Summon the Bright Water by Geoffrey Household Read Free Book Online

sank. The effort of pulling it out broke the strap and of course drove down the left leg. Cursing Marrin for not seeing that the strap was in good condition, I recovered the fin, but it would not stay on and was useless. I pulled out the left leg with some difficulty and decided that I had had enough. The silt stirred up by my efforts blinded me, and I no longer knew where the rock was. I was experienced enough not to panic, for I had only to release the weight belt round my waist and come up. I didn’t give a damn if his weight belt was lost for ever in the sand, as it certainly would be.
    I felt for the release catch but it wouldn’t release; it had jammed. But it couldn’t jam! Then I did panic – it had not jammed. It had been jammed – and cunningly, for I couldn’t see or feel how. Meanwhile, the weight of the cylinders was pushing me little by little down into the quicksand. My right leg was kicking to no purpose. My frantic efforts to clear my left leg broke the strap on that fin also.
    I began to discard the lead weights from the belt, all the time sinking lower. By the time they had gone I was swallowed up to the waist. I tried to lean forward and swim like a flat fish on top of the stuff. No good. I returned or was returned to an upright position and seemed to stay there. I was not sinking any more, so long as I kept still, but I could never get out. I had checked the cylinders before the start and reckoned that I had about an hour more of life before the inevitable end. It made no difference whether I chose to die by drowning or by gradual disappearance into the sand.
    I might last until the arrival of the bore. That must surely finish me since the sudden increase in depth would reduce my buoyancy still further. Mental arithmetic underwater had the most curious effect of increasing rather than reducing panic until I managed to get control of myself and was only madly impatient because I kept getting my simple sums wrong. Bottom of the ebb at the Guscar Rocks yesterday morning was 8.30, and today 10.10. This evening 11.00. But the bottom of the ebb here should be earlier than slack water down there. Hold on! That doesn’t matter to the bore. What matters is the Bristol Channel tide not the Severn, which, as I had seen, can ebb backwards if it likes. Bore passed the Guscar Rocks at 11.00. I had heard that its speed up-river was that of a galloping horse. Twelve miles it had to go. Say, fifty minutes. Bore due at 11.50. I should still have a little air left unless I had used up too much struggling with the fins. On the other hand, by standing still with sand up to my chest I was using a minimum. Not that it mattered. At 11.50, give or take ten minutes, I should be dead.
    I think I could never have composed my thoughts if there had been a chance of life. I was as still as a post driven into the bed of the river. The water was comfortable, its temperature cold but not too cold, possibly due to fresh water coming down from sunlit meadows. So far as movement went I was already dead, or rather in the calm of dying with the familiar objects of vision all faded away. As best I could, being an agnostic, a hopeful agnostic, I tried to concentrate on the sort of ‘I’ which would be worthy to live without a body. The intellect, perhaps. The power to love, perhaps.
    All colours darkened. The pressure on my ears was fierce and sudden. I cleared them, and then it seemed as if land and sea had dissolved into a chaos through which I was tossed and cartwheeled with no sense of position or up or down. I was conscious of speed and dreamed – so far as my brain worked at all – that it must be some limbo through which one passed at death. I never realised that the bore had passed over and taken me with it until I slammed hard into the entrance to a pill, the soft mud rising in a fountain of gobs as I hit it. The great wave, having sucked up the quicksand or forced its mass of water down into it, had carried me off along with