Читать книгу List, Ye Landsmen!. A Romance of Incident онлайн

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I felt myself sucked down, but I preserved my senses, and seemed to understand that I was passing under the body of the ship, clear of her, as though swept to and steadied at some depth below her keel by the weight of water her passage drove in downward recoil. I rose, bursting with the holding of my breath, and floated right upon an oar, which I grasped with a drowning grip, though I was a tolerable swimmer; and after drawing several breaths—and oh, the ecstasy of that respiration! and oh, the sweetness of the air with which I filled my lungs!—my wits being still perfectly sound, I struck out with my legs, with no other thought in me then than to drive clear of the drowning scramble which I guessed was happening hard by.

The oar was under my arms, and my ears hoisted well above the surface of the water. I heard a man steadily shouting—he was at some distance from me, and was probably holding, as I was, to something that floated him—but no other cries than that lonely shouting reached me; no bubbling noises of the strangling; nothing to intimate that anything lived.