AT DAWN
At dawn the wind had sunk to a steady sailing breeze and the swell had
lost its steepness, as the great blaze came in the east and the brow of
the sun shattered the horizon. Katafa reached for the basket of food
tied to the after-pole of the outrigger and opened it.
As she ate, her eyes roamed far and wide from sea-line to
sea-line—nothing! Karolin had vanished far from sight and Palm Tree was
too far off to show—nothing but the vales and hills of the marching
swell, the following wind and the sun now breaking from the sea that
seemed to cling to him.
To beat back against the wind and the current was impossible to her. It
was impossible even to turn the canoe with a single paddle, and in that
swell there was nothing to do but steer.
Then gulls came up on the wind, birds that had left Karolin before dawn
and were bound for the fishing grounds off Palm Tree. They passed her,
low-flying and honey-coloured against the sun, to vanish snowflake-white
in the distant blue.
Far to the westward lay the Paumotus, with their reefs and races and
utterly unaccountable currents; behind, Karolin and the vacant sea
stretching to the Gambiers; to the east, the South American coast, a
thousand miles and more away; to the north, Palm Tree and the vacant sea
stretching to the Marquesas—and all around, silence. This new, strange
thing for which she had no name almost daunted her. She had lived with
the eternal sound of the reef in her ears, it had been part of her world
like the ground beneath her feet, and now that it was withdrawn she was
at a loss. The occasional flap of the sail, the whisper and chuckle of
the bow wash, the fizz of the foam as the outrigger broke the gloss of
the swell—all these sounds came to her strange against the silence.
A great sea current is a world of its own and, like the _Kuro Shiwo_,
this northern drift carried with it its own peculiar people. Jellyfish
from the far south, albacores from the Gambier grounds, turtle drowsing
or asleep on its surface, sometimes a shoal of flying fish, like
shaftless arrow-heads of silver shot by invisible marksmen, would pass,
flittering into the water ahead; once, uprunning a steeper wall of the
swell, she glimpsed a shark cradled in the glossy green like a fish in
ice or a faun in amber. At noon a reef showed away to starboard,
razor-backed and spouting like a whale, and then, just before sunset,
gulls began to pass her, flying north; away across the water she could
see more gulls in full flight, all making north.
Standing up in the last blaze of the sunset, she strained her
eyes—nothing. Once she thought that she could see a point breaking the
far horizon, land or gull’s wing she could not be sure. Then, with the
dark, the wind sank to a dead calm and the swell to a gentle heave of
the sea, and, crouching in the bottom of the canoe, Katafa, her head
resting against the outrigger pole, closed her eyes.
She awoke at dawn with the whole eastern sky flushed like the petal of a
vast rose on which the day-star glittered like a point of dew. A faint
breathing of wind from the north brought a whisper with it, the whisper
of the reef, and for a second, just as she opened her eyes, the picture
of Karolin came before her. Had she drifted back? Rising and grasping
the mast, she turned her face to the wind, and there, far away still but
breathing at her with the perfumed breath of the land wind, lay the form
she had seen in mirage as a dreamer sees his fate.
Moment by moment, as the light increased, it grew clearer and more
definite, till now, struck by the first level beams of the sun, it
bloomed to full life across the blue.