support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a
struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I
was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that
plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and
that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in
my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding,
extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was
losing it altogether, and about to die.

An acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede
had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he
caught at me in falling.

But it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to
forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were
about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of
discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He
himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what
saved him.

I only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I
found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches,
and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist
me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me.
Nothing came to me to say, somehow.

"I lost consciousness for a moment or two," I heard him say. "That's what
saved me. It made me stop thinking about them."

"You nearly broke my arm in two," I said, uttering my only connected