Leaper 8 - 11/11/13

I saw them writhe with a deadly locution.

Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream.

It seems probable that if, upon reaching the second stage, we could recall the impressions of the first, we should find these impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond.

He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower -- is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.

Amid frequent and thoughtful endeavors to remember; amid earnest struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness into which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I have dreamed of success; there have been brief, very brief periods when I have conjured up remembrances which the lucid reason of a later epoch assures me could have had reference only to that condition of seeming unconsciousness.

Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?

The difficulty, nevertheless, was but trivial; although, in the disorder of my fancy, it seemed at first insuperable.

And the death just avoided, was of that very character which I had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition.

It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks.

Days passed -- it might have been that many days passed -- ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath.

And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.

I pondered upon all this frivolity until my teeth were on edge.

Scarcely had I dropped my head back into its original position, when there flashed upon my mind what I cannot better describe than as the unformed half of that idea of deliverance to which I have previously alluded, and of which a moiety only floated indeterminately through my brain when I raised food to my burning lips.

In their voracity the vermin frequently fastened their sharp fangs in my fingers.

At first the ravenous animals were startled and terrified at the change -- at the cessation of movement.