Four times the back-current sucked him under with its wild pull in the self-same way, and four times the return wave flung him up upon the beach again like a fragment of sea-weed.

With frantic efforts Felix tried at first to cling still to Muriel--to save her from the irresistible force of that roaring surf--to snatch her from the open jaws of death by sheer struggling dint of thews and muscle.

He might as well have tried to stem Niagara.

The great waves, curling irresistibly in huge curves landward, caught either of them up by turns on their arched summits, and twisted them about remorselessly, raising them now aloft on their foaming crest, beating them back now prone in their hollow trough, and flinging them fiercely at last with pitiless energy against the soft beach of coral.

If the beach had been hard, they must infallibly have been ground to powder or beaten to jelly by the colossal force of those gigantic blows.