A gleam, blue and uncanny, across the inky surface of some vast, mysterious, hidden sea.
Up rushed the lights at him; up rushed the sea of jetty black!
Stern shouted some wild, incoherent thing.
Crash!
A shock! A frightful impact, swift, sudden, annihilating!
Then in a mad and lashing struggle, all knowledge and all feeling vanished utterly. And the blackness of oblivion received him into its insensate bosom.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WHITE BARBARIANS
Warmth, wetness, and a knowledge of great weakness--these, joined with a singular lassitude, oppression of the lungs and stifling of the breath, were Allan Stern's sensations when conscious life returned.
Pain there was as well. His body felt sorely bruised and shaken. His first thought, his intense yearning wonder for the girl's welfare and his sickening fear lest she be dead, mingled with some attempt to analyze his own suffering; to learn, if possible, what damage he had taken in flesh and bone.
He tried to move, but found he could not. Even lying inert, as he now found himself, so great was the exertion to breathe that only by a fight could he keep the breath of life in his shaken frame.