How long it lasted--that wild rush, riding on the spray, held as it were by the wind--I don't know.  I tell you I could not think.  It went on and on as things do in a horrible dream, till all at once something happened.  I did not hear it, nor see it, hardly even felt it.  I only know that something happened, and I was being strangled--choked, but in another way.  The hands which grasped my throat to keep me from breathing had, I believe, ceased to hold, and something hot and terrible was rushing up my nostrils and down my throat, and I think I then made some effort with my hands.  Then I was being dragged along through water and over something soft, and all at once, though the deafening, confusing noise went on, I was not being swept away, but lying still on something hard.