d he slept. Chilled, soaked, starred--
his case desperate--down there in that clay-girt hole, he slept.

When he awoke it was quite dark, and the roar of the flood seemed to
have decreased considerably in intensity. Clearly the river had ran
down. How long he had been asleep he could form no approximate idea,
but the thought moved him to hold his watch to his ear even though he
could not see it. But it did not tick. The water had stopped it of
course.

Yes, the river had gone down, for no water was left in the cranny now.
Moreover, the entrance to his hiding-place was several feet above the
surface. The next thing was to get out. Simple it sounds, doesn't it?
But the sides of the cleft, wet and slimy from the rain, offered no
foothold. There were boughs hanging from above--but on clambering up
these, lo, the lip of the cleft was overhung with a complete
_chevaux-de-frise_ of _haakdoorn_, a mass of terrible fishhooks, turned
every way, as their manner is, so as to be absolutely impenetrable, save
to him who should be armed with a sharp cane knife with abundant room
and purchase for plying it. To an enfeebled and exhausted man, obliged
to use one if not both hands for holding on to his support and armed
with nothing at all, the obstacle was simply unnegotiable. He was at
the bottom of a gigantic natural beetle trap--with this difference that
there remained one way out: the way by which he had got in--the river to
wit.

From this alternative he shrank. The flood had very considerably
decreased; yet there was abundance of water still running down, quite
enough to tax the full resources of an average strong swimmer--moreover,
he knew that the banks were clayey and overhanging for a considerable
distance down--and over and above that, the rains would have bordered
the said banks, even where shelving, with dangerous quicksands. Yet
another peril lay in the fact that the stream was inhabited by the
evil-minded, carnivorous crocodile. It was one thing to choose the
river as a means to avoid an even surer peril still, it was quite
another to take to it in cold blood, for it might mean all the
difference between getting in and getting out again. But a further
careful investigation of his prison decided him that it was the only
way.

Letting himself cautiously down, so as to drop with as little splash as
possible, he was in the river once more, but somehow the water seemed
warmer than the atmosphere in his chille