. But octopuses don't wear boots. It was all in
a moment, of course.

"I felt myself sinking down again, and I threw my arms about to keep
steady, and the whole lot rolled free of me and shot down as I went up--"

He paused.

"I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what looked
like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went clutching one
another, and turning over, and both too far gone to leave go. And in
another second my helmet came a whack, fit to split, against the niggers'
canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.

"It was lively times I tell you? Overboard came Always with three spears
in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps kicking about me
in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw the game was up at a glance,
gave my valve a tremendous twist, and went bubbling down again after poor
Always, in as awful a state of scare and astonishment as you can well
imagine. I passed young Sanders and the nigger going up again and
struggling still a bit, and in another moment I was standing in the dim
again on the deck of the _Ocean Pioneer_.

"Gummy, thinks I, here's a fix! Niggers? At first I couldn't see anything
for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly understand how
much air there was to last me out, but I didn't feel like standing very
much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully heady, quite apart
from the blue funk I was in. We'd never reckoned with these beastly
natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good coming up where I was,
but I had to do something. On the spur of the moment, I clambered over the
side of the brig and landed among the weeds, and set off through the
darkness as fast as I could. I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted
back my head in the helmet and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary
bright green-blue above, and the two canoes and the boat floating there
very small and distant like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick
to squint up at it, and think what the pitching and swaying of the three
meant.

"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness--pressure something awful, like being buried in
sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing as it
seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit, I found
myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had