What is happening in the first four lines of the story "The Pit and the Pendulum"? Describe the dramatic tension this opening creates.

The
narrator gives the impression, at the opening, of waking from a nightmarebut it's actually a new
nightmare that is beginning for him. The robed figures surrounding him are Inquisition judges
who have just pronounced his death sentence. What's unusual, perhaps even for Poe, is the way
the reader is thrown off balance by this particular start, in which it's
difficult to reconstruct what has already happened despite the vividness of
description:

I was sicksick unto death with that long
agony . . .

With "that long agony"? What could
he be alluding to? Only a prior knowledge of the Inquisition and its methods would enable us to
grasp that he has already been tortured. The effect is slightly ironic that
he is being unbound, and the reader must wonder, for what purpose now? We know that he's to be
killed, so why are they unbinding him? This mystery, in the context of dreamlikein which the
robed figures appear like ghosts with their exaggeratedly white lips and the...