The fugitive was now nearly in the middle of the sands; but his pursuers had already crossed, in a few minutes, one half of the space which it had cost him a painful two hours' toil to traverse; and, with at least five miles before him yet, what hope that he could maintain such speed as to run in the ratio of two to three of distance, against the strength and velocity of high-blooded horses? But he had now reached the channel of the Beetham-water, and, as he crossed it, he stooped to ladle up a few drops in the hollow of his hand, to bathe his parched lips and burning brow. He saw it in an instant. The tide had turned, the waters were spreading wider and wider sensibly, they were running not slowly upward, they were salt to the taste already. His rescue or his ruin, the flood-tide was upon him; and, strange to say, what at another time would have aroused his wildest terror, now wakened a slight hope of safety. If he could yet reach, yet pass, the channel of the Kent, which lay, widening every moment, at some two miles farther yet before him, he might still escape both the cruel waters and the more savage man-hunters; but the distance was long, the fugitive weak with fatigue, weaker yet with fear, and the speed of thorough-bred horses was hard, as yet, behind him. He paused a moment to watch, as the first party, his direct pursuers, reached the broad river-bed--they crossed it, and that seemingly without alarm or suspicion of danger, though their heavily-barbed horses sank belly-deep in the treacherous ford; but having stemmed it, as they charged onward, it was clear to Eadwulf that the horses buried their hoofs deeper at every stride; soon they were fetlock-deep in the heavy sands. The second party crossed the same water-course higher up, and with less trouble; and these were now within two miles of the panting slave, shouting their war-cries, and spurring yet more furiously onward, having lost, if they had ever entertained any, all idea of danger, in the furious excitement of the chase, and taking no heed of the tokens of imminent and awful peril; and yet those tokens were now sufficient to appall the boldest. One of the peculiarities of those terrible and fatal sands is, that the first approach of those entering tides, which come on, not with the ordinary roll and thunder of billows and flash of snowy surf, but swift and silent as the pestilence that flies by night, is harbingered by no outward and visible sight or sound, but by the gradual and at first imperceptible conversion of the solid sands into miry and ponderous sludge, into moving quicksand, into actual water. When the sounds and sights are heard and seen, it is too late to make an effort. Death is at hand, inevitable.