X

ROMANCE IN SIGHT OF DEATH

28.  The next page of the diary is badly blurred and torn, but the following can be made out: 

“We are all about played out....  The boy is exhausted and lying over in a little excavation upon his sisters’ wraps, his fingers bleeding and one eye blinded with the sand....  The passageway behind us is almost closed up....  In front of us we have hit a solid wall....  The exhausted mother is binding her boy’s hands with a portion of her petticoat....  As she kneels there, with the faint flicker of a light falling on her finely chiseled profile, she resembles Botticelli’s magnificent Madonna in the Uffizi Gallery at Florence....  The picture is completed by the dark background and the solicitous attitude of the girls as they cluster around the sufferer....  With a little imagination one can delineate the jeweled crown which the two girlish angels are holding above her head....  Pathos, resignation and a sort of recreating FAITH are painted against that threatening wall and overhanging dirt....  If that should fall WE ARE ALL BOUND TO SUFFOCATE before any help can come....  My ‘prisoner’ is not a bit discouraged, however....  He is using his jackknife against the concrete wall with great patience and whistling softly and slowly an air from ’The Blessing of the Waters.’...  WATER!...  I know those girls are CHOKING for a drink as I have been for the last ten hours myself....  Still, not one of them has murmured at our grief and Anastasie has become quite chummy in pretending to cheer ME up....  Aristocracy or Royalty, even, with Democracy in a tunnel, makes us ALL of one size!  Under certain conditions a man of my education and family connections MIGHT be privileged to forget the veiled lady of Buckingham and accept these endearing little attentions with some guarantee of hope....  But WHAT IF WE ALL ARE BURIED HERE like the happy families of Herculaneum and Pompeii?...  Future inquisitive scientists may find this diary with our bones and classify us as a species of an extinct Tartar tribe!...  The wall my prisoner is gouging out seems to be getting wet....”

29.  Then there follows the entry: 

“Water has burst through the hole my prisoner has been making in that wall!...”

30.  The next entry has been evidently water-soaked and is entirely blotted out.

31.  This entry seems sufficiently distinct to make out what the writer has been through: 

“I tried in the foregoing to jot down enough of what was happening to enable anyone who would find our bodies to make out how we had died....  What I forgot to record in the excitement I’ll put down now....  When the wall caved in and the water burst down upon us it seemed that we would soon be drowned alive....  The small hole in the wall had allowed enough water to filter through at first to slake our thirst and make us all quite happy....  But gradually the ground beneath us became damp and sticky and the blue mud clung to our shoes like glue until we could hardly move....  The little air that crept in with the water, though, was a positive blessing to us all....  We should have stifled....  Finally the water ceased and our hearts began to sink....