What does the narrator in "The Pit and the Pendulum" discover when light enters his cell?
After literally wandering around in the darkness and just by a stroke of luck escaping plunging into the terrible pit that lies in the middle of his cell, the unnamed narrator sleeps, is given food, and then sleeps again through the drugged victuals that he is provided with. When he wakes up again, he finds his cell lit by a "wild, sulfurous luster," which allows him to see his cell and also to find out whether his initial thoughts and assessments of his prison were correct or not. Note what he discovered:
In its size I had been greatly mistaken. The whole circuit of its walls did not exceed twenty five yeards... I had been deceived, too in respect to the shape of the enclosure. In feeling my way I had found many angles and thus deduced an idea of great irregularity; so potent is the effect of total darkness...
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upon one arousing from lethargy or sleep! The angles were simply those of a few slight depressions, or niches, at odd intervals. The general shape of the prison was square.
In addition to having two of his central deductions about the size and shape of the prison proved wrong, the narrator sees that the walls of this prison were made of some kind of metal, covered in frightening shapes and images. The narrator also sees how in the centre of the cell "yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped."
In "The Pit and the Pendulum," what dim light illuminates the cell?
Initially when the narrator stumbles at the edge of the pit, he hears a door opening and closing above him. He sees a faint light and that illuminates the doom that had been prepared for him (the pit).
The narrator is eventually drugged and awakens to "a wild, sulphurous lustre, the origin of which I could not at first determine." However, upon escaping the pendulum, he realizes that the glow coming from behind the walls is really some kind of furnace used to heat the walls and give them a demonic glow. So he faces the final torture - be burned by the walls or pushed into the pit, as the walls shift and begin to close in on him.