This one is flush with the mouth
of a sloping gallery, narrow as the conduit of a sewer. In order to
penetrate the Refuge, one must first turn round and work backwards
with bent body into the shrunken pipe, and here the feet discover
steps. Every three paces there is a deep step.
Once inside you have a first impression of being trapped--that there
is not room enough either to descend or climb out. As you go on
burying yourself in the gulf, the nightmare of suffocation continues
that you progressively endured as you advanced along the bowels of
the trenches before foundering in here. On all sides you bump and
scrape yourself, you are clutched by the tightness of the passage,
you are wedged and stuck. I have to change the position of my
cartridge pouches by sliding them round the belt and to take my bags
in my arms against my chest. At the fourth step the suffocation
increases still more and one has a moment of agony; little as one
may lift his knee for the rearward step, his back strikes the roof.
In this spot it is necessary to go on all fours, still backwards. As
you go down into the depth, a pestilent atmosphere and heavy as
earth buries you. Your hands touch only the cold, sticky and
sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on all sides and
enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy breath
touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor, one
is assailed by a hot, unearthly clamor that rises from the hole as
from a sort of kitchen.
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