"I was sick." "Sick unto death with that long agony." "And when they at length unbound me for the judgment," "I felth that my strength were leaving me." "The sentence." "The terrible sentence of death was the last phrase of distinct accentuation to reach my ears." "After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum." "And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note," "the thought of what sweet rest must await us in the grave." "The though came gently and stealthily." "And it seemed long before it attained full appreciation." "But just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain this thought... the universe became no more than night, silence," "stillness." "I had swooned but still I would not say that I had lost all consciousness." "In the deepest slumber..." "No!" "In delirium..." "No!" "In a swoon..." "No!" "In death..." "No!" "Even in the grave, all is not lost." "Else there is no immortality for man." "Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we may break the gossamer web... of some dream." "Yet, in a second afterward," "so frail may that web have been, we remember not what we have dreamed." "Amid frequent endeavors and earnest struggles, to regather some token of that state of seeming nothingness into which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I dreamed of success." "There have been brief, very brief periods" "when I have conjured up remembrances which the lucid reason of a later epoch assures me could have had reference only to that condition where consciousness seems annihilated." "Until the moment when a hideous dizziness opressed me at the mere idea of the interminableness of the descent..." "Then comes a sense of sudden motionlessness, as if those who bore me" "(a ghastly train!" ")" "had outrun, in their descent, the limits of the limitless, and paused, defeated by the wearisomeness of their toil." "And then all is only madness, the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things." "Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound," "the tumultuous motion of the heart and the sound of its beating." "Then the tought, and a shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state." "Suddenly, a fearful idea drove the blood in torrents upon my heart." "I proceded for many paces but still all was blackness and vacancy." "It seemed evident that mine was not, at least, the most hideous of fates," "To have been buried alive in my grave was not the one that had been reserved for me." "I followed the wall up, stepping with careful distrust." "This process, however, afforded me no means of ascertaining the dimensions of my dungeon," "as I might make its circuit without being aware of the fact, so perfectly uniform seemed the wall." "The death just avoided was of that character which I had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition." "To the victims of its tyranny, there were no other alternatives than death with its direst physical agonies... or death with its most hideous moral horrors." "I had therefore been reserved for the latter." "My nerves had been unstrung by long suffering," "until I had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me." "What boots it to tell of the long, long hours of horror more than mortal, during which I counted the rushing oscillations of the steel!" "My cognizance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial agents, and I had thus been condemned to a different kind of destruction:" "a milder one." "Milder?" "I half smiled in my agony thinking of the singular application I had made of such a term." "Days passed, it might have been that many days passed," "ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me... with its acrid breath." "I prayed to heaven," "I wearied it with my prayer, to make the steel descend more speedily." "I grew mad." "Frantic." "And then suddenly..." "I fell into a deep calm and lay smiling" "at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bubble." "All of a sudden!" "A half-formed though of joy, of hope, rushed to my mind." "Yet, what business had I with hope?" "It was a thought only half-formed." "I felt that it was a thought of joy, but I felt also that it perished in its formation." "The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length." "I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart." "It would tear the fabric of my shirt, then it would return and repeat its operation, again -- and again." "Nothwithstanding its terrific vigor, all that it would accomplish, for several minutes, would be the tearing of my shirt's fabric." "To the right, to the left, and swinging far and wide, further off, further off, and then it would return," "while I quivered in every nerve as I thought how it would be sufficient for the machinery to descend slightly to precipite upon my bosom that glistening axe." "It was hope, the hope that triumphs even on the rack, that whisperes into the ears of the death-condemned." "I saw that some ten or twelve vibrations would bring the steel in actual contact with my clothes." "The bandage which enveloped me was unique." "The first stroke of the razor athwart any portion of the band, would so detach it that it might be unwound from me by means of my left hand." "The bandage enveloped me entirely, in all directions," "save in the path of the crescent..." "Scarcely had I let my head fall back when there flashed upon my mind what I cannot better describe than as the unformed half of that idea of deliverance, and of which only a moiety had floated indeterminately through my brain" "when I had noticed the dish." "The whole idea was now present, feeble, scarcely sane, scarcely definite, but still... entire." "For the moment, at least, I was free." "Free-- and in the grasp of the Inquisition!" "All of my movements were being watched." "I had but escaped death in one form of agony to be delivered unto something worse." "Death," "Any death but that of the pit!" "Fool!" "Might I not have known that into the pit I must go?" "that into the pit was the object of the burning iron to urge me?" "The walls rushed back!" "The room regained its previous shape." "The French army had entered Toledo." "The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies."