He pulls again, he pulls with
force; the cord resists! Fire mounts to his brain; his sluggish blood
is quickened; his heart and temples beat violently; his fever returns,
but only to restore to him, at this decisive moment, his former vigor.
He hastily digs new steps in the interstices of the rock; with his
hands suspending himself to the lasso, assisted by his feet, by his
knees, sometimes turning, grasping the projecting roots, the angles of
his wall, he at last reaches the top of the cliff.
Suddenly he feels the lasso stretch, as if about to break; a mist
passes over his eyes: his head becomes dizzy, the cord escapes his
grasp. But, by a mechanical movement, he has seized one of the highest
projections of the tunnel, he holds it, he climbs,--he is saved.
And during this perilous ascension, absorbed in the difficulties of
the undertaking, attentive to himself alone, staggering, with a
buzzing sound in his ears, he has not heard a sorrowful, lamentable
moaning, not far from him.
Dragging hither and thither after her the rope of leather and fibre of
aloes, Marimonda, rather, doubtless, by chance than by calculation,
had enlaced it around the trunk of the same tree which the night
before, during the storm, had agitated its dishevelled branches above
the deep couch of the dying man.
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