CHAPTER XXIV
The water surrounding the underground outlet was not of great depth—an inch or so over five feet—but the suction of the sink-hole was irresistible. Once caught in those sinking waters meant to go down with them; and a moth would have struggled to equal advantage. If fate had given me the choice of fighting to save myself it would not have changed the outcome in the least. The plank had floated too far away to seize. The water was deep enough that if, by a mighty wrench of muscles, I was able to seize with my hands some immovable rock on the lagoon floor my head would have been under water.
Fate, however, didn’t give me that fighting choice. Edith Nealman had already gone down, a single instant before. Loss of life itself couldn’t possibly mean more. There was nothing open but to follow through.
But while the trap itself was infallible, irresistible to human strength, there might be fighting aplenty in the darkness of the channel and beyond. The time hadn’t come to give up. The slightest 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 as children in the darkness. It was such an experience that from sheer, elemental fear—fear that was implanted in the germ-plasm in darkness tragedies in the caves of long ago—may poison and dry up the life-sustaining fluids of the nerves, causing death before the first physical blow is struck.