increasing
throbbing sound that seemed to come from behind me, out of the cave;
then, as Manuel lifted his foot hastily to step over the sill, I jumped
up deliriously, and with outstretched hands lurched forward at the flask
in his fingers.

I believe I laughed at him in an imbecile manner.

Somebody laughed; and I remember the superior smile on his face passing
into a ghastly grin, that disappeared slowly, while his astonished eyes,
glaring at that gaunt and dishevelled apparition rising before him in
the dusk of the passage, seemed to grow to an enormous size. He drew
back his foot, as though it had been burnt; and in a panic-stricken
impulse, he flung the flask straight into my face, and staggered away
from the sill.

I made a catch at it with a scream of triumph, whose unearthly sound
brought me back to my senses.

"In the name of God, retire," he cried, as though I had been an
apparition from another world.

What took place afterwards happened with an inconceivable rapidity, in
less time than it takes to draw breath. He never recognized me. I saw
his glare of incredulous awe change, suddenly, to horror and despair. He
had felt himself losing his balance.

He had stepped too far back. He tried to recover himself, but it was too
late. He hung for a moment in his backward fall; his arms beat the air,
his body curled upon itself with an awful striving. All at once he
went limp all over, and, with the sunlight full upon his upturned face,
vanished downwards from my sight.

But at the last moment he managed to clutch the bight of the hanging
rope. The end of it must have been lying quite loose on the ground
above, for I saw its whole length go whizzing after him, in the
twinkling of an eye. I pressed the flask fiercely to my breast, raging
with the thought that he could yet tear it out of my hands; but by the
time the strain came, his falling body had acquired such a velocity that
I didn't feel the slightest jerk when the green cord snapped--no more
than if it had been the thread of a cobweb.

I confess that tears, tears of gratitude, were running down my face. My
limbs trembled. But I was sane enough not to think of myself any more.

"Drink! Drink," I stammered, raising Seraphina's head on my shoulder,
while the galloping horses of the peons in hot pursuit passed with a
thundering rumble above us. Then all was still.

Our getting out of the cave was a matter of unremitting toil, through
what might have been