When Jerome Searing recovered consciousness he did not at once understand what had occurred.  It was, indeed, some time before he opened his eyes.  For a while he believed that he had died and been buried, and he tried to recall some portions of the burial service.  He thought that his wife was kneeling upon his grave, adding her weight to that of the earth upon his breast.  The two of them, widow and earth, had crushed his coffin.  Unless the children should persuade her to go home he would not much longer be able to breathe.  He felt a sense of wrong.  “I cannot speak to her,” he thought; “the dead have no voice; and if I open my eyes I shall get them full of earth.”

He opened his eyes.  A great expanse of blue sky, rising from a fringe of the tops of trees.  In the foreground, shutting out some of the trees, a high, dun mound, angular in outline and crossed by an intricate, patternless system of straight lines; the whole an immeasurable distance away—­a distance so inconceivably great that it fatigued him, and he closed his eyes.  The moment that he did so he was conscious of an insufferable light.  A sound was in his ears like the low, rhythmic thunder of a distant sea breaking in successive waves upon the beach, and out of this noise, seeming a part of it, or possibly coming from beyond it, and intermingled with its ceaseless undertone, came the articulate words:  “Jerome Searing, you are caught like a rat in a trap—­ in a trap, trap, trap.”

Suddenly there fell a great silence, a black darkness, an infinite tranquillity, and Jerome Searing, perfectly conscious of his rathood, and well assured of the trap that he was in, remembering all and nowise alarmed, again opened his eyes to reconnoitre, to note the strength of his enemy, to plan his defense.

He was caught in a reclining posture, his back firmly supported by a solid beam.  Another lay across his breast, but he had been able to shrink a little away from it so that it no longer oppressed him, though it was immovable.  A brace joining it at an angle had wedged him against a pile of boards on his left, fastening the arm on that side.  His legs, slightly parted and straight along the ground, were covered upward to the knees with a mass of debris which towered above his narrow horizon.  His head was as rigidly fixed as in a vise; he could move his eyes, his chin—­no more.  Only his right arm was partly free.  “You must help us out of this,” he said to it.  But he could not get it from under the heavy timber athwart his chest, nor move it outward more than six inches at the elbow.

Searing was not seriously injured, nor did he suffer pain.  A smart rap on the head from a flying fragment of the splintered post, incurred simultaneously with the frightfully sudden shock to the nervous system, had momentarily dazed him.  His term of unconsciousness, including the period of recovery, during which he had had the strange fancies, had probably not exceeded a few seconds, for the dust of the wreck had not wholly cleared away as he began an intelligent survey of the situation.