No answer.  Had he been swept off?  Or did he get back into the boat?  Perhaps he was drowned already.

But all of a sudden Daniel’s heart trembled with joy and hope.  He had just made out, a few hundred yards below, a red light, indicating a vessel at anchor.  All his efforts were directed towards that point.  He was carried thither with an almost bewildering rapidity.  He nearly touched it; and then, with incredible presence of mind, and great precision, at the moment when the current drove him close up to the anchor-chain, he seized it.  He held on to it; and, having recovered his breath, he uttered three times in succession, with all the strength of his lungs, so sharp a cry, that it was heard above the fierce roar of the river,—­

“Help, help, help!”

From the ship came a call, “Hold on!” proving to him that his appeal had been heard, and that help was at hand.

Too late!  An eddy in the terrible current seized him, and, with irresistible violence, tore the chain, slippery with mud, out of his stiffened hands.  Rolled over by the waters, he was rudely thrown against the side of the vessel, went under, and was carried off.

When he rose to the surface, the red light was far above him, and below no other light was in sight.  No human help was henceforth within reach.  Daniel could now count only upon himself in trying to make one of the banks.  Although he could not measure the distance, which might be very great, the task did not seem to him beyond his strength, if he had only been naked.  But his clothes encumbered him terribly; and the water which they soaked up made them, of course, every moment more oppressive.

“I shall be drowned, most assuredly,” he thought, “if I cannot get rid of my clothes.”

Excellent swimmer as he was, the task was no easy one.  Still he accomplished it.  After prodigious efforts of strength and skill, he got rid of his shoes; and then he cried out, as if in defiance of the blind element against which he was struggling,—­

“I shall pull through!  I shall see Henrietta again!”

But it had cost him an enormous amount of time to undress; and how could he calculate the distance which this current had taken him down—­one of the swiftest in the world?  As he tried to recall all he knew about it, he remembered having noticed that, a mile below Saigon, the river was as wide as a branch of the sea.  According to his calculation, he must be near that spot now.

“Never mind,” he said to himself, “I mean to get out of this.”

Not knowing to which bank he was nearest, he had resolved, almost instinctively, to swim towards the right bank, on which Saigon stands.

He was thus swimming for about half an hour, and began already to feel his muscles stiffening, and his joints losing their elasticity, while his breathing became oppressed, and his extremities were chilled, when he noticed from the wash of the water that he was near the shore.  Soon he felt the ground under his feet; but, the moment he touched it, he sank up to his waist into the viscous and tenacious slime, which makes all the Cochin China rivers so peculiarly dangerous.