attempt to open the case. He
must go back for a crowbar.

What else was there in this storehouse, thrust by Neptune from the
ocean bed? A chest of tea, seemingly undamaged. Three barrels of flour,
utterly ruined. A saloon chair, smashed from its pivot. A battered
chronometer. For the rest, fragments of timber intermingled with
pulverized coral and broken crockery.

A little further on, the deep-water entrance to the lagoon curved
between sunken rocks. On one of them rested the _Sirdar's_ huge
funnel. The north-west section of the reef was bare. Among the wreckage
he found a coil of stout rope and a pulley. He instantly conceived the
idea of constructing an aerial line to ferry the chest of tea across
the channel he had forded.

He threaded the pulley with the rope and climbed the tree, adding a
touch of artistic completeness to the ruin of his trousers by the
operation. He had fastened the pulley high up the trunk before he
realized how much more simple it would be to break open the chest where
it lay and transport its contents in small parcels.

He laughed lightly. "I am becoming addleheaded," he said to himself.
"Anyhow, now the job is done I may as well make use of it."

Recoiling the rope-ends, he cast them across to the reef. In such small
ways do men throw invisible dice with death. With those two lines he
would, within a few fleeting seconds, drag himself back from eternity.

Picking up the axe, he carelessly stepped into the water, not knowing
that Iris, having welded the incipient sago into a flat pancake, had
strolled to the beach and was watching him.

The water was hardly above his knees when there came a swirling rush
from the seaweed. A long tentacle shot out like a lasso and gripped his
right leg. Another coiled round his waist.

"My God!" he gurgled, as a horrid sucker closed over his mouth and
nose. He was in the grip of a devil-fish.

A deadly sensation of nausea almost overpowered him, but the love of
life came to his aid, and he tore the suffocating feeler from his face.
Then the axe whirled, and one of the eight arms of the octopus lost
some of its length. Yet a fourth flung itself around his left ankle. A
few feet away, out of range of the axe, and lifting itself bodily out
of the water, was the dread form of the cuttle, apparently all head,
with distended gills and monstrous eyes.

The sailor's feet were planted wide apart. With frenzied effort he
hacked at the murderous tentacles, but