Ducane had said that he would swim to the cave because that was the only thing he could think of to do. He had vaguely imagined that he would easily be able to find Pierce and would use his authority to make the boy come out. Now everything seemed different. The sheer solitude of the sunlit bay, followed by this plunge into the cool half-dark, had already done something to him. He felt removed from reality. He called again. He became aware that the sea was now running fairly fast in through the cave mouth and had already carried him farther away from the entrance. He swam a few strokes back to make sure he could easily get out again. Then he allowed the current to carry him a little farther on in the darkness, still shouting at intervals.
As Ducane swam in the great pool of the cavern he had a sudden mental image of the picture in Through the Looking Glass of Alice and the mouse swimming in the Pool of Tears.
He had a clear memory of the grace with which Alice swam, her dress so elegantly spread out in the water. Something about that picture must have affected him when he was a child. Girls and their dresses. He called again. Silence.
He could see more clearly now in the brown tea-coloured light of the cavern, and discerned to his left a blackness in the cavern wall which seemed like a hole. He swam towards it, breast stroke now, keeping his head well up and listening.
Then it was as if someone had touched his head very lightly with a black cushion and he had swum in through the entrance of the hole.
Ducane was not afraid of the sea, but he was very much afraid of confined spaces. He back-paddled, touching the wall.
Then he called out. A very very faint cry answered. Ducane let the water sweep him back against the wall. He listened to the silence which was edged by the faint hiss of the moving water.
He turned away from the dim light behind him and looked into the jet dark and called again. He had not imagined it. The faint cry replied, eerie, distant, lost.
Ducane began to have a new kind of picture. He saw Pierce somewhere at the end of the tunnel with cramp perhaps, hurt in some way, trapped in some way, calling out desperately for help. At the same time, as if the darkness itself had become a screen upon which the contents of his mind could be projected physically, he saw before him with absolute clarity the sallow anxious face of Mary Clothier. 'I'm coming!' he shouted, and launched out into the current.
The faint light behind him diminished and went out. The current now took him so quickly along that he scarcely needed to swim. The tunnel seemed to be turning sharply. Ducane caught hold of something, wet smooth rounded rock, and tried to hold on. Then he was whirled away by the current and twisted around as if some great hand had spun him between its fingers. He swallowed some water.
Ducane felt panic. He reached out trying to find something to hold on to. He was afraid he might at any moment strike his head violently against some projection of rock. The thick shutin darkness frightened him. He struck his knee against a knob of rock just beneath the water and managed by resting against it and bracing his hands against the side of the tunnel to stop himself from moving. He called out out as loudly as he could: 'Pierce! Pierce!'
'Pierce! Pierce!'
It's an echo, Ducane said to himself. He said it coldly, utter= ing it articulately inside his head. He called again, 'Hello!'
'Hello!' I must get back, he thought. He let go of his rock and struck out vigorously to swim back the way he had come. But the strong current seized hold of him and hurried him with it, on, on.
Ducane was now very much afraid. He fought his way to the wall where the water seemed less swift and tried to cling to it.
The absolute darkness confused his sense of direction, confused his sense of his body. He had to use mental imagery to tell himself how to swim. He thought to himself, strength will do it, every bit of strength I have, supernatural strength. He began half to edge, half to swim, along the wall of rock in what seemed to be the direction from which he had come. He moved very slowly, but at least now he seemed to be moving.
He thought he was coming back to the place where the tunnel turned. For a moment he seemed entirely out of the current.
Then he sensed a change of direction and the tunnel seemed airier, wider, and the force of the water less strong. He must be nearly back in the main cavern.
Ducane felt an enlargement and the tunnel wall, which he had been touching, disappeared. He could swim quite easily now. He took several strokes. He must have reached the main cavern. But it was dark now. There was a faint greenish line ahead of him of subaqueous light. But the low sun-streaked gap of the cavern mouth was not to be seen. The cave was closed.
Now there were new pictures. Ducane seemed to have been swimming for some time. Coloured images appeared upon the darkness with such brightness that it seemed as if he must be able to see the cavern walls by their light. He saw Alice standing upon the mantelpiece, at the moment when the looking glass begins to turn into a silvery gauze through which she can pass. He saw Mary Clothier's face, no longer anxious but looking tender and sad. We have both died, he thought, and then could not recall who 'we' were. Himself and Pierce of course. He called out to Pierce at intervals but received no reply. The sound echoed close about him as if unable to penetrate further, but telling him at least that the channel along which he was swimming was still reasonably large.
He was beginning to feel cold and his limbs were very tired, but the swimming had now become automatic, as if he were in a natural element. Something very dreadful moved along with him, just above his head, a noiseless black crow made of ectoplasm.
It was fear, panic fear, such as would disfigure a man and make him disintegrate and scream. Ducane was very conscious of its presence. He tried to breathe slowly and evenly.
He pictured the cavern rising, rising, into the dry safety of the cliff side. He tried not to picture other things. At least the cavern went on and there was nothing else to do but go on with it, to go on and on as far as one could go. But so far there had been nothing to touch, as he constantly tested his surroundings with outstretched hands, except the sheer walls of wet stone containing the moving water. No cranny of pebbles, no strand, no rock even on which to rest. And now he was seeing Alice falling down the rabbit hole, falling slowly, slowly.
Ducane thought, in this sort of darkness I could pass within a yard of the way to safety and not know. It's all chance, utter chance. The current was not very fast now and he could easily swim to and fro across it touching the walls of the channel which were now about fifteen feet apart. The channel seemed to be narrowing very slightly. There were irregularities in the wall, but these were merely bumps, projections, worn to a slimy roundness by the water which proceeded onward into the depths of the cliff along its black interminable pipe. The air was still fresh, but it carried a faintly rotten sea smell, as if the water itself were decomposing, and indeed it did seem as if the stuff were becoming thicker and oilier. Amid the extinction or derangement of all his other senses Ducane smelt the smell with a monstrous clarity as if the smell itself were a black structure of gluey air and water within which, perhaps without moving at all, he made, more and more feebly, the yearning movement of swimming, of praying.
It seemed to him that he had not called out for some time and he called now, hoarsely, not very, loudly, 'Pierce!'
'Hello.'
'Pierce!'
'Hello there.'
The cry was from near. Ducane stopped swimming. Everything was changed. He inhabited his body again, he felt his extremities moving in the water. All round him he could feel things resuming their sizes. The darkness was no longer a stuff of which he was part, but a veil, an accident.
'Where are you?»
'Here, here.'
Ducane was suddenly brought up against a ridge of rock, its surface soft with slime. He could feel the water dividing about him, holding him against the rock.
'Where?'
'This way.'
Ducane edged round the rock and let the water take him.
His knees suddenly touched bottom, then his hand. He was no longer swimming but crawling. He felt
