After his
trial, the narrator first finds himself imprisoned in
total darkness inside a small cell. "The blackness of eternal night
encompassed me." Being confined is, itself, frightening for the narrator--"[T]hewas
intolerably close,"-- but his terror is increased when, having moved along the damp walls
in order to determine the size of his cell, the narrator
secondly discovers that there is a hole in the
floor.
After the narrator trips over a remnant of cloth that
he has used to mark the beginning of his walk around his cell, he discovers a startling
circumstance: While his chin lies on the floor of the cell, his
...lips, and the upper portion of my head, although seemingly at a less elevation than
the chin, touched nothing.
At the same time, the prisoner
feels a "clammy vapor" on his forehead and he smells "decayed fungus." When
he puts out his arm, he discovers that he has fallen at the very edge of a circular pit.
Breaking off a small fragment of masonry just below the margin of the hole, the prisoner drops
it into the pit only to realize that it is a deep pit filled with water. When there is a rapid
opening and closing of an overhead door, the narrator "saw clearly the doom which had been
prepared for me." He congratulates himself on escaping this deadly accident by his timely
fall.
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