The Count of Monte Cristo

第二十一章 The Island of Tiboulen

Chapter 21. The Island of Tiboulen follows Edmond Dantès immediately after his fellow prisoners hurl him into the sea bound inside a weighted sack. Through a combination of luck, physical prowess, and his prepared knife, Dantès escapes drowning, swims a league through dark and storm-tossed waters, reaches the barren Island of Tiboulen, witnesses a fishing boat shattered against the rocks, and ultimately stages a desperate rescue that brings him aboard a Genoese tartan bound for Italy. Beginning as a flight from the Château d’If, the chapter becomes a series of narrow survivals—against the sack, the sea, the tempest, the wreck, and his own exhaustion—each one carrying him further from his prison and closer to a new identity as a free man at sea.

Escape from the Weighted Sack

Escape from the Weighted Sack Dantès, hurled into the sea inside a sack weighted with shot, preserves himself by holding his breath and using a knife he had prepared to rip the sack open. Though he successfully extracts his arm and body, the shot still drags him down until he bends double and severs the cord binding his legs just as strangulation seems inevitable. A powerful leap brings him to the surface, the weighted sack sinking away as the shroud it nearly became. He surfaces once, glimpses the Château d’If looming behind him with a torch and two figures on its highest rock, and dives again to escape detection, swimming underwater for an extended stretch—a feat at which he had once excelled, being renowned as the best swimmer in the port at Marseilles.