It was an old fear, this of darkened waters. Perhaps it was remembered from those infinite eons before the living organisms from which we sprang ever emerged from the gray spaces of the sea. And I knew it to the full.
But I didn’t float supinely down that Cimmerian stream. The race was certainly to the swift. Knowing that the only shadow of hope lay in reaching the end of the passage before the air in my lungs was exhausted, I swam down that stream with the fastest stroke I knew. Carried also by the waters, I must have traveled at a really astounding pace, at momentary risk of striking my head against the rock walls of the channel.
An interminable moment later my arms swept about Edith’s form. I felt her long tresses streaming in the flood, but her slender arms had already lost all power to seize and hold me. Had death already claimed her? Yet I could not give her the little store of life-giving air that still sustained me. Holding her in one arm and swimming with every ounce of strength I had, we sped together through that darkened channel.
No swimmer knows the power and speed that is in him until a crisis such as this. No under-water swimmer can dream of what distances he is capable until death, or something more than death, is the stake for which he races. The passage seemed endless. Slowly the breath sped from my lungs. And the darkness was still unbroken when the last of it was gone.
The trial was almost done. I could struggle on a few yards more, until the oxygen-enriched air in my blood had made its long wheel through my body.
What happened thereafter was dim as a dream. There was a certain period of bluntness, almost insensibility; and then of tremendous stress and conflict that seemed interminable. It must have been that even through this phase I fought on, arms and legs thrashing in what was practically an involuntary effort to fight on to the open sea. The last images that drowning men know, that queer, vivid cinema of memories and regrets began to sweep through the disordered brain. There was nothing to do further. The trial was done. I gave one more convulsive wrench....
And that final impulse carried me into a strange, gray place that the senses at first refused to credit. It was hard to believe, at first, that this was not merely the gray borderland of death. Yet in an instant I knew the truth. I was heading toward light: the subterranean blackness of the channel was fading, as the gloom of a tunnel fades as the train rushes into open air. And a second later I shot to the surface of the open sea.
It was through no conscious effort of mine that I did not lose my life in the moment of deliverance from the channel. At such times the body struggles on unguided by the brain; instinct, long forgotten and neglected, comes into its own again. As I came up my lips opened, I took a great, sobbing breath.
I must have submerged again. At least the blue water seemed to linger over my eyes for interminable seconds thereafter. But there were no walls of stone to imprison me now, and I again rose, and this time came up to stay. The life-giving air was already sweeping through me, borne on the corpuscles of the blood.