Yet there _was_ something in there--an end to this disorder. It would take all he had left--the good air. It was like a knife or a gun or a poison-pill.... The movement below was so strong that it would grip him, shut him from the air, and leave him slithering along toward the Pole, sometimes sinking sideways, and then rising, forever seeking his balance ... not forever. He pictured himself in a school of herring, thousands of bright lidless eyes, thousands of bubbles, like eyes, from their mouths opening and shutting--he slithering sideways--his hands moving in the tugs and pressures. They would cease to dart from his movements, understanding them as the ground-birds know the wind in the grass. Lips and eye-lids and nostrils--they would have food. Food was the great event of the day to all things--except men. Men ate by the clock, ate to smoke, ate to soften the hearts of women ... yet after all food was food.... Or one big fish.... Or two fighting for him.... Or one finding him lying still, a slow fanning of fins against the purple pressures, watching to be sure--then the strike.... Once he had examined a minnow after the strike of a bass.... Where would _he_ be in that strike--or in that herring school-room--not that slithering sideways thing--but _he_? Would he be watching humorously, or back in the cage with Mr. Sproxley, or in Bessie’s bedroom? Was it all a myth about that other _he_? It seemed a myth with his stomach sinking, tightening like a dripping rag between a pair of mighty elbows. In the centre of the rag was a compressed cork, and in the cork, a screw was twisting. Cork--that made him think of the whiskey. He turned from the water to the coat under the seat, his eyes blinking. His bare foot moved painfully to the coat and along the breast to the pocket, to the hard hump of the bottle. His eyes suddenly filled with the figure of Stackhouse, whose attitudes were an endless series of death tableaus, as his stories had also pictured. His face had broken out into more beard, his eyes glazed, body shapeless, like clothing stuffed with hair. His hands held the primal significance of birth and death. They lay upon his limbs, the thumbs drawn into the palms, the first and little fingers of each pointing straight down. Bellair thought of how death contracts the thumb, and how infants come with their thumbs in-drawn.