Then before their crouching position could begin to weary them, the beat of the engines became insistent, imminent; and the launch shot round the curve, loaded with standing men, and heading directly for the beach. A volley of fire greeted them, but the soldiers were already overboard, waist-deep in water, plunging towards the shore with their rifles held high over their heads, while the crew of the launch violently reversed the engines and drove themselves off the sand by means of long poles, to save the launch from an irrevocable grounding. The attack was well planned, and executed by men who knew intimately the lie of the coast. With loud shouts, they emerged dripping from the water on to the beach. They were at least forty strong; the island picket numbered only a score, but they had the advantage of concealment. A few of the soldiers dropped while yet in the water; others fell forward on to their faces with their legs in the water and their heads and shoulders on dry land; many gained a footing but were shot down a few yards from the edge of the sea; the survivors flung themselves flat behind hummocks of rock and fired in the direction of the defending fire. Everything seemed to have taken place within the compass of two or three minutes. Julian had himself picked off three of the invaders; his blood was up, and he had lost all the sickening sense of massacre he had felt during the early part of the day. He never knew how the hand to hand fight actually began; he only knew that suddenly he was out of the cave, in the open, without a rifle, but with his revolver in his grasp, backed and surrounded by his own shouting men, and confronted by the soldiers of Herakleion, heavily impeded by their wet trousers, but fighting sheerly for their lives, striving to get at him, losing their heads and aiming wildly, throwing aside their rifles and grappling at last bodily with their enemies, struggling not to be driven back into the sea, cursing the islanders, and calling to one another to rally, stumbling over the dead and the wounded. Julian scarcely recognised his own voice in the shout of, 'Aphros!' He was full of the lust of fighting; he had seen men roll over before the shot of his revolver, and had driven them down before the weight of his fist. He was fighting joyously, striking among the waves of his enemies as a swimmer striking out against a current. All his thought was to kill, and to rid his island of these invaders; already the tide had turned, and that subtle sense of defeat and victory that comes upon the crest of battle was infusing respectively despair and triumph. There was now no doubt in the minds of either the attackers or the defenders in whose favour the attack would end. There remained but three alternatives: surrender, death, or the sea.