The Second Book of Lankhmar

through the frozen turf, I can take deeper swaths. Pshawri, while you are feeling for the Mouser's head, tell us, coolly and clearly, all that your conscience will allow about your Maelstrom dive."

       "You think he may yet survive?" Cif asked falteringly, as though doubting her own wild hopes.
           "Madam," said Fafhrd, "I've known the Gray One for some time. It never does to underestimate his resourcefulness under adversity or coolth in peril."
         11
           Tight-packed upright in dirt, as if he had been honored with a Rimish pit burial, the Mouser became aware of a lump in his throat which, as he observed it, slowly grew larger and harder and began to involve or elicit twitching sensations in his cheeks and his mouth's roof, and like painful feelings or impulses toward movement, deep in his chest. A tension grew in that whole area and there began the faintest buzzing in his ears. All these sensations continued to increase without respite.
           He recalled that his last breath had been drawn while he still saw the moon.
           With a tremendous effort of will he fought down the urge to gulp in a great breath (which could fill his mouth with dust, set him coughing and gasping — not to be thought of!). He began very slowly (almost experimentally, you might say, except it had to be done — and soon!) to inhale, at first through his nostrils but swiftly switching to his barely parted lips, where his tongue could wet them and, moving from side to side, push back intrusive particles of earth, keep them at bay — somewhat like the approved technique for smoking hashish whereby one draws in thin whifflets of air on either side of the pipe to dilute the rich fumes. (Ah, mused the Mouser, the wondrous freedom of the tongue inside the mouth! No matter how the body were confined. Folk appreciated it insufficiently.)
           And all the while he was drawing cold sips of precious lifegiving air that had been stored between the particles of solid ground, and while letting no more dirt grains pass his lips than he could easily swallow. Why, in this fashion, he speculated, he might eventually move through the ground, taking in earth at his anterior end, perhaps — who knows? — extracting nutriment from it and then excreting it in a fecal trail.
           But then the lump in his throat caught his attention again. He blew out that breath (it took an appreciable time, there was resistance) and slowly (remember, always slowly! he told himself) took in a second breath.
           He decided after several repetitions of this process that if he worked at it industriously, losing no time but never letting himself be tempted to rush things, he could keep the lump in his throat (and the impulse to gasp) down to a tolerable size.
           So for the present, understandably, everything not connected with breathing became of secondary importance to the Mouser — nay, tertiary!
           He told himself that if he kept up the process long enough, it would become habitual, and then there would be room in his mind to think of other things, or at least of other aspects of his current predicament.
           A question then would be: Would he care to do so when the time came? Would there be profit or comfort in such speculation?
           As the Mouser did indeed slowly become able to attend to other matters, he noted a faint reddish glow within his eyelids. A few breaths later he told himself that could not be, it took sunlight to do that and here he had not even moon. (He would have permitted himself a small sob, except under his present circumstances the slightest breathing irregularity was not to be thought of.)
           But curiosity, once roused, persisted ("...even to the grave," he told himself with sententious melodrama), and after a few more breaths he parted his eyelids the narrowest slit, hedged by his lashes.
           Nothing attacked him, not the tiniest grain of sand, and there was indeed yellow light.
           After a bit he parted his lids still farther, while dutifully keeping up his breathing, of course, and surveyed the little scene.
           Judging by the way the view was brightly yellow-rimmed, the illumination appeared to be coming from his own face. He remembered the strange dream or night-incident Cif had told him of, in which she'd seen him wearing a phosphorescent half-mask with ovals of blackness where his eyes