If he had cried out, if he had struggled, it would have been better.

But to know that he was alive there, with every nerve and perception at its utmost stretch.

Oh! my God! Oh! my God! My limbs began to ache, and yet I dared not stir a muscle.

They ached horribly, or so I thought, and beneath this torture, mental and physical, my mind gave.
I remembered things: remembered how, as a child, I had climbed a tree and reached a place whence I could move neither up nor down, and what I suffered then.

Remembered how once in Egypt a foolhardy friend of mine had ascended the Second Pyramid alone, and become thus crucified upon its shining cap, where he remained for a whole half hour with four hundred feet of space beneath him.