I lay for several minutes unable to move; then my brain awoke and
called for life. I twisted over on my face, and moved my arms out
and in with the motion of a swimmer; the most exquisite pains
shot through my chest and abdomen. My head weighed tons.
Water ran from my nose and mouth in gurgling streams. The
roaring, scarcely abated, pounded in my ears. I was telling
myself over and over with a most intense earnestness: "But if I
were really dead I shouldn't be able to move." It appears that
the first sense to leave a drowning man, and the last to return,
is the sense of humor.
In another ten minutes, having rid my lungs of the water that had
filled them, I felt no pain and but little fatigue. My head was
dizzy, and there was still a feeling of oppression on my chest;
but otherwise I was little the worse for wear. I twisted
carefully over on my side and took note of my surroundings.
I lay on a narrow ledge of rock at the entrance to a huge cavern.
Not two feet below rushed the stream which had carried me; it
came down through an opening in the wall at a sharp angle with
tremendous velocity, and must have hurled me like a cork from its
foaming surface.
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