"'Gummy,' thinks I, 'here's a fix!' Niggers? At first I couldn't see
anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady--quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never repined
with these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good,
coming up where I was, but I had to do something. On the spur
of the moment, I clambered over the side of the brig and landed
among the weeds, and set off through the darkness as fast as I could.
I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet
and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary bright green-blue above,
and the two canoes and the boat floating there very small and distant
like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick to squint up at it,
and think what the pitching and swaying of the three meant.

"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried
in sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing
as it seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit,
I found myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another
squint to see if anything was visible of the canoes and boats,
and then kept on. I stopped with my head a foot from the surface,
and tried to see where I was going, but, of course, nothing was
to be seen but the reflection of the bottom. Then out I dashed like
knocking my head through a mirror. Directly I got my eyes out of
the water, I saw I'd come up a kind of beach near the forest. I had a
look round, but the natives and the brig were both hidden by a big,
hummucky heap of twisted lava, the born fool in me suggested a run
for the woods. I didn't take the helmet off, but eased open one of
the windows, and, after a bit of a pant, went on out of the water.