rking double. "It is useless to
resist," Discouragement was murmuring in his brain, while his other
half was affirming desperately, "I do not want to die!... I must not
die!"

Thus he lived through a few seconds that seemed to him like hours. He
felt the brute force of hidden friction, then a blow in the abdomen
that arrested his course between the two waters, and grasping at the
irregularities of a projecting rock, he raised his head and was able to
breathe. The wave was retreating, but another again overwhelmed him,
detaching him from the point with its foamy churning, making him leave
in the stony crevices bits of the skin of his hands, his breast, and
his knees.

The oceanic suction seemed dragging him down in spite of his desperate
strokes. "It's no use! I'm going to die," half of his mind was saying
and at the same time his other mental hemisphere was reviewing with
lightning synthesis his entire life. He saw the bearded face of the
_Triton_ in this supreme instant. He saw the poet Labarta just as when
he was recounting to his godson the adventures of the old Ulysses, and
his shipwrecked struggle with the rocky peaks and waves.

Again the marine dilatation tossed him against a rock, and again he
anchored himself to it with an instinctive clutch of his hands. But
before this wave retired it hurled him desperately upon another ledge,
the refluent water passing back below him. Thus he struggled a long
time, clinging to the rocks when the sea overwhelmed him, and crawling
along upon the jutting points whenever the retiring water permitted.

Finding himself upon a projecting point of the coast, free at last from
the suction of the waves, his energy suddenly disappeared. The water
that dripped from his body was red, each time more red, spreading
itself in rivulets over the greenish irregularities of the rock. He
felt intense pain as though all his organism had lost the protection of
its covering,--his raw flesh remaining exposed to the air.

He wished to get somewhere, but over his head the coast was rearing its
stark bulk,--a concave and inaccessible wall. It would be impossible to
get away from this spot. He had saved himself from the sea only to die
stationed in front of it. His corpse would never float to an inhabited
shore. The only ones that were going to know of his death were the
enormous crabs scrambling over the rocky points, seeking their
nourishment in the surge; the sea gulls were letting themselves dr