World Literature Classics Library: The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 23 Nos. 34 and 27 (2)
After a while he felt sunlight entering his brain.The brain is a wonderful chessboard, and just one square is enough to prove that man is superior to animals.Edmund's thoughts were still vague and imperceptible, but they all found their places on the chessboard again.He could think, and reason for his thoughts.At this time, he said to himself: "We must find a way to find out, but no one can be hurt. If this is a normal work of a worker, I only need to knock on my wall, and he will stop the work immediately. He has to find out. Who knocked and why. But he was working not only legally, but ordered, so he was at it again. If it was the other way around, the sound of my knocking on the wall would frighten him, he worried If he is found out, he won't do it any more, only at night, when he thinks everyone is lying down and asleep." Edmund stood up again at once, and now his legs did not tremble, nor did his eyes. it took.He went to a corner of the dark cell, dug out a stone that had been loosened by damp, returned to the place by the wall where the sound was most clearly heard, and knocked three times.

As soon as I knocked for the first time, the sound disappeared like a ghost.Edmund listened intently, and an hour passed, and two hours passed, without hearing any new sound, and Edmond was too frightened to make any further movement.Filled with hope, Edmond ate a few mouthfuls of bread and drank a few mouthfuls of water, and thanks to the strong health that nature had given him, he recovered almost as before.The day passed without any sound.As night fell, the voice still did not reappear. "A prisoner!" said Edmund to himself, with indescribable delight.The night passed without hearing a sound, and that night Edmund did not close an eye.

At the end of night and day, the guard came again to deliver food.Edmund, who had eaten up the previous meal, devoured the new ones which had been brought, and kept listening to the voice which never came again, and dreaded whether it should cease forever.He circled back and forth for more than ten miles in the dark cell, and hung himself up by the iron bars on the transom for several hours, using this long-forgotten exercise to restore the flexibility and strength of his limbs.In short, he was preparing to face his future fate. At this moment, he seemed to be a wrestler who was about to enter the ring, not only moving his arms, but also rubbing his body with grease.Moreover, during the interval of this crazy movement, he went to listen for the sound to come again.He was very impatient with the prisoner's caution, but how could people guess that the person who disturbed him was also a prisoner who was also eager to be free? Three days passed, what a terrible 72 hours, it was 1 minute 1 minute Get over it!
At last, one evening, shortly after the last look of the warden, Dantes put his ear to the wall for the hundredth time, and it seemed to him that an imperceptible vibration vibrated in his head from the soundless stone.He shrank back from the wall, allowing his shocked head to return to normal, and walked around the cell a few times, but put his ears to the original place.There was no longer any doubt that something was going on there, and the convict, seeing the danger in his method, had changed his method, probably now prying with a stick instead of a chisel, in order to proceed more safely.

Emboldened by this discovery, Edmond decided to help the stoic prisoner.He removed the bed first, because it seemed to him that the rescue work was being carried out in the direction behind the bed, and then looked around the cell for something that could be used to goug the wall, dig out the wet cement, and finally pry the stone out. .But nothing was found, he had no knife or any other sharp weapon, only the iron bar on the transom, but he had already experienced it many times, and the iron bar was so firmly nailed that there was no need to try whether it could be shaken or not.The only furniture in the cell was a bed, a chair, a table, a bucket and a jug.There are several iron tenons on the bed, but they are all firmly fixed on the wooden frame with screws. You need a screwdriver to unscrew the screws and remove the tenons.There was nothing to use on the table or chairs, and the handles on the buckets had been removed later.Dantès had only one way to smash the jug and pick a piece with a sharp angle to dig the wall.So he smashed the pitcher to pieces on the ground.He picked up two or three sharp pieces and hid them in the straw mattress, leaving the rest in a mess on the ground.The breaking of a jug is a perfectly natural accident and never arouses suspicion.

Edmund could work all night, but in the darkness of the cell it was difficult to do much work, he had to feel it with his hands, and he soon felt that the crude tool had been lifted from a harder stone. blunted.So he pushed the bed back to the old place and waited until dawn.Now that there is hope, man has become patient.All night he listened to the unknown man secretly digging his tunnel.

