ng it over in my mind in the quiet of my bunk aboard--"What
if he should swallow me?" Nor to this day can I understand how I escaped
the portals of his gullet, which of course gaped wide as a church door.
But the agony of holding my breath soon overpowered every other feeling
and thought, till just as something was going to snap inside my head I
rose to the surface. I was surrounded by a welter of bloody froth, which
made it impossible for me to see; but oh, the air was sweet!

I struck out blindly, instinctively, although I could feel so strong an
eddy that voluntary progress was out of the question. My hand touched
and clung to a rope, which immediately towed me in some direction--I
neither knew nor cared whither. Soon the motion ceased, and, with a
seaman's instinct, I began to haul myself along by the rope I grasped,
although no definite idea was in my mind as to where it was attached.
Presently I came butt up against something solid, the feel of which
gathered all my scattered wits into a compact knub of dread. It was the
whale! "Any port in a storm," I murmured, beginning to haul away again
on my friendly line. By dint of hard work I pulled myself right up the
sloping, slippery bank of blubber, until I reached the iron, which,
as luck would have it, was planted in that side of the carcass now
uppermost. Carcass I said--well, certainly I had no idea of there being
any life remaining within the vast mass beneath me, yet I had
hardly time to take a couple of turns round myself with the rope (or
whale-line, as I had proved it to be), when I felt the great animal
quiver all over, and begin to forge ahead. I was now composed enough to
remember that help could not be far away, and that my rescue, providing
that I could keep above water, was but a question of a few minutes. But
I was hardly prepared for the whale's next move. Being very near his
end, the boat, or boats, had drawn off a bit, I supposed, for I could
see nothing of them. Then I remembered the flurry. Almost at the same
moment it began; and there was I, who with fearful admiration had so
often watched the titanic convulsions of a dying cachalot, actually
involved in them. The turns were off my body, but I was able to twist a
couple of turns round my arms, which, in case of his sounding, I could
readily let go.

Then all was lost in roar and rush, as of the heart of some mighty
cataract, during which I was sometimes above, sometimes beneath, the
water, but al