erhaps in one of the dungeons at Toledo (the inquisitor's prison). He decides to explore. However, he soon stumbles and collapses to the ground, where he falls asleep. Upon waking, the narrator finds a portion of water and bread, which he consumes. Then he resumes his tour of the prison, and notices that although most of his body has fallen on solid ground, most of his face is dangling. He realizes that in the center of the prison there is a circular pit. The narrator falls asleep again and wakes up to more water and bread. He imagines that he must have been drugged by the water because he immediately falls asleep after drinking. When he wakes up the next time, the prison is dimly lit. Here on the narrator goes into repeated lapses of unconsciousness. The light allowed him to clarify his understanding of the shape of his cell. The walls were not as he imagined, but were carved with designs of fiends and hideous depictions of the punishments of hell. There were not many pits but only one in the middle of the room.To find the depth of the pit, the narrator breaks a stone off of the wall of the pit and throws it in, listening to it fall. The pit is deep with water at the bottom. The narrator decides that the inquisitors must have left him to fall into the pit. The victim's greatest fear was not that he would see hideous forms or the henchmen of the Inquisition but that there would be nothing to see at all. His fears are confirmed. He sat in darkness. In that darkness, reason came to birth. At first, as a distraction from the utter emptiness, later as a means of survival, eventually, a prevention against insanity. Thought was not confined to remembering where he was and how he had arrived there. It took a pernicious turn down the by-ways of paranoia. Many stories of torture, like this one, set up a stage upon which the prisoner painted his future fate. As aforementioned in the beginning of the story where he was sick unto death.The narrat...
