impact one of the posts supporting the confusion of
timbers above him, smashing it into matchwood, and bringing down the
crazy edifice with a loud clatter, in clouds of blinding dust!

When Jerome Searing recovered consciousness he did not at once
understand what had occurred. It was, indeed, some time before he opened
his eyes. For a while he believed that he had died and been buried, and
he tried to recall some portions of the burial service. He thought that
his wife was kneeling upon his grave, adding her weight to that of the
earth upon his breast. The two of them, widow and earth, had crushed his
coffin. Unless the children should persuade her to go home he would not
much longer be able to breathe. He felt a sense of wrong. "I cannot
speak to her," he thought; "the dead have no voice; and if I open my
eyes I shall get them full of earth."

He opened his eyes. A great expanse of blue sky, rising from a fringe of
the tops of trees. In the foreground, shutting out some of the trees, a
high, dun mound, angular in outline and crossed by an intricate,
patternless system of straight lines; the whole an immeasurable distance
away--a distance so inconceivably great that it fatigued him, and he
closed his eyes. The moment that he did so he was conscious of an
insufferable light. A sound was in his ears like the low, rhythmic
thunder of a distant sea breaking in successive waves upon the beach,
and out of this noise, seeming a part of it, or possibly coming from
beyond it, and intermingled with its ceaseless undertone, came the
articulate words: "Jerome Searing, you are caught like a rat in a trap--
in a trap, trap, trap."

Suddenly there fell a great silence, a black darkness, an infinite
tranquillity, and Jerome Searing, perfectly conscious of his rathood,
and well assured of the trap that he was in, remembering all and nowise
alarmed, again opened his eyes to reconnoitre, to note the strength of
his enemy, to plan his defense.

He was caught in a reclining posture, his back firmly supported by a
solid beam. Another lay across his breast, but he had been able to
shrink a little away from it so that it no longer oppressed him, though
it was immovable. A brace joining it at an angle had wedged him against
a pile of boards on his left, fastening the arm on that side. His legs,
slightly parted and straight along the ground, were covered upward to
the knees with a mass of debris which towered above his narrow horizon.
His h