"How long I lay insensible I know not; but when my faculties returned I found myself stretched upon the ground, which felt cold and damp, and in a place involved in the deepest and most impenetrable gloom. I found that the epaulets and lace had been torn from my coat, and an intense pain on the back of my head reminded me of the blow of the steel mace; and on raising my hand to the wound, I found my hair clotted and hardened with coagulated blood. Rats or some monstrous vermin running over me caused me to leap from the ground, and endeavour to discover where I was. This the darkness rendered impossible; but by the chill atmosphere of the place, the difficulty of respiration I experienced, and the hollow echoes of my feet, dying dismally away in distant cavities, I conjectured rightly that I was imprisoned in some subterranean vault. What the agony of my mind was when this idea became confirmed, you may better conceive than I describe. I recollected that the troops marched next day, and that unless Fassifern made some most strenuous attempt to discover and free me, I should be left at the mercy of the lawless Mohammed, either to be his perpetual captive in a dungeon, to be left to a slow lingering death by starvation, or a more expeditious one by some mode of torture, such as the most refined spirit of Eastern cruelty and barbarism could invent. "In groping about, I soon came in contact with a stone wall, which I felt carefully all round, but no door or outlet could I discover. A succession of wooden boxes placed upright, sounding and hollow when I touched them, informed me at once of the truth,—that I was cast into one of those ancient catacombs which are so numerous under the city of Alexandria,—horrible caverns hollowed in the bowels of the earth, where the mummy-remains of the subjects of the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and others, out-standing the course of more than twenty centuries, lay swathed in their bandages and embalming! The blood rushed back upon my trembling heart, and every hair on my aching head seemed to bristle upon my scalp, as I staggered dizzily against the mouldy wall, knocking down half-a-dozen mummy-coffers, which fell heavily and hollowly upon the pavement. "You may imagine what were my feelings when I reviewed my situation. I, a superstitious Highland boy, that used to shake in my brogues, like a dog in a wet sack, if I passed the kirk-yard of Inverary after night-fall, and never went into the dark but with my eyes closed tight for fear of seeing something ’uncanny,’ when I found myself in this gloomy repository of the dead I was so confounded and terrified, that it was long before I recovered my self-possession so far as to cast a firm glance of scrutiny around me, and endeavour to discover some means of escape. I perceived with joy a faint ray of daylight streaming through a small aperture, which appeared nearly twenty feet above me.