The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths unguessable. The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold his breath.
Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended in frigid purgatory. Against his ribs something hammered like a racing engine. In his ears sounded a vast roaring, the deafening voices of a thousand waterfalls. His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of bursting wide.
Without warning expelled from those depths, he shot full half-length out of water, and fell back into the milky welter of the Assyrian's wake.
Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
Already the Assyrian, forging onward unchecked, had left him well astern, her progress distinctly disclosed by that infernal bluish glare spouting from her after deck.
She seemed absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could conceivably be that great liner, the Assyrian….
Temporarily a burning pain in his left shoulder drove all other considerations out of mind. The salt water was beginning to smart in the raw, superficial wound made by that assassin's bullet … back there in the stateroom … long ago….
Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by insensible degrees losing force.