The mist swallowed them up.

There are moments of which no man can recall his mental impressions, moments so acutely horrible that, mercifully, our memory retains nothing of the emotions they occasioned.  This was one of them.  A chaos ruled in my mind.  I had a vague belief that the Burman, forward, glanced back.  Then the course of the launch was changed.  How long intervened between the tragic end of that Gargantuan struggle and the time when a black wall leaped suddenly up before us I cannot pretend to state.

With a sickening jerk we ran aground.  A loud explosion ensued, and I clearly remember seeing the brown man leap out into the fog—­ which was the last I saw of him.

Water began to wash aboard.

Fully alive to our imminent peril, I fought with the cords that bound me; but I lacked poor Weymouth’s strength of wrist, and I began to accept as a horrible and imminent possibility, a death from drowning, within six feet of the bank.

Beside me, Nayland Smith was straining and twisting.  I think his object was to touch Karamaneh, in the hope of arousing her.  Where he failed in his project, the inflowing water succeeded.  A silent prayer of thankfulness came from my very soul when I saw her stir—­when I saw her raise her hands to her head—­ and saw the big, horror-bright eyes gleam through the mist veil.

CHAPTER XXVII

We quitted the wrecked launch but a few seconds before her stern settled down into the river.  Where the mud-bank upon which we found ourselves was situated we had no idea.  But at least it was terra firma and we were free from Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Smith stood looking out towards the river.

“My God!” he groaned.  “My God!”

He was thinking, as I was, of Weymouth.

And when, an hour later, the police boat located us (on the mud-flats below Greenwich) and we heard that the toll of the poison cellars was eight men, we also heard news of our brave companion.

“Back there in the fog, sir,” reported Inspector Ryman, who was in charge, and his voice was under poor command, “there was an uncanny howling, and peals of laughter that I’m going to dream about for weeks—­”

Karamaneh, who nestled beside me like a frightened child, shivered; and I knew that the needle had done its work, despite Weymouth’s giant strength.

Smith swallowed noisily.

“Pray God the river has that yellow Satan,” he said. 
“I would sacrifice a year of my life to see his rat’s body
on the end of a grappling-iron!”

We were a sad party that steamed through the fog homeward that night.  It seemed almost like deserting a staunch comrade to leave the spot—­so nearly as we could locate it—­where Weymouth had put up that last gallant fight.  Our helplessness was pathetic, and although, had the night been clear as crystal, I doubt if we could have acted otherwise, it came to me that this stinking murk was a new enemy which drove us back in coward retreat.