DONALD TRUMP - THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

AS THE PENDULUM SWINGS CLOSER AND CLOSER, DONALD TRUMP IS DISPLAYING MORE BIZARRE, MORE ERRATIC BEHAVIOR. 

NOW THAT GENERAL MICHAEL FLYNN HAS CONFESSED, THE TRUMP TEAM OF LIARS WILL PROBABLY START ACCUSING SPECIAL PROSECUTOR, ROBERT MUELLER AND DEMOCRATS OF COVERING UP SINS - SUCH AS ABUSING WOMEN. 

REPUBLICAN SYMPATHIZERS MAY COME OUT OF THE WOODWORK AND ACCUSE ADAM SCHIFF AND OTHERS OF SEXUAL ABUSE.

EXPECT IT.

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe

The story begins with the narrator receiving a death sentence from the court of the Inquisition for an unknown crime. He describes the implacable horror of the judges as they announce their decrees, although the narrator himself is too overwhelmed with fear to understand their words and falls into a faint while longing for death. He awakens in darkness, wondering how much of what he remembers was a dream and how much was reality. At first, he swings between terror and confusion, but he then tries to remember the events of the past few days before opening his eyes. Realizing that he is unbound and in a dark dungeon, he reasons that he must not have been at an auto-da-fe, the typical manner of execution for those who ran afoul of the Inquisition. Instead of the public prayer and ceremonies that would have led to an auto-da-fe execution, he has been probably been placed in one of the dungeons of Toledo, a place known for particularly cruel tortures and punishments.

 

Fearful, the narrator again faints, and after he awakes for the second time, he begins to explore the dungeon while wondering what his fate will be. He discovers a stone wall and tears off a rag from his robe in order to mark a starting point so that he will know when he has circumnavigated the room. However, he trips, falls, and is overtaken by sleep before making a full circuit, and upon waking, he finds that someone has given him a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. He finishes the circuit and, having counted his steps, he estimates the circumference of the cell to be about fifty yards, although he is unable to ascertain the shape of the prison. The narrator then decides to cross the center of the room, moving with increasing confidence until he fortuitously trips and lands prone at the edge of a circular pit. By dropping a stone from the masonry at the edge of the pit, he discovers that the pit is very deep and filled with water at the bottom. He hears a door closing and realizes that he has narrowly escaped his death.

 

The narrator's experience with the surprise of the pit is exactly in line with the horror stories he has heard of the Inquisition's punishments, and he decides that he would rather wait for death at the edge of the pit than risk the fall, deciding that the Inquisitors would not allow jumping into the pit to lead to an instantaneous death. Increasingly terrified, he remains awake for a long time but eventually falls asleep and wakes to again find bread and water by his side. However, the water is drugged, so he again falls asleep and wakes up to find himself in a slightly different situation. He can now see the cell by a sulfurous light and observes that the circumference of the room is only half what he estimated, since he must have nearly circumnavigated the dungeon before falling asleep and then accidentally backtracked the entire circuit after waking up. He also sees that the room is actually square, that the floor is made of the stone, and that the walls are made of large plates of metal and decorated with frightening figures. He can also see the circular pit in the center of the room.

 

 

The narrator observes his surroundings from the position to which he was moved while in his drugged sleep. He is securely bound on his back by a long strap that has been wound around his body and attaches him to a wooden framework so that he can only move his head and, to a lesser extent, his left arm, which he is able to use to take food from a nearby dish. However, he has not been provided with water, and the food has been heavily seasoned in order to produce the sensation of needing water. The ceiling, meanwhile, is thirty to forty feet above his head and plated with metal. One of the plates features a typical painting of the figure of Time, although Time appears to be holding an image of a pendulum rather than the more commonly associated scythe.

 

After a moment, the narrator notices that the pendulum is actually not an image and is in fact a pendulum sweeping slowly from side to side over a small trajectory. Confused, he observes it for several minutes but eventually turns his attention to the large rats that have been released into the dungeon. For some thirty or sixty minutes, he concentrates on scaring the rats away from his food, but when he again looks at the ceiling, he sees that the arc of the pendulum's swing is about a yard larger, that the pendulum is swinging faster, and that, most importantly, the pendulum has visually descended. The pendulum, he now sees, has a razor-like edge of steel and is attached to the ceiling by a brass rod. The narrator concludes to his horror that because he has managed to avoid their preferred form of punishment in the form of the surprise pit, his torturers have decided to find an alternative.

 

For an interminable period of time, the narrator watches the pendulum gradually swinging closer and closer to his body. At first, he prays for a swifter descent and, losing mental control, struggles to force himself closer to the blade, but then he suddenly calms down and smiles at the pendulum. Finally, he again faints; the narrator guesses that because the position of the pendulum had not noticeably changed, it must not have been an extended faint, but he also conjectures that had it been a long faint, his captors - who are clearly observing him closely - could have stopped the descent of the blade. He eats the remainder of the rat-plundered food and for a brief moment feels hopeful. On the edge of madness, he tries to hold on to the sensation of hope while observing that the blade was designed to cut horizontally across his heart. As the blade swings closer, he waits in a frenzied anguish for the blade to begin fraying his robes and vainly struggles to free his arm.

 

As his mental tension increases, he struggles between hope and despair, losing briefly to despair as he thinks about the tangled strap that restrains him. Nevertheless, he manages to pull his thoughts together for long enough to find a potential solution. He spreads the remains of the oil and spice from his food onto the strap and lies still so that the hungry rats swarm his body in order to eat away at the strap. By the time the rats free him from his bindings, the pendulum has already begun to slice at the robes above his chest, but he is able to break free away from the blade. As soon as he does, the pendulum is retracted to the top of the ceiling, proving to the narrator the closeness with which he is watched. He realizes quickly that something has changed in his prison and finds the source of the cell's light at a fissure at the base of the walls. An outside fire is heating his chamber, and the narrator rushes to the edge of the pit, weighing the cool water of the pit against the growing heat of the prison cell. He leaves the edge in a fit of tears.

 

The cell heats up further and begins to flatten into a narrowing diamond so that the narrator will eventually be forced into the pit. The narrator clings to the heated walls but is ultimately forced to the brink of the pit and screams in despair. As he is about to fall in, however, he hears voices and trumpets as the walls return suddenly to their normal shape. Having just led the French army into Toledo and beaten back the forces of the Inquisition, General Lasalle rushes in and catches the fainting narrator by the arm before he falls into the pit. The ordeal is over.

BUT WILL IT BE OVER BEFORE THE FIRST NUCLEAR BOMB LANDS?