If I wished to live till the year of my exile were over, should I not endeavor to find some crevice in the surface-world, of which I already knew something, where I might hope that my insignificance would save me?
How could we hope to penetrate undetected into the domain of the Dwellers? There was no sanity in the supposition.
I then fell into a mood of depression, in which I saw very vividly the folly of the adventure which we had undertaken. But I was suffering from a lowered vitality, and though my wounds were trivial I was conscious of the throbbing of my scalded foot, and that my right shoulder was both stiff and painful. I lay for some time in silence, pondering the strange things I had seen reviewing–not without some mental discords–my judgment of the Bat-wings, and the fate to which it had cast them, and wondering vainly what new marvels or terrors might be before us, when we should penetrate the subterranean world of which we were about equally ignorant.Īs I lay I became aware that the night was chilly, though, being cloudy, it was less so than we had experienced previously. There were no stars the night had clouded while we slept–for I lay long in a sleep of utter weariness and exhaustion, both of mind and body and so, I think, in her own way, did my companion.īut I waked at length, with a dim sense of peril ended, and the short pause of security which is so precious to those who walk in dangerous ways, but conscious also of thirst and hunger, and of the shadow of great events, of which the significance was beyond my knowing. The long curve of the living-wall had fallen in from end to end, but the ashes were burning still, with a paler flame, so that it showed like a white bow in the darkness. The ashes of the central buildings glowed with a pale blue light and an occasional flame would rise up and lick across them like a ghostly tongue. The night had fallen to blackness while we still lay in the rock-cleft.
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