It couldn't last. I imagine the avalanche had now reached a slope of the mountain not normally covered at all, and as the deep surge shallowed out, its surface broke, like rapids of a river. The gentle rustle of the snow when it started to move had now risen to a hoarse roar, like the roar of the sea but with a strange muffled note in it more terrible than the crash and boom of surf. Philipson stuck doggedly to his steering pole, but there was no steering our crazy craft in that awful race. Jolt after jolt shook us, and at each one I saw Poyning and Philipson swing to and from me, as if we were on elastic. The ribs were clearly fetched adrift; there was no longer anything to stop the raft doubling up and being submerged. At last, with a fearful jerk, we were shot clean into the air. The shock of pitching threw me backwards, but I felt nobody behind me. Ah Sing and Lo Eng were gone. 'She will smash up now,' yelled Philipson over his shoulder. 'When it comes, keep your limbs stretched out stiff!' The crash came almost as he spoke. The raft heaved up, then plunged, and I found myself whirled down in a tremendous roaring, suffocating mass of snow, with nothing in my hand but a fretted rope's end. I spread-eagled myself and stiffened my arms and legs, and I imagine it was to that I owed my life; for though I was often submerged to the point of stifling, I remained near the surface for the most part, and could get a deep breath now and again when some sudden upheaval of the snow-torrent threw me to the top. Once my heel struck something hard, and the leg became numb and dead from that instant on. Had I been rolling in a ball it might have been my head, in which case I should certainly not be putting this record on paper now. I felt myself sink suddenly deeper. The snow rushed over me, I was madly fighting for breath, with a bewildered sense of plunging into the very bowels of the sea, at frightful speed. Then came a blinding flash of light in front of my eyes.... I must have lain unconscious for an hour, for that's the time Poyning said it took him to find me. He had been much luckier. When the raft broke up the main portion of it remained, apparently, under his body and kept him riding afloat for fully a minute after the rest of us had disappeared. Philipson he lost sight of just after me, but he himself had been supported by the canvas to the end, until, with a blow that winded him but did nothing worse, he was brought up sharp in a hollow far down the mountain side.