although we had baulked him of it for the present.

The dreadful exhaustion of reaction from the late excitement now seized
upon the rest of us, and one by one we wearily sank down again into our
respective places in the boat. Then I told the men by what means I had
obtained temporary relief during the night, advising them to try the
same method, and presently we were all sitting in our wet clothes,
ravenously chewing away upon strips of our shoe leather. But nobody
thought of again having recourse to the oars; indeed our strength had
now so completely melted away that I doubt very much whether a single
man in the whole of that boat's company--saving, perhaps, myself--could
have laid out an oar unaided.

The blazing hot, breathless day lagged slowly along, every hour seeming
to spin itself out to a more intolerable length than the last, and with
every moment our suffering grew more nearly unbearable, until toward
evening I seemed to be going mad, for the most fantastic ideas went
crowding through my whirling brain, and I now and then caught myself
muttering the most utter nonsense, now laughing, now weeping and moaning
like a child. Anon I found myself kneeling in the stern-sheets and
supporting my body upon one arm as I gesticulated with the other while
apostrophising that demon shark--or were there two of them again, or
three? I remember laughing to myself uproariously, noticing at the same
time, with a sort of wonder, what a wild, eldritch, gibbering laugh it
was, at the thought of how those sharks--yes, there _were_ three; I was
certain of it--would jostle and hustle each other, in their greedy haste
to get at me, were I to simply stand up and topple over the gunwale into
the water. And how easily--how ridiculously easily--I might do it too.
I laughed again at the absurdity of taking so much trouble and enduring
such frightful extremity of suffering to preserve a life that might be
so readily got rid of, and wondered dully why I had been so foolish as
to go through it all when it might be put an end to in a single moment.
Why, I asked myself, should I remain any longer in the boat with that
great, red, flaming eye staring so mercilessly down upon me out of that
brazen sky, when the laughing blue water smiled so temptingly up into my
eyes and wooed me to its cool embrace? There would be no more hunger
and thirst down there, no relentless sun to torment me century after
century by darting his fiery beams down up