With those two lines he would, within a few fleeting seconds, drag himself back from eternity.
Picking up the axe, he carelessly stepped into the water, not knowing that Iris, having welded the incipient sago into a flat pancake, had strolled to the beach and was watching him.
The water was hardly above his knees when there came a swirling rush from the seaweed.

A long tentacle shot out like a lasso and gripped his right leg.

Another coiled round his waist.
"My God!" he gurgled, as a horrid sucker closed over his mouth and nose.

He was in the grip of a devil-fish.
A deadly sensation of nausea almost overpowered him, but the love of life came to his aid, and he tore the suffocating feeler from his face.
Then the axe whirled, and one of the eight arms of the octopus lost some of its length.

Yet a fourth flung itself around his left ankle.