at he was on the edge of taking the
flight before he had settled all his plans. Opium has more effect on
the white man than the black. Peroo was only comfortably indifferent
to accidents. "She cannot live," he grunted. "Her seams open already.
If she were even a dinghy with oars we could have ridden it out; but a
box with holes is no good. Finlinson Sahib, she fills."

"_Accha!_ I am going away. Come thou also."

In his mind Findlayson had already escaped from the boat, and was
circling high in air to find a rest for the sole of his foot. His
body--he was really sorry for its gross helplessness--lay in the
stern, the water rushing about its knees.

"How very ridiculous!" he said to himself, from his eyrie; "that--is
Findlayson--chief of the Kashi Bridge. The poor beast is going to be
drowned, too. Drowned when it's close to shore. I'm--I'm on shore
already. Why does n't it come along?"

To his intense disgust, he found his soul back in his body again, and
that body spluttering and choking in deep water. The pain of the
reunion was atrocious, but it was necessary, also, to fight for the
body. He was conscious of grasping wildly at wet sand, and striding
prodigiously, as one strides in a dream, to keep foothold in the
swirling water, till at last he hauled himself clear of the hold of
the river, and dropped, panting, on wet earth.

"Not this night," said Peroo in his ear. "The Gods have protected us."
The lascar moved his feet cautiously, and they rustled among dried
stumps. "This is some island of last year's indigo crop," he went on.
"We shall find no men here; but have great care, Sahib; all the snakes
of a hundred miles have been flooded out. Here comes the lightning, on
the heels of the wind. Now we shall be able to look; but walk
carefully."

Findlayson was far and far beyond any fear of snakes, or indeed any
merely human emotion. He saw, after he had rubbed the water from his
eyes, with an immense clearness, and trod, so it seemed to himself,
with world-encompassing strides. Somewhere in the night of time he had
built a bridge--a bridge that spanned illimitable levels of shining
seas; but the Deluge had swept it away, leaving this one island under
heaven for Findlayson and his companion, sole survivors of the breed
of man.

An incessant lightning, forked and blue, showed all that there was to
be seen on the little patch in the flood--a clump of thorn, a clump of
swaying, creaking bamboos, and a gray, gnarl