at once to be a beach of finely powdered coral fragments. As he touched
this beach for an instant, the undertow of that vast dashing breaker
sucked him back with its ebb again, a helpless, breathless creature; and
then the succeeding wave rolled him over like a ball, upon the beach as
before, in quick succession. Four times the back-current sucked him under
with its wild pull in the self-same way, and four times the return wave
flung him up upon the beach again like a fragment of sea-weed. With
frantic efforts Felix tried at first to cling still to Muriel--to save
her from the irresistible force of that roaring surf--to snatch her from
the open jaws of death by sheer struggling dint of thews and muscle. He
might as well have tried to stem Niagara. The great waves, curling
irresistibly in huge curves landward, caught either of them up by turns
on their arched summits, and twisted them about remorselessly, raising
them now aloft on their foaming crest, beating them back now prone in
their hollow trough, and flinging them fiercely at last with pitiless
energy against the soft beach of coral. If the beach had been hard, they
must infallibly have been ground to powder or beaten to jelly by the
colossal force of those gigantic blows. Fortunately it was yielding,
smooth, and clay-like, and received them almost as a layer of moist
plaster of Paris might have done, or they would have stood no chance at
all for their lives in that desperate battle with the blind and frantic
forces of unrelenting nature.

No man who has not himself seen the surf break on one of these
far-southern coral shores can form any idea in his own mind of the terror
and horror of the situation. The water, as it reaches the beach, rears
itself aloft for a second into a huge upright wall, which, advancing
slowly, curls over at last in a hollow circle, and pounds down upon the
sand or reef with all the crushing force of some enormous sledge-hammer.
But after the fourth assault, Felix felt himself flung up high and dry by