Kastle Krags: A Story of Mystery

by Absalom Martin

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The water surrounding the underground outlet was not of great depth--aninch or so over five feet--but the suction of the sink-hole wasirresistible. Once caught in those sinking waters meant to go down withthem; and a moth would have struggled to equal advantage. If fate hadgiven me the choice of fighting to save myself it would not have changedthe outcome in the least. The plank had floated too far away to seize.The water was deep enough that if, by a mighty wrench of muscles, I wasable to seize with my hands some immovable rock on the lagoon floor myhead would have been under water.

  Fate, however, didn't give me that fighting choice. Edith Nealman hadalready gone down, a single instant before. Loss of life itself couldn'tpossibly mean more. There was nothing open but to follow through.

  But while the trap itself was infallible, irresistible to humanstrength, there might be fighting aplenty in the darkness of the channeland beyond. The time hadn't come to give up. The slightest fightingchance was worth every ounce of mortal strength. And as the watersseized me I gave the most powerful swimming stroke I knew, a single,mighty wrench of the whole muscular system, in an attempt to get my lipsabove water for a last breath.

  Partly because I have always been a strong swimmer, but mostly by goodfortune, I won that instant's reprieve. I had already exhaled; and inthe instant that my lips were above the smooth surface of the lagoon Ifilled my lungs to their utmost capacity, breathing sharp and deep, withthe cool, sweet, morning air. The force of my leap carried me over anddown, the descending waters seized me as the sluice in a sink mightseize an insect, and slowly, steadily, as if by a giant's hand, drew meinto darkness.

  I had been drawn into the subterranean outlet of the lagoon, thepassageway of the waters of the outgoing tide. Life itself depended onhow long that under-water channel was. I only knew that I was headedunder the rock wall and toward the open sea.

  At such times the mental mechanics function abnormally, if at all. Iwas not drowning yet. The thousand thoughts and memories and regretsthat haunt the last moments of the lost did not come to me. The wholeconsciousness was focussed on two points: one of them a resolve to dowhat I could for Edith, and the other was fear.

  Besides the seeming certainty of death, it was unutterably terrible tobe swept through this dark, mysterious channel under the sea. Perhapsthe terror lay most in the darkness of the passage. It was a darknesssimply inconceivable, beyond any that the imagination could conjureup--such absolute absence of light as shadow the unfathomable cavernson the ocean floor or fill the great, empty spaces between oneconstellation and another. In the darkest night there is always somefine, almost imperceptible degree of light. Here light was a thingforgotten and undreamed of.

  The waters did not move with particular swiftness. They flowed rathereasily and quietly, like the contents of a great aqueduct. Perhaps itwould have been better for the human spirit if they had moved with arush and a roar, blunting the consciousness with their tumult, andhurling their victim to an instantaneous death. The death in thatundersea channel was deliberate and unhurried, and the imagination hadfree play. Already we three were like departed souls, lost in the still,murky waters of Lethe--drifting, helpless, fearful as children in thedarkness. It was such an experience that from sheer, elementalfear--fear that was implanted in the germ-plasm in darkness tragedies inthe caves of long ago--may poison and dry up the life-sustaining fluidsof the nerves, causing death before the first physical blow is struck.

  It was an old fear, this of darkened waters. Perhaps it was rememberedfrom those infinite eons before the living organisms from which wesprang ever emerged from the gray spaces of the sea. And I knew it tothe full.

  But I didn't float supinely down that Cimmerian stream. The race wascertainly to the swift. Knowing that the only shadow of hope lay inreaching the end of the passage before the air in my lungs wasexhausted, I swam down that stream with the fastest stroke I knew.Carried also by the waters, I must have traveled at a really astoundingpace, at momentary risk of striking my head against the rock walls ofthe channel.

  An interminable moment later my arms swept about Edith's form. I felther long tresses streaming in the flood, but her slender arms hadalready lost all power to seize and hold me. Had death already claimedher? Yet I could not give her the little store of life-giving air thatstill sustained me. Holding her in one arm and swimming with everyounce of strength I had, we sped together through that darkened channel.

  No swimmer knows the power and speed that is in him until a crisis suchas this. No under-water swimmer can dream of what distances he iscapable until death, or something more than death, is the stake forwhich he races. The passage seemed endless. Slowly the breath sped frommy lungs. And the darkness was still unbroken when the last of it wasgone.

  The trial was almost done. I could struggle on a few yards more, untilthe oxygen-enriched air in my blood had made its long wheel through mybody.

  What happened thereafter was dim as a dream. There was a certain periodof bluntness, almost insensibility; and then of tremendous stress andconflict that seemed interminable. It must have been that even throughthis phase I fought on, arms and legs thrashing in what was practicallyan involuntary effort to fight on to the open sea. The last images thatdrowning men know, that queer, vivid cinema of memories and regretsbegan to sweep through the disordered brain. There was nothing to dofurther. The trial was done. I gave one more convulsive wrench....

  And that final impulse carried me into a strange, gray place that thesenses at first refused to credit. It was hard to believe, at first,that this was not merely the gray borderland of death. Yet in an instantI knew the truth. I was heading toward light: the subterranean blacknessof the channel was fading, as the gloom of a tunnel fades as the trainrushes into open air. And a second later I shot to the surface of theopen sea.

  It was through no conscious effort of mine that I did not lose my lifein the moment of deliverance from the channel. At such times the bodystruggles on unguided by the brain; instinct, long forgotten andneglected, comes into its own again. As I came up my lips opened, I tooka great, sobbing breath.

  I must have submerged again. At least the blue water seemed to lingerover my eyes for interminable seconds thereafter. But there were nowalls of stone to imprison me now, and I again rose, and this time cameup to stay. The life-giving air was already sweeping through me, borneon the corpuscles of the blood.

  In an instant I had found my stroke--paddling just enough to keepafloat. Edith still lay insensible in my arms. Only a glance was neededto see where I was. A gray line back of me stretched the rock wall, andbeyond it the lagoon. I had been swept from the latter, through asubmarine water passage under the wall and a hundred yards into the opensea. Dell, who had gone through the channel ahead of us, was nowhere tobe seen.

  As soon as I had breath I shouted for help to the little file of men whowere already streaming through the gardens toward the lagoon. They mustcome soon, if at all. Tired out, I couldn't hold on much longer. In thepauses between my shouts I gazed at the stark-white face of the girl inmy arms. My senses were quickening now, and a darkness as unfathomableas that of the undersea passage itself swept over me at the thought thatI had lost, after all--that the girl I had carried through was alreadypast resuscitation.

  But the men on the shore had heard me now--I was aware of the splash ofoars and the hum of the motor of Nealman's launch. Some one shoutedhope--and already the dark outline of the motorboat came sweepingtowards me. It was none too soon.... The dead weight in my arms wasforcing me down, and my feeble strokes were no longer availing. But nowstrong arms had hold of me, dragging me and my burden into the boat.

  There are no memories whatever of the next hour. I must have lainunconscious on the sand of the shore while Nopp and his men fought thefight for Edith's life. At least I was there when at last, afterlifetimes were done, a strong hand shook my shoulder. Van Hope and Noppwere beside me, and they were smiling.

  "A piece of news for you," Nopp told me, happily. "You
put up a goodfight--and you'll be glad to know that your girl will live."