CHAPTER XIN DEADLY PERIL
WhenBomba slowly came to himself, fighting his way through unconsciousness, he did not realize at once the full significance of his plight.
First of all, he knew that he was drenching wet—probably it had been the beating of rain upon his face that had brought him back to consciousness.
The heavens had opened, and a deluge of rain had descended on the jungle, filling the dry beds of the ygapos as though by magic, overflowing the banks of the streams so that along their shores twin torrents raged.
Bomba had been swept by the branches of a falling tree into a deep hollow in the ground. The jungle abounded with these miniature pools, their bottoms only a muddy ooze at most times, the hollows only full after a rainfall or the overflowing of some stream in the vicinity.
Bomba wondered dully if he had been seriously injured, perhaps crushed, in the fall. There was no feeling in his body, and at first he was too dazedto test his strained muscles. He seemed to himself like a disembodied ghost.
But as the rain continued to fall upon his upturned face, fuller consciousness returned to him. He viewed his situation with more active alarm, tried to move his hands and feet and raise himself from his confined position.
This effort ended in a feeling of almost complete discouragement. His feet and legs were powerless. They might have been cut from his body, for all the good they were to him. He could not even raise himself sufficiently to look and see if they were still there.
Branches of the fallen tree pinioned him as securely to the ground as though he had been bound by iron cords. There was a stifled oppressed feeling in his chest, and it hurt him to draw a long breath.
His left arm, seemed dead. It possessed no more feeling than the lower part of his body. His right arm and hand seemed numb and almost useless at the start. The arm was doubled under him, and Bomba thought it must be broken.
But, by an agonized effort that made the sweat start from his brow, he managed at last to move it, ever so slowly and painfully, drawing it by degrees from under his prostrate body, until that much of him at least was free.
The blood surged back into the numbed arm,causing the boy unspeakable agony. But as circulation was resumed, feeling and power came back, and Bomba flexed and unflexed his fingers with a sensation of renewed life.
He was a helpless thing no longer. His right hand was clear. If he could reach the machete, drag it free and hack his way through the imprisoning branches!
But even as he groped for the machete Bomba discovered something that seemed to turn the blood in his veins to ice.
The water was rising in the pool!
Until now, this phase of his terrible danger had not struck Bomba. The painful freeing of his right hand, the fear that in the fall he might have sustained an injury that would cripple him and leave him a prey to the first beast of the jungle that might roam that way, the dread that he might never be able to free himself from those ruthless, imprisoning branches had blinded him to another and more imminent peril that threatened.
The rain was still torrential, and the pool that had been for weeks only a muddy depression in the jungle floor was now filling with water.
If he could not reach his machete with his still half-numbed right hand and hack his way free from the branches before the water rose to his mouth and nose as he lay on his back, Bomba would die—drown like a rat in a trap.
This certainty roused him at once to frantic effort. By a desperate strain, his hand found its way to the machete in his belt. The sharp-pointed twigs of the branch that imprisoned his chest tore at his flesh cruelly, but Bomba did not even feel the pain.
It was one thing to die on his feet, fighting to the last breath, and another to lie there flat on his back, while the water crept up and up, seeking to close his nostrils, fill his throat, and deprive him of life.
He had the machete now, and was hacking feebly at the nearest branch, for the strength had not yet come back into his hand and arm. He succeeded in cutting away some of it. The fragments brushed aside fell with a sickening splash into the water.
Slow work! Heart-breaking work! If only the rain would stop, the torrential downpour slacken for a while, he might yet get free. But in the lowering heavens to which Bomba lifted his anguished eyes there was no hope. It would need but a short time to fill the pool to overflowing.
The water crept higher, while Bomba slashed furiously at the confining branches. Steadily, sections of them came away and dropped into the muddy water—but not fast enough!
The chill of the rising waters was about his shoulders now. When his neck tired of holdinghis head above the surface, he could feel the clammy touch upon his ear.
He had cleared away much of that network of branches. The weight on his chest was lighter. He could breathe more freely.
He tried to lift himself, but could not. That dreadful incubus still held him securely.
Chilled to the bone, shivering, he went to work again. More branches and still more were pushed aside and dropped into the pool. The lapping of the water sounded in his ears as though death were crooning its awful lullaby.
Wearied of holding up his head, his arm one agonizing ache from the effort of using it in that strained position, Bomba let himself relax for a moment and lay back gasping for breath.
Lying there, the water was over his ears, filling them with a drumming sound. It climbed still higher, as steady and implacable as fate.
He could not relax like that again without bringing the water over his eyes, over his nose——
Bomba lifted his head frantically, and, summoning his last reserve of strength, hacked at the boughs.
He would not die like that! He would not! Surely strength would be given him to resist that awful fate!
And strength was given him—the temporary strength of a madman.
He knew no fatigue, felt no pain, was conscious of nothing but the sound and touch of that lapping, creeping water.
That spasm of superhuman energy was not without result. It seemed to him that the load on his chest was lightening. Perhaps he could sit up.
One straining, frantic effort—another— He fell back, weak and gasping, into the pool.
The waters closed over him with a greedy, sucking sound and blotted out his face completely.
A trail of tiny bubbles rose to the surface.