The shrunken leather was almost as tough as metal and the fastenings were both intricate and sunken into each other in the drying process. For hours, with intervals where she lay back exhausted, wet with the perspiration of her efforts that, drying, chilled her to the bone in the low temperature, she worked until her fingertips were sore and bleeding, her nails torn and broken.
Once a rumbling roar sounded overhead and her overstrung nerves quivered until she shook like a leaf in a gale, cowering, dreading the unknown. It increased, fragments leaped beyond the black entrance and she knew it for an avalanche of the crumbled clay, loosened by the reaction of the temperature after the heat of the day. It might have walled her in. She shivered to a lively sense of her still present weakness.
At last the leather yielded, loosened, looped and unlooped. Her ankles were free though her legs were numb to the knees, cramped in the muscles of her calf with spells of agony until she managed to chafe out the contractions. Half hysterically now, she attacked the gag and at last she got it clear of her jaws, slipped it down to her neck, and drew in deep breaths to her lungs. There had been no place on the water-washed rock against which she could rub the thongs with any hope of severing them. The hide was tougher than the sandrock. For the present her hands had to remain tied until she could discover some flinty edge. She swung her legs over the edge of the niche and then a sudden faintness swooped down upon her and she had to
