They ascended five or six more steps, and then Dantès felt that they took him one by the head and the other by the heels, and swung him to and fro. “One!” said the grave-diggers. “two! three, and away!” And at the same instant Dantès felt himself flung in the air like a wounded bird falling, falling with a rapidity that made his blood curdle. Although drawn downward by the same heavy weight which hastened his rapid descent, it seemed to him as if the time were a century. At last, with a terrific dash, he entered the ice-cold water, and as he did so he uttered a shrill cry, stifled in a moment by his immersion beneath the waves.
Dantès had been flung into the sea, into whose depths he was dragged by a thirty-six pound ball tied to his feet. The sea is the cemetery of If Castle.

Chapter XIII begins here.

Dantès, although giddy and almost suffocated, had yet sufficient presence of mind to hold his breath; and as his right hand (prepared as he was for every chance) held the knife open, he rapidly ripped up the sack, extricated his arm, and then his body: but in spite of all his efforts to free himself from the bullet, he felt it dragging him still lower. He then bent his body, and by a desperate effort severed the cord that bound his legs, at the moment he was suffocating. With a vigorous spring he rose to the surface of the sea, whilst the bullet bore to its depths the sack that had so nearly become his shroud.
Dantès merely paused to breathe, and then dived again, in order to avoid being seen. When he rose a second time, he was fifty paces from where he first sunk. Behind him, blacker than the sea, blacker than the sky, rose, like a phantom, the giant of granite, whose projecting crags seemed like arms extended to seize their prey; and on the highest rock was a torch that lighted two figures. He fancied these two forms were looking at the sea; doubtless these strange undertakers had heard his cry. Dantès dived again, and remained a long time beneath the water. When he reappeared the light had disappeared.

    Now this was such an awe-inspiring scene, the highlight among the many in The Count of Monte Cristo, that I just had to give it a go. Once I figured out that by a bullet, Alexander Dumas meant a cannonball, the rest was simple. Cannonballs not being common around Prahran at the time, I substituted a house brick, added a length of rope, a huge hessian bag nicked off the back of Horrie’s truck when he came home for lunch, and sharpened my new pocketknife assiduously. The heavy bundle over my shoulder, I struggled through the side-streets to the Yarra River, Spot eyeing me dubiously all the way.
    There was a small jetty and I sat on the end of it, slipped into the bag, tied ankles to brick and—nearly bloody choked on the flour dust inside the bag! The coughing fit destroyed my nerve. I sat for an hour but could not find the courage to go on with it. Maybe I’d be braver after I learned to swim.