He was still a good distance from the mouth of the cleft. He had heard the men on shore say that if once he were at the mouth of the cleft he should be past the worst, as he should then be in sight of the yacht, from which a rope could be thrown to him.
He now was cut and bleeding in a dozen different places.
Another thing, too, troubled him greatly. He had during the few last dives, tried to pull up some of the rope he towed after him, and he began to feel that the few small coils he had left would not be sufficient to reach the end of the passage.
What could one do in such a strait?
Desperate cases require desperate remedies. There were two coils of that rope round his body. If he unwound these he would be able to add considerably to his few remaining coils. He could tie the end of the line to his left wrist, and then he should be no more incapacitated than he had been with the coils.
To effect this, under existing circumstances, was an enormous labour. Wave after wave he dived under; time after time he rose again to his work.
At length the line was ready, and he had only now to face his desperate swim.
He had by this time begun to feel faint. His head was somewhat dizzy and confused from long and frequently holding his breath. He was bleeding from twenty small wounds, of not one of which he felt the pain. He was too desperate, too battered, too exhausted, to feel paltry pain. He knew he had to swim between one wave and another to the end of that passage, and for the time he thought of nothing else.
At last the moment came, and he thrust himself forward through that narrow channel with the supreme mental and physical concentration of a man whose whole being is absorbed in the determination to succeed.
He reached the end of the opening, and found himself in shallow water. With a dim hazy sense of triumph he staggered to his feet. He was conscious of smiling. Then he saw standing up before him a grey-green barrier of water, and then, for awhile, he was conscious of no more.