The smugglers, when they caught me by using the false letter, meant to make my life. At the last moment they had decided not to kill me; not because of me, but because of my wife and child. But they wanted to punish me. Sop they had put me in a place where I was sure to feel the pain of coming death, without having to die. They had left me there hanging, with my eyes covered, over the edge of a shallow hole in the chalk, less than nine feet deep. I thought that I was hanging over the side of the big cliff, with a terrible death slowly creeping upon me. The bottom was never more than a yard from feet. When I fell, being a man of six feet in height, I was within a short distance of the ground. But I died a thousand deaths during that terrible hour I spent on Poet's Cliff.