The topmost tower, delicately massive, a score of feet above them, swayed to and fro, gently, like the ripple of wheat in light summer airs.  But Corliss gazed at it unheeding.  Just to lie there, on the marge of the mystery, just to lie there and drink the air in great gulps, and do nothing!—­he asked no more.  A dervish, whirling on heel till all things blur, may grasp the essence of the universe and prove the Godhead indivisible; and so a man, plying a paddle, and plying and plying, may shake off his limitations and rise above time and space.  And so Corliss.

But gradually his blood ceased its mad pounding, and the air was no longer nectar-sweet, and a sense of things real and pressing came back to him.

“We’ve got to get out of this,” he said.  His voice sounded like a man’s whose throat has been scorched by many and long potations.  It frightened him, but he limply lifted a shaking paddle and shoved off.

“Yes; let us start, by all means,” Frona said in a dim voice, which seemed to come to him from a far distance.

Tommy lifted his head and gazed about.  “A doot we’ll juist hae to gie it oop.”

“Bend to it!”

“Ye’ll no try it anither?”

“Bend to it!” Corliss repeated.

“Till your heart bursts, Tommy,” Frona added.

Once again they fought up the thin line, and all the world vanished, save the streak of foam, and the snarling water, and the grinning fissure.  But they passed it, inch by inch, and the broad bend welcomed them from above, and only a rocky buttress of implacable hate, around whose base howled the tides of an equal hate, stood between.  Then La Bijou leaped and throbbed and shook again, and the current slid out from under, and they remained ever in one place. Dip and lift, dip and lift, through an infinity of time and torture and travail, till even the line dimmed and faded and the struggle lost its meaning.  Their souls became merged in the rhythm of the toil.  Ever lifting, ever falling, they seemed to have become great pendulums of time.  And before and behind glimmered the eternities, and between the eternities, ever lifting, ever falling, they pulsed in vast rhythmical movement.  They were no longer humans, but rhythms.  They surged in till their paddles touched the bitter rock, but they did not know; surged out, where chance piloted them unscathed through the lashing ice, but they did not see.  Nor did they feel the shock of the smitten waves, nor the driving spray that cooled their faces. . .

La Bijou veered out into the stream, and their paddles, flashing mechanically in the sunshine, held her to the return angle across the river.  As time and matter came back to them, and Split-up Island dawned upon their eyes like the foreshore of a new world, they settled down to the long easy stroke wherein breath and strength may be recovered.

“A third attempt would have been useless,” Corliss said, in a dry, cracked whisper.