new terror that was now rapidly closing upon him.

Like a glint of lightning from a cloud comes the following spurted item,
written the next day:

_Forty hours of this. Am growing weaker. My arm--[word scratched
out]. Had to give up trying to start the glass in my helmet. Can't
budge it...._

Soon afterward occurs another passage in the same startling altered key:

_Tried to get away this [morning], but the priests too suspicious.
I wanted to try smashing the glass on a rock. Likely would have
burst my ear drums anyway--_

And further:

_If I could get hold of a knife for three minutes. Bamboo stick
[part illegible here]--can't tear vulcan canvas. No use...._

When Peters read those lines aloud and looked up he confronted a sickly
ring of auditors.

"Good God!" breathed Bartlet. "_He couldn't get out!_"

The knowledge of Albro's actual plight crashed upon us all in just that
phrase, and I leave you to gauge its impact. We had had no hint of it.
Here was the diary before us. We were only waiting to learn the present
address of the diarist. Indeed our whole attitude toward the singular
discovery we were making had been quite cheerful, even exultant, like
that of children who follow the tribulations of some favorite hero,
secure of the happy solution.

"Couldn't get _out_?" squeaked Jeckol. "How do you mean--he couldn't?"

"He was locked up in that blasted diving dress!"

"Locked up?"...

"Sewed up--sacked up," said Peters heavily. "Did you ever see
the damn' stuff? He calls it canvas, which it ain't, but tanned
twill--two-