The strength of an unfaltering will to live drove him on when tearing muscles cried for rest. He could no longer see his watch: when he tried to look at it, the figures and the hands whirled and jazzed before his eyes in a dizzy tangle which he had lost the power to control. But hours had ceased to mean anything—in that Stygian emptiness there was no time, no anything but pain and madness. Always there was that impenetrable darkness, clinging, pulsating, palpable. It wound sinuously about his limbs and tried to hold them—it looped a noose round his chest and tightened it—it thudded on his temples and seared his eyes—swelled in upon him till he seemed to be ploughing through a tenuous liquid, and yet when he hit out and strove to break away from its grip it thinned away and let him go, only to swathe him round again in an instant. It stuck in his throat like a fog, curling ghostly, evil fingers caressingly round his face. He thought of Light, Light, Light—of glowing coals and the leaping flicker of camp fires, of the pale, mystical light of the moon and the dim, dusty light of stars, of search-light beams and the head-lights of cars, of the sizzling white glare of arc lamps. He thought of all great lights—of the merciless blaze of eye-aching tropical suns flaming over amethyst desert skies. But there was only the darkness. . . . And he toiled on. . . . And then ahead of him was no longer darkness. He had turned a corner of the passage, staggering round a buttress and falling heavily over a boulder which he saw but had not the strength to avoid. And as he lay on the ground, sore and weary to death, he saw that the rock about him was picked out with the faintest of faint silver lights. He wondered if this was madness at last—if his eyes had been won over to the Enemy and were joining in the derision of his defeat—if his vision had been seduced to refining his torture with hallucinations of victory. Slowly, fearfully, he raised his head. He could see all the cave in which he lay—the height and the length and the breadth of it. The light was so dim that it hardly amounted to more than normal darkness, but after the appalling blind blackness in which he had wandered for so many hours it was as startling a contrast as the rising of the sun after night. Almost sobbing with thankfulness, he dragged himself to his feet and went reeling on. There was another bend about fifty yards ahead, and at that corner it seemed as if the light was a little stronger. He reached the angle of rock and stumbled round it in a torment of apprehension lest after all he should have been deceived. But before him lay a short stretch of widening cave, and at the end of that showed a great rough-hewn opening. And through that opening he saw the blessed sky—an infinitely deep and clean blue evening sky sprinkled with merry, winking stars.