At last he came to the place beyond which it would have been obviously unwise to advance, if he were to depend on the means hitherto adopted of stemming the torrent.
He was still a good distance from the mouth of the cleft. He had heard the men on shore say that if once he were at the mouth of the cleft he should be past the worst, as he should then be in sight of the yacht, from which a rope could be thrown to him.
He now was cut and bleeding in a dozen different places.
Another thing, too, troubled him greatly. He had during the few last dives, tried to pull up some of the rope he towed after him, and he began to feel that the few small coils he had left would not be sufficient to reach the end of the passage.
Desperate cases require desperate remedies. There were two coils of that rope round his body. If he unwound these he would be able to add considerably to his few remaining coils. He could tie the end of the line to his left wrist, and then he should be no more incapacitated than he had been with the coils.
To effect this, under existing circumstances, was an enormous labour. Wave after wave he dived under; time after time he rose again to his work.
At length the line was ready, and he had only now to face his desperate swim.
He had by this time begun to feel faint. His head was somewhat dizzy and confused from long and frequently holding his breath. He was bleeding from twenty small wounds, of not one of which he felt the pain. He was too desperate, too battered, too exhausted, to feel paltry pain. He knew he had to swim between one wave and another to the end of that passage, and for the time he thought of nothing else.
At last the moment came, and he thrust himself forward through that narrow channel with the supreme mental and physical concentration of a man whose whole being is absorbed in the determination to succeed.
He reached the end of the opening, and found himself in shallow water. With a dim hazy sense of triumph he staggered to his feet. He was conscious of smiling. Then he saw standing up before him a grey-green barrier of water, and then, for awhile, he was conscious of no more.
When the wave, which Cheyne had seen approaching, struck him, he was dashed violently against the rock behind. Fortunately he had got round the corner of the opening. Had he happened to be in the gap, he would to a certainty have been hurled through it into the sheltered water inside the reef, and the chances are that, if he had been thus taken unawares, he would have been killed in that gap. Another thing too, had been in his favour: the rock against which he had been thrown had a small cleft in it, and into this cleft he had been jambed by the force of the water. This fact prevented him from being knocked down and carried away.