This effort ended in a feeling of almost complete discouragement. His feet and legs were powerless. They might have been cut from his body, for all the good they were to him. He could not even raise himself sufficiently to look and see if they were still there.
Branches of the fallen tree pinioned him as securely to the ground as though he had been bound by iron cords. There was a stifled oppressed feeling in his chest, and it hurt him to draw a long breath.
His left arm, seemed dead. It possessed no more feeling than the lower part of his body. His right arm and hand seemed numb and almost useless at the start. The arm was doubled under him, and Bomba thought it must be broken.
But, by an agonized effort that made the sweat start from his brow, he managed at last to move it, ever so slowly and painfully, drawing it by degrees from under his prostrate body, until that much of him at least was free.
The blood surged back into the numbed arm, causing the boy unspeakable agony. But as circulation was resumed, feeling and power came back, and Bomba flexed and unflexed his fingers with a sensation of renewed life.
He was a helpless thing no longer. His right hand was clear. If he could reach the machete, drag it free and hack his way through the imprisoning branches!
But even as he groped for the machete Bomba discovered something that seemed to turn the blood in his veins to ice.
The water was rising in the pool!
Until now, this phase of his terrible danger had not struck Bomba. The painful freeing of his right hand, the fear that in the fall he might have sustained an injury that would cripple him and leave him a prey to the first beast of the jungle that might roam that way, the dread that he might never be able to free himself from those ruthless, imprisoning branches had blinded him to another and more imminent peril that threatened.
The rain was still torrential, and the pool that had been for weeks only a muddy depression in the jungle floor was now filling with water.