By a desperate exertion he extricated himself from under it--only
to swoon from the fresh anguish caused to him by the effort.
For a short time he lay insensible in his cold dark solitude. Then,
reviving after this first shock, he began to experience in all their
severity, the fierce spasms, the dull gnawings, the throbbing torments,
that were the miserable consequences of the injury he received. His arm
lay motionless by his side--he had neither strength nor resolution to
move any one of the other sound limbs in his body. At one moment his
deep, sobbing, stifled respirations, syllabled horrible and half-formed
curses--at another, his panting breaths suddenly died away within him;
and then he could hear the blood dripping slowly from his shoulder, with
dismal regularity, into a little pool that it had formed already by his
side.
The shrill breezes which wound through the crevices in the wall before
him, were now felt only on his wounded limb. They touched its surface
like innumerable splinters of thin, sharp ice; they penetrated his flesh
like rushing sparks struck out of a sea of molten lead.
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