With my left hand I began caressing the mane of my horse, all the while
letting him hear my voice. The poor animal replied to my caresses by a
plaintive neighing; then, not to alarm him abruptly, my hand followed,
by little and little, the curve of his nervous neck, and finally rested
upon the spot where the last of the vertebrae unites itself with the
cranium. The horse trembled; but I calmed him with my voice. When I felt
his very life, so to speak, palpitate in his brain beneath my fingers,
and leaned over toward the wall, my feet gently slid from the stirrups,
and, with one vigorous blow, I buried the pointed blade of my knife in
the seat of the vital principle. The animal fell as if thunderstruck,
without a single motion; and, for myself, with my knees almost as high
as my chin, I found myself a horseback across a corpse! I was saved! I
uttered a triumphant cry, which was responded to by the colonel, and
which the abyss re-echoed with a hollow sound, as if it felt that its
prey had escaped from it. I quitted the saddle, sat down between the
wall and the body of my horse, and vigorously pushed with my feet
against the carcass of the wretched animal, which rolled down into the
abyss. I then arose, and cleared, at a few bounds, the distance which
separated the place where I was from the plain; and, under the
irresistible reaction of the terror which I had long repressed, I sank
into a swoon upon the ground. When I reopened my eyes, the colonel was
by my side."



A SKETCH

FROM "LIFE ON THE OCEAN."

Carthagena lies in the parallel of ten degrees twenty-six minutes north,