Panting and fetching my breath by the most painful of efforts, I blundered heavily through a net-work of branches—and got my second sudden fall over a bank. This time I struck sitting down—in a stream of water which, swollen by the rain, was a roaring torrent. It swept me downward, gasping and battling to keep my head above the surface. Then with a splash the ourang-outang landed headlong in the flood. He also came rolling and tumbling along with the turbulent volume of water. But he clutched an overhanging limb and hauled himself out and up on the bank, as if he found the plunge exceedingly hateful. Whether he lost the scent, or whether he was convinced that I also had scrambled out of the stream, would be hard to determine. Busy as I was to keep from being drowned, or dashed to death on the rocks, I yet had a flash of relief and thankfulness to find myself freed of the terrible pursuer. My bow, to which I had clung with such a desperation, was lost from my hand when I fell into the torrent. As I righted myself, a trifle, on my downward sweep, and tried to mark out a branch or a creeper to clutch, a terrific bolt of lightning struck a tree not a hundred feet below. As if a thousand cannon had burst, the din and crash of thunder fairly stunned me for a second where I was. I got a mental photograph of the tree flying apart in monster splinters, as if a charge of dynamite had rended it asunder; and then followed a total annihilation of all light and a downpour of rain which was simply overwhelming. I was bowled downward helplessly, tossed through a drag of vines that were growing over the bed of the stream, and then, before I had half collected my senses—scattered as they were by the stroke of lightning,—I was shot through an agitated run-way and plunged below my depth in what I thought to be a large pool of water. Almost immediately, as I began to swim, on arising to the surface, I pushed against a great piece of timber on the top of which I climbed without a moment’s hesitation. Then came a flicker of lightning a mile away, illuminating all the scene, when I discovered that I was crouching on a large section of the very tree which the fearful lightning blast had shattered, and which was floating on the surface of the sheet of water which I had previously dubbed “My Lake.” CHAPTER XVII SAURIANS AS FOES As if the culmination of the electric discharge in that particular quarter had come with the bolt which struck so near myself, there was almost a complete cessation of pyrotechnics which would have been visible from the rain-pelted lake. Distant thunder grumbled incessantly, but the gloom which descended over water and jungle was only rendered more intense by the fitful glow of light which trembled upward so far away.