When their boat overset among the whirlpools and treacherous water volcanoes of the Suck of Suliscanna, Wat Gordon had been sculling at the stern. And when the water swallowed him, pulling him down as though he had been jerked through a trap-door by the arm of some invisible giant--or, more exactly, drawn slowly under by the tentacle of the dread Kraken of these Northern seas--he kept a tight grip on the oar with which he had been alternately steering and propelling the boat, as Jack Scarlett cried him his orders from the bows. Wat Gordon had been born in the old tower of Lochinvar, in the midst of that strange, weird, far-withdrawn moorland loch, set amid its scanty pasture-meadows of sour bent-grass and its leagues of ambient heather. As a boy he had more often gone ashore by diving from his window or paddling out from the little stone terrace than by the more legitimate method of unhooking the boat from its iron lintel and pulling himself across to the main-land. But this was a different kind of swimming, for here in the tumble and tumultuous swirl of angry waters Wat was no more than a plaything tossed about, to be tantalized with the blue sky and the summer sea, and then again to be pulled under and smothered in the seething hiss of the Suck of Suliscanna. Nevertheless, Wat found space to breathe occasionally, and as he was driven swiftly towards the north along the face of the great Lianacraig precipices and close under them he clutched his oar tighter, holding it under his arm and leaning his chest upon it. So close to the land was he that he voyaged quite unseen by the watchers on the cliffs above, who supposed that he had gone down with the boat. But the current had seized him in its mid-strength, and after first sweeping him close inshore it was now hurrying him northward and westward of the isle, under the vast face of the mural precipice in which the cliffs of Lianacraig culminated. The boat had cleared itself of its mast and sail, and Wat could see that she floated, upturned indeed, but still becking and bowing safely on the humps and swirls of the fierce tidal current which swept both master and vessel along, equally derelict and at its mercy.