In Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, the first two dangers the narrator has to overcome are the titular pit and pendulum. When the narrator first wakes up in his cell, he is surrounded by absolute darkness, with no way of knowing what kind of place he was imprisoned in. As he carefully explores his cell, he trips, and when he hits the ground, he notices that most of his head is not touching anything: he had accidentally found the pit in the center of the floor, and he had narrowly missed falling into it.
At a later point, his water is drugged, and when he wakes up, he finds that he is strapped down so that he cannot move. At first, he does not consider it much of a problem, but as the pendulum slowly lowers towards him, he realizes what will happen to him if he does not move. In order to escape being slowly cut in half, he spreads what little is left of his food onto the strap holding him down and the rats chew through it, and it is just in time for him to move out of the way before the pendulum could do too much damage.
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