as children in the
darkness. It was such an experience that from sheer, elemental
fear--fear that was implanted in the germ-plasm in darkness tragedies in
the caves of long ago--may poison and dry up the life-sustaining fluids
of the nerves, causing death before the first physical blow is struck.

It was an old fear, this of darkened waters. Perhaps it was remembered
from those infinite eons before the living organisms from which we
sprang ever emerged from the gray spaces of the sea. And I knew it to
the full.

But I didn't float supinely down that Cimmerian stream. The race was
certainly to the swift. Knowing that the only shadow of hope lay in
reaching the end of the passage before the air in my lungs was
exhausted, I swam down that stream with the fastest stroke I knew.
Carried also by the waters, I must have traveled at a really astounding
pace, at momentary risk of striking my head against the rock walls of
the channel.

An interminable moment later my arms swept about Edith's form. I felt
her long tresses streaming in the flood, but her slender arms had
already lost all power to seize and hold me. Had death already claimed
her? Yet I could not give her the little store of life-giving air that
still sustained me. Holding her in one arm and swimming with every
ounce of strength I had, we sped together through that darkened channel.

No swimmer knows the power and speed that is in him until a crisis such
as this. No under-water swimmer can dream of what distances he is
capable until death, or something more than death, is the stake for
which he races. The passage seemed endless. Slowly the breath sped from
my lungs. And the darkness was still unbroken when the last of it was
gone.

The trial was almost done. I could struggle on a few yards more, until
the oxygen-enriched air in my blood had made its long wheel through my
body.

What happened thereafter was dim as a dream. There was a certain period
of bluntness, almost insensibility; and then of tremendous stress and
conflict that seemed interminable. It must have been that even through
this phase I fought on, arms and legs thrashing in what was practically
an involuntary effort to fight on to the open sea. The last images that
drowning men know, that queer, vivid cinema of memories and regrets
began to sweep through the disordered brain. There was nothing to do
further. The trial was done. I gave one more convulsive wrench....

And that final impulse carr