Slowly my thoughts fumbled around the situation.  Then, as by force of habit, my hand went to my pocket.  God be praised!  I had matches, and I cried with thankfulness, out of very weakness.  But I still sat on in the dark for a while.  I felt very tired.  After thinking about it for a long time, I took out my precious match-box, which unconsciously I had been hugging with my hand, and struck a light, looking about me in a dazed fashion.  The match burnt down to my fingers, and I threw it away, as the flame stung me.  I had seen something of my surroundings, enough to last my tired brain for a minute or two.  I was at the bottom of a sort of crevasse, a narrow cleft in the rocks which continued on in a slanting downward chasm into the darkness.  It was a natural corridor, with a floor of white sand.  The sand had accounted for my coming off without any broken bones.

After another minute or two, I struck another match, and lo! another miracle.  There was my lantern lying beside me.  The glass of it was broken, but that was no matter.  As I lit the wick, my hopes leapt up with the flame.  At the worst, I had light.

“Lux in tenebris!” I seemed to hear the voice of the “King”—­inextinguishably gay; and, at the thought of him, my inertia passed.  What could he be thinking?  His daughter spirited away, and now I too mysteriously vanished.  What was happening up there, all this time?  Up there!  How far was it to “up there”?  How far had I fallen?  All about me was so terribly still and shut away.  I could believe myself at the very centre of the earth, and it seemed ages ago, aeons of time, since I had last seen the “King.”  What time was it?  I felt for my watch.  I found but the wreck of it.  It was the only thing that had suffered.  It was smashed to smithereens.

Then I moved myself again, and, taking up the lantern, raised it aloft, but the chasm down which I had fallen went up and up in a slanting direction, and lost itself in darkness.  Bringing the lantern down to the level again, I examined the rock corridor.  Behind me, as before me, it continued—­a long, deep fissure, splitting its way through the earth.  I limped my way along some yards of the section that lay before me, but it seemed to me that it was growing narrower as it went on, as though it were coming to an end; and indeed, after a while, I came to a place too narrow for me to pass.

I swung my lantern aloft, seeking the possibilities of a climb, but everywhere it was sheer, without a ledge or protuberance of any kind to take advantage of, and it was utterly devoid of vegetation—­not a sign of a friendly shrub or root to hold by.