uld have
lain still, and not got startled from their slumbers by the foot thus
treading upon them.

Perhaps it was a fortunate circumstance for them, that by such a
contingency they might be awakened, and that by such they _were_
awakened.

Otherwise their sleep might have been protracted into the still deeper
sleep--from which there is no awaking.

All four had begun to feel--if any sensation while asleep can be so
called--a sense of suffocation, accompanied by a heaviness of the limbs
and torpidity in the joints,--as if some immense weight was pressing
upon their bodies, that rendered it impossible for them to stir either
toe or finger. It was a sensation similar to that so well known, and so
much dreaded, under the name of _nightmare_. It may have been the very
same; and was, perhaps, brought on as much by the extreme weariness they
all felt, as by the superincumbent weight of the sand.

Their heads, lying higher than their bodies, were not so deeply buried
under the drift; which, blown lightly over their faces, still permitted
the atmosphere to pass through it. Otherwise their breathing would have
been stopped altogether; and death must have been the necessary
consequence.

Whether it was a genuine nightmare or no, it was accompanied by all the
horrors of this phenomenon. As they afterwards declared, all four felt
its influence, each in his own way dreaming of some fearful fascination
from which he could make no effort to escape. Strange enough, their
dreams were different. Harry Blount thought he was falling over a
precipice; Colin that a gigantic ogre had got hold of and was going to
eat him up; while the young Hibernian fancied himself in the midst of a
conflagration, a dwelling house on fire, from which he could not get
out!

Old Bill's delusion was more in keeping with their situation,--or at
least with that out of which they had lately escaped. He simply supposed
that he was submerged in the sea, and as he knew he could not swim, it
was but natural for him to fancy that he was drowning.

Still, he could make no struggle; and, as he would have done this,
whether able to swim or not, his dream did not exactly resemble the real
thing.

The sailor was the first to escape from the uncomfortable _incubus_;
though there was but an instant between the awakening of all. They were
startled out of their sleep, one after another, in the order in which
they lay, and inversely to that in which they had lain down.