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Show RIVER rattlesnake swallows a mouse. I caught one last view of Thor and my hands went up against the cold, corroded, slimy steel. Suddenly I was lost in wet, cold, and noisy blackness. The subterranean world was completely dark. As the barges rushed over I breast-stroked like a bullfrog. At first my buoyancy pulled me up against the onrushing barges, a sickening feeling like the fingers of death scrapping along my back, but I pushed off against the steel with my legs and went deeper into the dark river. Horrendous submarine noises throbbed through the water, sounding like a steel drum band playing intensely on the bottom of the river in time to the weird music of the towboaf s twin propellers. Now, for all the terror and adrenaline, my head cleared and I thought about Huck Finn and how he had wound up under a steamboat in exactly the same situation. Huck dove to the bottom of the river and hung on to a root till the man-eating sternwheel had passed overhead, but I was not about to try that number, being now as close to the bottom of the river as I ever hoped to get, pulling with strength born of fear through the black water toward, I hoped, the Arkansas side of the barges and not a spinning set of bronze screws. My lungs emptied of air and I kept expecting to feel the suction of the propellers. I swam and I swam, thinking about the props and the growing fire in my chest. At last I let go of some of the used up air. My lungs were now empty but I had no idea how much farther I'd have to swim under that vast sheet of moving steel, which even fish must have found unnatural and terrifying. I swam and I swam. Suddenly light filtered through the hair that hung down over my eyes, amazingly golden and bright. It meant I was nearing the edge of the barges and I -206- |