Again my eyes opened and encountered the face of a friend between me and the blue sky. A pair of dark brown eyes, anxious and kind, looked down into mine, and I tried in vain to remember the name of that friend with the mane of flowing hair and the brown-bearded face. I knew him so well, but could not place him. After an effort I gave it up and closed my eyes with a sigh. Really it did not matter very much, for, just after being shattered on the granite floor at the far bottom of the abyss, it did not seem to signify what was the name that belonged to that face. I lapsed again into darkness, and I can dimly recollect having some such grim, absurd thought as this: that the fall on the rocks below had scattered my ideas and injured my brain in some way.
A third time I opened my eyes: the same position, the same face as before. I began to think there was something in it, and was prompted to put a question.
“Where am I?”
“Where are you?” replied the deep voice of Kahikatea—I knew him now—“Why, I hauled you out of the pool nearly half an hour ago. You came up from the bottom like a piece of limp seaweed. I thought you were dead at first.”
“So did I,” I returned wearily. “I thought I had gone down into the abyss, but it must have been the current through the basin that I was struggling against in the dark.”
Kahikatea looked down at me with a puzzled expression on his face, as if he thought I was wandering.
“Don’t talk now, old man,” he said presently. “You’ve a frightful bruise on the back of your head and a deep cut on the top; you’d better keep quiet.”
Thus admonished, I lay with my eyes half shut watching him, as he prepared a bandage to bind up my wounds—the one on the top and the one on the back, from both of which I could feel the blood still flowing.
“Now,” he said, when at last I was bandaged with something like a tenfold turban round what appeared to me a tenfold skull, “shall we camp here?”
“Rather not,” I returned; “they might see us from above and drop rocks on us.”