He made the passage with ease.

Pitched against the hole of the tree was a long narrow case, very heavy, iron-clamped; and marked with letters in black triangles and the broad arrow of the British Government.

“Rifles, by all the gods!” shouted the sailor.  They were really by the Enfield Small Arms Manufactory, but his glee at this stroke of luck might be held to excuse a verbal inaccuracy.

The Sirdar carried a consignment of arms and ammunition from Hong Kong to Singapore.  Providence had decreed that a practically inexhaustible store of cartridges should be hurled across the lagoon to the island.  And here were Lee-Metfords enough to equip half a company.  He would not risk the precious axe in an attempt to open the case.  He must go back for a crowbar.

What else was there in this storehouse, thrust by Neptune from the ocean bed?  A chest of tea, seemingly undamaged.  Three barrels of flour, utterly ruined.  A saloon chair, smashed from its pivot.  A battered chronometer.  For the rest, fragments of timber intermingled with pulverized coral and broken crockery.

A little further on, the deep-water entrance to the lagoon curved between sunken rocks.  On one of them rested the Sirdar’s huge funnel.  The north-west section of the reef was bare.  Among the wreckage he found a coil of stout rope and a pulley.  He instantly conceived the idea of constructing an aerial line to ferry the chest of tea across the channel he had forded.

He threaded the pulley with the rope and climbed the tree, adding a touch of artistic completeness to the ruin of his trousers by the operation.  He had fastened the pulley high up the trunk before he realized how much more simple it would be to break open the chest where it lay and transport its contents in small parcels.

He laughed lightly.  “I am becoming addleheaded,” he said to himself.  “Anyhow, now the job is done I may as well make use of it.”

Recoiling the rope-ends, he cast them across to the reef.  In such small ways do men throw invisible dice with death.  With those two lines he would, within a few fleeting seconds, drag himself back from eternity.

Picking up the axe, he carelessly stepped into the water, not knowing that Iris, having welded the incipient sago into a flat pancake, had strolled to the beach and was watching him.

The water was hardly above his knees when there came a swirling rush from the seaweed.  A long tentacle shot out like a lasso and gripped his right leg.  Another coiled round his waist.

“My God!” he gurgled, as a horrid sucker closed over his mouth and nose.  He was in the grip of a devil-fish.

A deadly sensation of nausea almost overpowered him, but the love of life came to his aid, and he tore the suffocating feeler from his face.  Then the axe whirled, and one of the eight arms of the octopus lost some of its length.  Yet a fourth flung itself around his left ankle.  A few feet away, out of range of the axe, and lifting itself bodily out of the water, was the dread form of the cuttle, apparently all head, with distended gills and monstrous eyes.