Lost in the Catacombs! How often I had imagined it! and now, indeed, it had become a terrible reality. Horror almost paralyzed me for the moment. I seemed to be all nerve and brain, and these thrilled and throbbed so wildly that I was forced to lean against the rock for support. I thought I should go mad, for there was something in the very idea of being shut up in that awful cavern, in the awful silence and awful darkness, doomed to perish by inches, every hour expanding to an age, which rendered any other means of death blissful by contrast. My head swam, and I believed I was about to swoon, when, feeling that to do so was to be destroyed, I roused my will and almost involuntarily sprang forward. My movement was so sudden that my taper was extinguished, and an inky blackness fell upon me like a pall. The horror of my situation was a hundred-fold increased. If I could have lighted my little candle again, I should have been almost happy; and yet, a few seconds before, I had regarded myself as the most miserable of mortals. My brain seemed to be absolutely bursting, and my heart forcing itself into my throat. I was conscious of a sense of suffocation, and I was not sure that the rocky walls were not pressing together to crush me. I remember having an anxious longing that they might do so, and end the agony I was enduring. I frankly admit I had never known before what human suffering can be. I had not supposed myself capable of such mental anguish; it was ten thousand times more, and worse, than death—an indefinable and overwhelming dread of something which might not be named, but that could be pictured with miraculous power. I had confronted death often, in sickness, in catastrophe, in battle, on land and water, by falling, and by fire, and the so-called King of Terrors had not shown himself half so terrible as I had anticipated. But then and there, in those silent and rayless Catacombs, I was unnerved, overpowered, and horrified, by a crushing dread of the unknown. Every moment was a month. Every feeling was a minister of horror. Exactly what I did I shall never know, though I seem to have a misty recollection that I strove to kill myself by dashing my head against the rocks. For some time I was incapable of determining my conduct; and then, with all my exquisite sense of mental pain, I was aware of hurrying rapidly through the thick darkness. How long this continued I know not; but of a sudden I saw beyond me a flash of light like the aurora in the far northern sky. Was I really mad? Was I dreaming? Was I dead, and waking from the sleep of death? I rubbed my eyes, I pinched myself, I tried to scream, but I could not make a sound. Burning as my throat was, and all on fire as I seemed from head to foot, my voice froze as I sought to give it utterance.