No sound escaped either now, but hard and concentrated breathing; it was a struggle for death or for life, and each scarcely paused a moment to glare into the other's eyes. Fiercely as the first of his race and name is said to have grappled with the wolf in the wilds of Stocket Forest, did Skene grapple with his athletic adversary.
Near the edge of the rocks that overhung the river at the end of the chasm, backwards and forwards they swayed, locked in a savage and deadly grasp. Finding that every effort to uproot Skene, to get him off his legs and throw him, so that he might resort to strangulation, proved unavailing, he strove to drag him towards the Nile, in the hope of flinging him down the bank; but whether the said bank was a precipice of a hundred feet or only the drop of a few yards Skene knew not, and in the blind fury of the moment, with pursuers coming on, never thought of it.
Nearer and nearer the verge, by sheer strength of muscle and weight of limb, the Greek was dragging him, and already some shouts in English ascending from the bosom of the river evinced that the struggle was visible from the boats; but Skene now gave up all hope of being able to conquer his opponent or free himself from his terrible grasp, and had but one thought—that if he perished, Pietro Girolamo should perish too!
Now they were at the edge, the verge of what was evidently a precipice of considerable height, and more fiercely and breathlessly than ever did they wrench, sway, and grasp each other, their arms tightening, as hatred, rage, and ferocious dread grew apace together—the clamorous dread that one might escape the doom he meant to mete out to or compel the other to share with him.
As last a species of gasping sigh escaped them. Both lost their footing at once and fell for a moment through the air; they then crashed upon bushes and stones, and without relaxing their grasp rolled over and over each other with awful speed down a precipitous steep, sending before and bringing after them showers of gravel and little stones, crashing through mimosa bushes and other scrub, maimed, bruised, and covered with each other's blood, for some forty feet or so.
Mad was the thirst for each other's destruction that inspired these two men; for Malcolm Skene, by the peril and circumstances of the time, was reduced to the level of the Ionian savage with whom he fought—if fighting it could be called.
Another moment and they had rolled into the Nile—a fall, ere it was accomplished, that in a second seemed to compress and contain the epitome of life, and down they went under the surface, cleaving the water at a rate that seemed to take all power out of heart and limb, and, parting, they rose at a little distance from each other.
Faint and breathless Skene went down again, water bubbling in his eyes, choking in his throat, and all breath had left him ere he rose to the surface again, and saw Girolamo clinging to a rock round which swept the beginning of a rapid. He was visible for a moment only; exhaustion made him relax his hold. He sank, rose again only to sink; then a hand was visible once or twice above the water as he was swept away into eternity by the fierce current that bubbled round the sun-baked rocks.
Then Skene felt hands laid upon him, and while English voices and exclamations came pleasantly to his half-dulled ears, he was dragged by soldiers on board one of the boats, where he lay so completely exhausted as to be almost insensible; and he had not fallen into the river a moment too soon, for, just as he did so, a group of armed Arabs, the followers of Moussa Abu Hagil, crowned with a spluttering fire of musketry, and with wild gesticulations, the rocks above the Nile.