before him like a bit of scenery on a stage, and he looked at it and
understood with his eyes each detail of it.

As the cook passed, much farther to the left, the captain was calling to
him, "Turn over on your back, cook! Turn over on your back and use the
oar."

"All right, sir." The cook turned on his back, and, paddling with an
oar, went ahead as if he were a canoe.

Presently the boat also passed to the left of the correspondent with the
captain clinging with one hand to the keel. He would have appeared like
a man raising himself to look over a board fence, if it were not for the
extraordinary gymnastics of the boat. The correspondent marvelled that
the captain could still hold to it.

They passed on, nearer to shore--the oiler, the cook, the captain--and
following them went the water-jar, bouncing gaily over the seas.

The correspondent remained in the grip of this strange new enemy--a
current. The shore, with its white slope of sand and its green bluff,
topped with little silent cottages, was spread like a picture before
him. It was very near to him then, but he was impressed as one who in a
gallery looks at a scene from Brittany or Holland.

He thought: "I am going to drown? Can it be possible Can it be possible?
Can it be possible?" Perhaps an individual must consider his own death
to be the final phenomenon of nature.

But later a wave perhaps whirled him out of this small, deadly current,