You did well, Captain Glover, to get
another paddle."

"Lord bless ye!" returned the skipper impatiently, "it's lucky I was
whittlin' while you was thinkin'. If we on'y had a boat-hook!"

From moment to moment the murmur came nearer and grew louder. It was
smothered and then redoubled by the reverberations of the canon, so that
sometimes it seemed the tigerish snarl of a rapid, and sometimes the
leonine roar of a cataract. A bend of the chasm at last brought the
voyagers in sight of the monster, which was frothing and howling to devour
them. It was a terrific spectacle. It was like Apollyon "straddling quite
across the way," to intercept Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of
Death. From one dizzy rampart to the other, and as far down the echoing
cavern as eye could reach, the river was white with an arrowy rapid
storming though a labyrinth of rocks.

Sweeny, evidently praying, moved his lips in silence. Glover's face had
the keen, anxious, watchful look of the sailor affronting shipwreck; and
Thurstane's the set, enduring rigidity of the soldier who is tried to his
utmost by cannonade.

CHAPTER XXVI.

The three adventurers were entering the gorge of an impassable rapid.

Here had once been the barrier of a cataract; the waters had ground
through it, tumbled it down, and gnawed it to tatters; the scattered
bowlders which showed through the foam were the remnants of the Cyclopean
feast.

There appeared to be no escape from death. Any one of those stones would
rend the canvas boat from end to end, or double it into a wet rug; and if
a swimmer should perchance reach the bank, he would drown there, looking
up at precipices; or, if he should find a footing, it would only be to
starve.

"There is our chance," said Thurstane, pointing to a bowlder as large as a
house which stood under the northern wall of the canon, about a quarter of
a mile above the first yeast of the rapid.

He and Glover each took a paddle. They had but one object: it was to get
under the lee of the bowlder, and so stop their descent; after that they
would see what more could be done. Danger and safety were alike swift
here; it was a hurry as of battle or tempest Almost before they began to
hope for success, they were circling in the narrow eddy, very nearly a
whirlpool, which wheeled just below the isolated rock. Even here the
utmost caution was necessary, for while the Buchanan was as light as a
bubble, it was also as fragile.

Sou