On the left was a low ledge of rocks leading back to the narrow beach
already mentioned, and the ledge came out to within a few feet of where
the outmost boat on that side would pass it. It was the only chance and
a poor one, but already the first rank of my fleet was trembling on the
brink, and without stopping to weigh matters I bounded off my own canoe
on to the raft alongside, which rocked with my weight like a tea-tray.
From that I leapt, with such hearty good-will as I had never had before,
on to a second and third. I jumped from the footstool of one Martian
to the knee of another, steadying myself by a free use of their nodding
heads as I passed. And every time I jumped a ship collapsed behind me.
As I staggered with my spring into the last and outermost boat the ledge
was still six feet away, half hidden in a smother of foam, and the rim of
the great fall just under it. Then I drew all my sailor agility together
and just as the little vessel was going bow up over the edge I leapt from
her--came down blinded with spray on the ledge, rolled over and over,
clutched frantically at the frozen soil, and was safe for the moment,
but only a few inches from the vortex below!

As soon as I picked myself up and got breath, I walked shorewards and
found, with great satisfaction, that the ledge joined the shelving beach,
and so walked on in the blue obscurity of the cliff shadow back from the
falls in the bare hope that the beach might lead by some way into the
gully through which we had come and open country beyond. But after a
couple of hundred yards this hope ended as abruptly as the spit itself
in deep water, and there I was, as far as the darkness would allow me
to ascertain, as utterly trapped as any mortal could be.

I will not dwell on the next few minutes, for no one likes to acknowledge
that he has been unmanned even for a space. When those minutes were