Clearly the great thing was to slip the clutch of the torrent which was patiently struggling to pluck him away and haul him down to the death which had been arranged for him. The Saint pulled himself up a few inches to test his muscles, and groaned, for he had been weakening faster than he realized. He let himself down again for a second's rest and set his teeth. Perhaps he prayed. . . . Then he took and held a deep breath, and heaved again. He edged up six inches ... seven ... eight.... There he stopped to breathe again. Even that slight drawing of his body from the clasp of the rushing water lessened the stress, and he tackled the next effort with a better heart. This time he brought his chin over the ledge, and one of his feet, scrabbling for help against the submerged face of the rock, lodged in a cranny and enabled him to get enough support from his legs partially to relax his arms and hands while he gathered strength for a final spurt.

He looked up, wondering now whether this strenuous climbing was only going to lead to a postponement of the end — to a cramped and painful clinging to the stone until his endurance petered out and he slipped and fell again into those evil waters. And then he had difficulty in stopping himself wasting precious energy in a resounding cheer, for he saw a wide black opening in the rock some ten feet over his head. That was certainly a recess where he could lie down and rest almost indefinitely. It seemed as if the kind gods were giving him all the breaks that afternoon.

"Not yet, my Tiger, not yet," muttered the Saint, with all his old indomitable jauntiness flooding back. "Shoals of people have sweated like Harry to bump me off, but I'm beginning to think it can't be done!"

The sight of that prospective refuge was enormously encouraging, and he felt new reserves of strength tingle into his body. He shifted his grip to another narrow angle of rock at arm's length overhead, and with a long pull he managed to hitch himself right out of the water and get his toes on to the ledge which had saved his life, while his hands moved up from crevice to crevice in the stone; so that when he paused again he was standing straight up, flattened out against the rock, with the river slinking past clear beneath him.

The opening he had seen was temptingly near now, and in his eagerness he nearly overreached himself. He flung his weight on to a jutting bit of rock without first testing it, and it broke away in his hand. He was left swinging by three fingers of his left hand in a hold barely an inch deep, and it was several nerve-racking and muscle-racking seconds before he found fresh holds. Thereafter he proceeded with more circumspection, and eventually scrambled over the rim of the ledge he had marked down with no further mishap.

He stretched himself out on his back and closed his eyes. Now that the immediate peril was past, reaction came. In the ordinary way his nerves were faultless, but perhaps the prefatory shock of the fall, followed by the awful sensation of being swirled helplessly down into the depths of the underground river, had between them succeeded in undermining some of his confidence. He felt utterly weary, and he was shaking in every limb — though this could have been largely due to the reaction of relaxing muscles and tendons. It was some time before he was able to roll over on his side and peer down at the treacherous, glimmering sheen of smooth water a dozen feet below. Unenviable as his position still was, the Saint contrived a twisted grin.

"Rotten luck, son," he croaked. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't want to die to-day."

Then in the nebulous light which permeated the clammy atmosphere, he turned to examine the possibilities of further progress. He had heard of such caverns as this, and knew that parts of the country were honeycombed with a vast network of such subterranean natural excavations. Some of these caves went further than even the most intrepid had ever dared to explore them: he remembered a story he had heard about Cheddar Caves, of a party which had set out to investigate a certain tunnel and had never returned, and he recalled how his fertile imagination had been fired with visionings of strange prehistoric beasts surviving in the bowels of the earth, and perhaps a race of semi-human beings similarly entombed, and how he had resolved one day to go in search of the lost explorers. But that would have been with all the armoury he wanted, suitable companions, ropes, and torches.... This, however, was not Cheddar, and he had nothing but his soaking clothes and the few things in his pockets. Yet, since there was no retreat toward the water, he must go the other way. He was certain that he had been carried too far down the stream for there to be any hope of a search party getting in touch with him.

Behind him what he had thought was simply the ledge proved to be a low gap in the face of the rock. He crawled a little way in, and felt again the helplessness of being without the flashlight which he ought to have had with him in any case. Still, it wasn't any use crying about it — you couldn't weep luminous tears — so the only thing to do was to carry on and hope for the best.

A distinct draught chilled his face as he wriggled along in the pitchy blackness, and his hopes began to rise again, tentatively. If the air circulated freely, it meant that somewhere there must be an outlet, and the grim doubt was whether, when he found it, it would prove to be an outlet he could use.

It was a vague sort of consolation to find that his wrist watch, which was guaranteed to stand any amount of rough handling on land or sea or air, had stood up to this last test. It was still ticking smoothly, and he could time his laborious progress by the luminous dial. The floor of the tunnel seemed to be practically level, and long-forgotten eroding waters had worn it flat and eaten the jaggedness off the irregularities which had survived, so that worming along on his stomach was not so arduous as it might have been. Once he cracked his head against a wall of rock right in his path, and so found that the passage took a twist to the right. After that, he felt his way gingerly, and thus circumnavigated the subsequent windings uninjured. Always he made sure that the air blew on his face, and by that means he saved himself the expenditure of much time and energy on following up a side branch which must have been a blind alley. He went on like this for over an hour, and at the end of that time, raising himself slowly to his feet, he found that the roof had receded far enough to allow him to proceed upright, which was an improvement.

Still he felt his way forward very carefully with feet and hands, for he had no desire to step over the edge of a small precipice or run his head against a sudden dip of the rock above. He kept one hand on the wall to steer by and worked patiently on.

The darkness had that pitchy intensity which torments the eyes and rasps the nerves to a shrieking rawness. He understood then as never before the full agony of blindness. Queer flashes of crimson rocketed across his sight, and the strain of transferring all his reliance to his sense of touch was working him up into a quivering torment of fraying ganglions. There was a terrible desire to sink down on the stone and crawl aimlessly about till sleep and forgetfulness came. Then this was replaced by the struggling of a childish terror to unthrone his reason and set him pounding helpless fists against the rock — to rush madly into the blackness till he crashed against another wall and was flung broken and screaming to the ground — to give up the attempt altogether and stand raving and cursing this false blindness, praying recklessly for the relief of death. For all the darkness that cloaks the world under the sky is as dazzling sunshine to the awful numbing terror of the darkness in the places under the earth where there has never been light since the beginning.