ompact circle, their poor flower-girt heads
nodding as the swift current curtsied their crafts. They hemmed me in
with desperate persistency as we spun through the ghostly starlight in
a swirling mass down to destruction! And in a minute we were so close
to the edge of the fall I could see the water break into ridges as it
felt the solid bottom give way under it. We were so close that already
the foremost rafts, ten yards ahead, were tipping and their occupants
one by one waving their arms about and tumbling from their funeral
chairs as they shot into the spray veil and went out of sight under a
faint rainbow that was arched over there, the symbol of peace and the
only lovely thing in that gruesome region. Another minute and I must
have gone with them. It was too late to think of getting out of the
tangle then; the water behind was heavy with trailing silks and
flowers. We were jammed together almost like one huge float and in
that latter fact lay my one chance.

On the left was a low ledge of rocks leading back to the narrow beach
already mentioned, and the ledge came out to within a few feet of where
the outmost boat on that side would pass it. It was the only chance
and a poor one, but already the first rank of my fleet was trembling on
the brink, and without stopping to weigh matters I bounded off my own
canoe on to the raft alongside, which rocked with my weight like a
tea-tray. From that I leapt, with such hearty good-will as I had never
had before, on to a second and third. I jumped from the footstool of
one Martian to the knee of another, steadying myself by a free use of
their nodding heads as I passed. And every time I jumped a ship
collapsed behind me. As I staggered with my spring into the last and
outermost boat the ledge was still six feet away, half hidden in a
smother of foam, and the rim of the great fall just under it. Then I
drew all my sailor agility together and just as the little vessel was
going bow up over the edge I leapt from her--came down blinded with
spray on the ledge, rolled over and over, clutched frantically at the
frozen soil, and was safe for the moment, but only a few inches from
the vortex below!

As soon as I picked myself up and got breath, I walked shorewards and
found, with great satisfaction, that the ledge joined the shelving
beach, and so walked on in the blue obscurity of the cliff shadow back
from the falls in the bare hope that the beach might lead by some way
in