est fighting
chance was worth every ounce of mortal strength. And as the waters
seized me I gave the most powerful swimming stroke I knew, a single,
mighty wrench of the whole muscular system, in an attempt to get my lips
above water for a last breath.

Partly because I have always been a strong swimmer, but mostly by good
fortune, I won that instant's reprieve. I had already exhaled; and in
the instant that my lips were above the smooth surface of the lagoon I
filled my lungs to their utmost capacity, breathing sharp and deep, with
the cool, sweet, morning air. The force of my leap carried me over and
down, the descending waters seized me as the sluice in a sink might
seize an insect, and slowly, steadily, as if by a giant's hand, drew me
into darkness.

I had been drawn into the subterranean outlet of the lagoon, the
passageway of the waters of the outgoing tide. Life itself depended on
how long that under-water channel was. I only knew that I was headed
under the rock wall and toward the open sea.

At such times the mental mechanics function abnormally, if at all. I
was not drowning yet. The thousand thoughts and memories and regrets
that haunt the last moments of the lost did not come to me. The whole
consciousness was focussed on two points: one of them a resolve to do
what I could for Edith, and the other was fear.

Besides the seeming certainty of death, it was unutterably terrible to
be swept through this dark, mysterious channel under the sea. Perhaps
the terror lay most in the darkness of the passage. It was a darkness
simply inconceivable, beyond any that the imagination could conjure
up--such absolute absence of light as shadow the unfathomable caverns
on the ocean floor or fill the great, empty spaces between one
constellation and another. In the darkest night there is always some
fine, almost imperceptible degree of light. Here light was a thing
forgotten and undreamed of.

The waters did not move with particular swiftness. They flowed rather
easily and quietly, like the contents of a great aqueduct. Perhaps it
would have been better for the human spirit if they had moved with a
rush and a roar, blunting the consciousness with their tumult, and
hurling their victim to an instantaneous death. The death in that
undersea channel was deliberate and unhurried, and the imagination had
free play. Already we three were like departed souls, lost in the still,
murky waters of Lethe--drifting, helpless, fearful