Wet through now, he shivered to the very bones. The pangs of hunger were gnawing him. He dived a hand into his pocket. The pulpy biscuit was well-nigh uneatable, and black with tobacco dust. There was no help for it. He swallowed the stuff greedily, and it produced a horrible nausea. Soaked, chilled through and through, he crouched throughout that long terrible day, and a sort of lightheadedness came over him. Once more he was within Umzilikazi's sepulchre, and the awful coils of the black _mamba_ were waving, over yonder in the gloom, then, with a prolonged hiss, the terror plunged into the flood which was bearing him along. It had seized his legs beneath the surface and was dragging him down--and then it changed to Hermia. She was in the stream with him, and he was striving to save her, and yet fiercely combating a longing to let her drown, but ever around his heart was one yearning, aching pain, an awful, unsatisfied longing for a presence, a glimpse of a face--he hardly realised whose--and it would not come. Had he gone mad--he wondered dully, or was this delirium, the beginning of the end, or the terrible unsatisfied longings of another world? Then even that amount of brain consciousness faded, and he slept. Chilled, soaked, starred-- his case desperate--down there in that clay-girt hole, he slept. When he awoke it was quite dark, and the roar of the flood seemed to have decreased considerably in intensity. Clearly the river had ran down. How long he had been asleep he could form no approximate idea, but the thought moved him to hold his watch to his ear even though he could not see it. But it did not tick. The water had stopped it of course. Yes, the river had gone down, for no water was left in the cranny now. Moreover, the entrance to his hiding-place was several feet above the surface. The next thing was to get out. Simple it sounds, doesn't it? But the sides of the cleft, wet and slimy from the rain, offered no foothold. There were boughs hanging from above--but on clambering up these, lo, the lip of the cleft was overhung with a complete _chevaux-de-frise_ of _haakdoorn_, a mass of terrible fishhooks, turned every way, as their manner is, so as to be absolutely impenetrable, save to him who should be armed with a sharp cane knife with abundant room and purchase for plying it. To an enfeebled and exhausted man, obliged to use one if not both hands for holding on to his support and armed with nothing at all, the obstacle was simply unnegotiable. He was at the bottom of a gigantic natural beetle trap--with this difference that there remained one way out: the way by which he had got in--the river to wit.