[Illustration: I made my difficult way toward the stairs ] I made my difficult way upon hands and knees through the gap in the wall, across the mud floor of the cellar, toward the stairs, resting several times from weariness before I reached my destination. But when I arrived at the far end, where the stairs should have been, I received a shock that totally unnerved me. The stairs were gone. In place of them was a debris of rubble and broken stones, as firmly set as if workmen had built it into the wall. The mass must have been there for years, because, out of the thin soil that had drifted in, a little oak tree sprang, twisting its spindling stem to rear its crown toward the patch of daylight. At last I understood. I had come to realize the fact that my sleep had been a prolonged one; it might have lasted weeks—even months, I had thought, as with cataleptics; but an entire century! that idea had been too incredibly grotesque for consideration. That Sir Spofforth, with whom, it seemed, I had dined almost yesterday, had gone, ages ago, to his long home; Lazaroff; Esther, whom I loved; that generations had come into birth and died ... it seemed too cruel a jest. I wept. I raved and called for Esther. Surely a hundred years had never passed, turning her brown hair to gray, lining her gentle face, bringing at last the gift of death to her, while I lay underground, encased in steel and air! I cried aloud in terror. I hammered helplessly upon the walls. Again I called Esther, Lazaroff, George. There was no answer of any kind. Presently a ray of light quivered through the hole, falling upon the heap of debris that blocked the stairway. The yellow beam moved onward, and now it bathed the thin branches of the little twisted tree that, by the aid of those few minutes of sunlight daily, had ventured into life. It had grown cunningly sidewise, so as to expose the maximum of wood to the light. I watched the ray till it went out; I wanted to show the plant to Lazaroff, to ask him whether the mechanics of heliotropism could suffice to answer the problem of the tree’s brainless consciousness; and my chagrin that this whim could not be fulfilled assumed an absurd significance. It was, in fact, the realization of this loss of responsiveness to the reality of the situation that constantly urged me to find some way of escape when I might have relapsed otherwise into an acquiescence which would have brought insanity and death. The stairs being gone, I turned my consideration to the cellar roof. To reach this it would be necessary to drag one of the planks beneath the hole and scramble up, clinging to the sides with my fingers and bracing my feet against the wall. This feat was not a difficult one for a normal man, but for me clearly impossible. I must wait until I became stronger.