My heart sank within me. The sorapus nutshell had proved a false
prophet, and, after all, my intuition had been correct--it was the
left-hand channel that I should have followed.

Had I been a woman I should have wept. At my right was a great,
slow-moving eddy that circled far beneath the cliff's overhanging
side, and to rest my tired muscles before turning back I let my
boat drift into its embrace.

I was almost prostrated by disappointment. It would mean another
half-day's loss of time to retrace my way and take the only passage
that yet remained unexplored. What hellish fate had led me to
select from three possible avenues the two that were wrong?

As the lazy current of the eddy carried me slowly about the periphery
of the watery circle my boat twice touched the rocky side of the
river in the dark recess beneath the cliff. A third time it struck,
gently as it had before, but the contact resulted in a different
sound--the sound of wood scraping upon wood.

In an instant I was on the alert, for there could be no wood
within that buried river that had not been man brought. Almost
coincidentally with my first apprehension of the noise, my hand shot
out across the boat's side, and a second later I felt my fingers
gripping the gunwale of another craft.

As though turned to stone I sat in tense and rigid silence, straining
my eyes into the utter darkness before me in an effort to discover
if the boat were occupied.