Then he crept back into his chest, ate, and fell asleep.
Several days elapsed without the reappearance of Augustus Barnard.
Either he had not been able to get down into the hold again, or he had not ventured to do so, fearing to betray the presence of Arthur Pym, and thinking the moment for confessing everything to his father had not yet come.
Arthur Pym, meanwhile, was beginning to suffer from the hot and vitiated atmosphere of the hold.

Terrible nightmares troubled his sleep.

He was conscious of raving, and in vain sought some place amid the mass of cargo where he might breathe a little more easily.
In one of these fits of delirium he imagined that he was gripped in the claws of an African lion, (1) and in a paroxysm of terror he was about to betray himself by screaming, when he lost consciousness.
The fact is that he was not dreaming at all.

It was not a lion that Arthur Pym felt crouching upon his chest, it was his own dog, Tiger, a young Newfoundland.

The animal had been smuggled on board by Augustus Barnard unperceived by anybody--( this, at least, is an unlikely occurrence).