An irresistible hand grasped the keel, making the landing a vertical one.  Ferragut shot out like a projectile, falling in the foaming whirlpools and having the impression, as he sank, that men and casks together were rolling and raining into the sea.

He saw bubbling streaks of white and black hulks.  He felt himself impelled by contradictory forces.  Some dragged at his head and others at his feet in different directions, making him revolve like the hands of a clock.  Even his thoughts were working double.  “It is useless to resist,” Discouragement was murmuring in his brain, while his other half was affirming desperately, “I do not want to die!...  I must not die!”

Thus he lived through a few seconds that seemed to him like hours.  He felt the brute force of hidden friction, then a blow in the abdomen that arrested his course between the two waters, and grasping at the irregularities of a projecting rock, he raised his head and was able to breathe.  The wave was retreating, but another again overwhelmed him, detaching him from the point with its foamy churning, making him leave in the stony crevices bits of the skin of his hands, his breast, and his knees.

The oceanic suction seemed dragging him down in spite of his desperate strokes.  “It’s no use!  I’m going to die,” half of his mind was saying and at the same time his other mental hemisphere was reviewing with lightning synthesis his entire life.  He saw the bearded face of the Triton in this supreme instant.  He saw the poet Labarta just as when he was recounting to his godson the adventures of the old Ulysses, and his shipwrecked struggle with the rocky peaks and waves.

Again the marine dilatation tossed him against a rock, and again he anchored himself to it with an instinctive clutch of his hands.  But before this wave retired it hurled him desperately upon another ledge, the refluent water passing back below him.  Thus he struggled a long time, clinging to the rocks when the sea overwhelmed him, and crawling along upon the jutting points whenever the retiring water permitted.

Finding himself upon a projecting point of the coast, free at last from the suction of the waves, his energy suddenly disappeared.  The water that dripped from his body was red, each time more red, spreading itself in rivulets over the greenish irregularities of the rock.  He felt intense pain as though all his organism had lost the protection of its covering,—­his raw flesh remaining exposed to the air.

He wished to get somewhere, but over his head the coast was rearing its stark bulk,—­a concave and inaccessible wall.  It would be impossible to get away from this spot.  He had saved himself from the sea only to die stationed in front of it.  His corpse would never float to an inhabited shore.  The only ones that were going to know of his death were the enormous crabs scrambling over the rocky points, seeking their nourishment in the surge; the sea gulls were letting themselves drop vertically with extended wings from the heights of the steep-sloped shore.  Even the smallest crustaceans had the advantage of him.