After dawn the guards came to the cell.Dantès told him that when he was holding the water jug ​​to drink water last night, the water jug ​​slipped and broke.While complaining, the guard went to get him a new one, and didn't bother to pick up the pieces on the ground.Not long after, the guard came back again, told the prisoner to be careful in the future, and then left.In the past, every time the prison door was closed and locked, Dantès felt that his heart was being squeezed, but now he listened to the creaking sound of the lock with indescribable joy.He heard the footsteps fade away until they finally disappeared, and then he rushed to remove the bed, and by the faint light of daylight entering the dark cell, he saw that his work was completely useless last night, because He dug out the stone itself and not the mortar on the side.In fact, the mortar has been damp and has become very soft.

Dantès was so happy that his heart was jumping. He saw that the dry part of the mortar had peeled off. Of course, the peeled off place was only the size of a sesame seed, but after half an hour, he scraped off almost a handful of ash.If you are a mathematician, it is not difficult to calculate. If you dig like this, if you don’t touch any big rocks, you can dig out a strip of two feet in height and width in two years. , a 325-foot passageway.Dantès then scolded himself, for all the time that had passed, always felt so long and difficult, but he did not think to use it for this job, and wasted time in anticipation, prayer and despair.He has been locked in this dark cell for six years. Even if he works very slowly, what job can't he do? Thinking of this, he added a new strong desire.

After three days of working with the utmost care, he finally scraped off the cement, leaving the stone bare.The wall was built of gravel, and for strength a large ashlar was built in at intervals.He dug out the cement to reveal this kind of ashlar, and now he had to figure out how to loosen it along the joints.Dantès tried to pick with his nails, but they were not strong enough.He took the pieces of the jug to pry it again, but it shattered when it was stuffed into the crack of the stone.After trying for an hour in vain, Dantès had to stand up, his head dripping with sweat, and his brow was covered with sorrow at the same time.Did you have to stop at the beginning? Did you just wait for the prisoner over there to get bored and give up? At this moment, he thought about it, stood there with a smile on his forehead, The sweat dried up immediately.

The guard brought soup to Dantès every day in a tin pan, which contained two servings of soup for him and another prisoner, because Dantès had already discovered that sometimes the guard divided it from him first, and sometimes from the other prisoner. Divide, so the soup in the pot is sometimes full and sometimes only half full.The frying pan has an iron handle, and it is this iron handle that Dantès took a fancy to. Even if he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, he would think it would be worthwhile.

The guards poured the soup from the pot into the basin used by Dantès, who drank it with a wooden spoon, washed the dishes, and used them the next day.That night, Dantès put the basin on the ground halfway between the cell door and the table, and the guard came in and stepped on it, crushing the basin.Dontès can't be blamed this time. Of course he shouldn't have thrown the basin on the ground, but the guard shouldn't have walked without looking at his feet.The guard had no choice but to mutter a few words, and then he looked around, looking for something to hold the soup.But Dantès only used such a basin to eat, and there was no place to pour soup.

"You may leave the pot here," said Dantès, "and bring me my breakfast tomorrow."

This idea fit the guard's desire not to move too much, and he didn't have to go up and down and up and up three times in a row, so he kept the pan.Dantès trembled with joy.That night he ate very fast, drank soup and ate meat—the soup usually comes with meat in prisons.Then he waited another hour, sure that the guard would not change his mind and come again.He removed the bed, took the frying pan, stuck the end of the iron handle into the gap between the ashlar and the gravel where the cement had been scraped off, and used it as a lever to lift it up.The stone moved slightly, and Dantès could see that there was a lot of progress now.Sure enough, an hour later, the stone was pulled out from the wall, leaving a hole more than one and a half feet in diameter.Dantès carefully gathered the lime together again, poured it on the four corners of the cell, and then covered the lime with some dust scraped from the ground with the broken jug.He had a valuable tool in his hands that night, by luck, or rather by a clever scheme, and he wanted to make the most of the night, so he continued digging furiously.

(End of this chapter)