en out
still another camera and was lying on his back, pointing it over our
heads at the boundary of grass and sky.

Hysteria burned my lungs as I continued the dreamlike battle upward.
Fear may have confused me, but it seemed as though the enveloping weed
was now positively rather than merely negatively hampering me. The
runners whipped around my legs in clinging spirals; the surface, always
soft, now developed treacherous spots like quicksands and while one foot
remained comparatively secure, the other sank deeply, tripping me.
Prone, the entangling fronds caught at my arms and neck; the green
blades, no longer tender, scratched my face and smothered my useless
cries for help. I sobbed childishly, knowing myself doomed to die in
this awful morass, drowned in an unnatural sea.

So despairing were my thoughts that I gave up all struggle and lay there
weakly crying when I noticed the grass relaxing its hold, I was sinking
in no farther; indeed it seemed the lightest effort would set me free. I
rose to my knees and finally to my feet, but I was so shaken by my
battle I made no attempt to continue forward, but stood gazing around me
marveling that I was still, even if only for a few more moments, alive.

"Belly belong you walk about too much, ay? Him fella look-look no got
belly." Gootes had given up his endeavor to reach the rim and apparently
struggled all the way over to impart, if I understood his _bechedemer_,
this absurd and selfevident piece of information.

"This is hardly a time for levity," I rebuked him coldly.

"Couldnt think of a better. Reality is escaped through one flippancy or
another. Rafe has his--" he waved his hand toward the still industrious
cameraman "--and I have mine. I bet W R has a telescope or a periscope
or a spectroscope somehow trained on us right now and will see to it the
rescue party arrives ten minutes after all life is extinct."

To tell the truth I'd forgotten our expedition was but a stunt initiated
by the _Daily Intelligencer_ to rebound to its greater publicity. Here
in this isolate cup it was difficult to conceive of an anterior
existence; I thought of myself, as in some strange manner indigenous to
and part of the weed. To recall now that we were here purposefully, that
others were concerned with our venture, and that we might reasonably
hope for succor extricated me from my subjective entanglement with the
grass much as the relaxation of my body a short while before freed me