Once, he was able to scramble through the dangerous area during the moment between two waves. The second time he miscalculated. The incoming breaker loomed above him like a wall of blue-green crystal crowned with white foam. The moment before it struck, he braced himself as best he could and wrapped his arms around the largest and heaviest rock he could find. Then he took a deep breath and held it. The wave roared down and over him, flattening him against the rocks like a giant hand. Blade held on, although the strain seemed about to pull his arms out of their sockets. He held on until his lungs seemed to be filled with white-hot gas instead of air, and the blue-greenness about him began to turn gray and then black. Then suddenly the wave was past, its roar fading away in his ears. Almost by reflex, Blade's arms and legs pulled him up the rocks, out of the path of the next wave. He sat in safety as it roared past him, gulping in air, and flexing his arms to get the hard knots out of his painfully strained muscles. Then he rose and went on.

It began to seem that he had always been stumbling over crumbling, slimy gray stones, not falling headlong only by a series of desperate muscle-wrenching efforts. The spray from the breakers dried on his skin, stinging painfully in his cuts and leaving an itching crust of salt all over him. Once, a rock sheared in two under his weight, and a sharp edge slashed along his left leg. The cut ran almost from knee to anklebone, but by a miracle it was not deep. It soon stopped bleeding, and then Blade was no longer aware of it. He scrambled on, sweat now running down his skin to carve lines in the caked salt.

Almost before he realized it, he was near the far end of the reef. He found a perch on the highest rock he could reach and looked around. He grinned through salt-caked lips as he realized that he had been right. Out here the water was far deeper than by the beach. The big waves rolled in, rising ten and fifteen feet high, just as they did farther in. But they did not break on the rocks in a white cauldron of foam, ready to swallow even the strongest swimmer. They made a fringe of white around the edge of the reef, but that was all. Diving into the sea would be hardly more dangerous than diving into a swimming pool.