As his gaze returned from the ceiling he saw something for the first time. It was a ledge, fortuitously formed by the protruding lintel of the window.
At once he knew it as his immediate perch. He had hopes of a returning storm and of the scattering abroad of the flotilla that rose and fell in the mounting waves.
But if a storm were to develop then there would be even less time to spare before his enemies made their first move. Time was on no one’s side, neither theirs nor his. They would be entering at any moment.
But it was no easy task to reach this ledge above the window, where the shadows were at their deepest. He stood in the bows of the slight canoe so that its stern rose high out of the water. One of his hands clasped a joist of the low roof above his head and the other felt along the lintel’s upper edge in search of a grip. All this time it was necessary for him to keep the canoe flush against the wall, while the swell in the cave lifted it up and down.
It was vital that the canoe were kept from dancing forward on a wave so that its bows protruded across the square of the window and into the line of vision of those without. It was a hideous exertion, stretched as he was at an angle, his hands upon the ledge and ceiling, his feet together in the volatile prow of the canoe, the water dashing to and fro, lifting and falling, the thin spray everywhere.
Luckily for him he had obtained by now a firm grip with his right hand, for his fingers had found a deep crack in the uneven stone of the protruding lintel. It was not the height of this shelf that made him wonder whether he would ever reach it with the rest of his body, for, standing as he was in the canoe, it was only a foot above his head. It was the synchronization of the various things he had to do before he could find himself crouched above the window, with the canoe beside him that was so desperately difficult.
But he was as tenacious as a ferret and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees he withdrew his right leg from the canoe and prised his knee against the inside edge of the stone upright. The canoe was still standing practically on its head by reason of the pressure of his left foot in the bows. So vertical had she become that he was able with a kind of febrile genius of his own to let go of the joist above his head and with this same left hand to lift the canoe clean out of the water. He was now left with both his arms engaged – one in holding him where he was and the other in holding the canoe away from the light. He was suffering with his right knee prised as it was against the upright of the window. The other leg dangled like a dead thing.
For a little while he remained as he was, the sweat pouring over his piebald face, his muscles shrieking for release from so ghastly a strain. For this period he had no doubt that there was no end to this save that of dropping like a dead fly from a wall – dropping into the water below, where, bobbing in the golden torch light below the lintel, he would be picked up by the nearest of his enemies.
But at the height of his pain he began to pull at the entire weight of his body, to pull at it with his single hand whose crooked finger shook in the lintel crack. Inch by inch, moaning to himself as though he were a baby, or a sick dog, he drew the deadweight of his body up until, twisting over a little on one side, he was able to bring his other leg into play. But he could find no kind of irregularity in the stone upright for the questing toe of his shoe.
He rolled his eye in a frenzy of despair. Again he thought he was dropping into the water. But as his eye rolled it had, half-consciously, become aware of a great rusty nail leaning out horizontally from the shadowy joist. It shrivelled and it swelled out, this nail, as he turned his eyes to it again with a blurred conception floating in his mind that he could not at once decipher. But what his thoughts could not define, his arm put into practice. He watched it raise itself, this left arm of his; he watched it lift the canoe gradually until the bows were above his head and then, as a man might hang his hat upon a peg, he hung his craft upon the rusty nail. Now that his left hand was free he was able to get a second purchase upon the lintel crack, and to draw himself upwards with a comparative lack of pain until he was kneeling on all fours upon the twelve-inch protuberance of the heavy lintel.
Where there had been so emphatic a division between the black waves within the room and the yellow waves that tossed beyond the window, there was no longer so sharp a demarcation. The tongues of golden water slithered further into the room and the black tongues flickered out less freely into the outer radiance.
