A FIRE ON THE REEF (Continued)
Katafa, when she had arranged her hair and made her bed of blankets in
the bottom of the canoe, lay down, but she did not close her eyes. She
lay watching the last glow of the sunset, and then the instantly
following stars held her gaze, talking to her of Karolin and the great
sea spaces she had been suddenly caught away from.
The atoll island has never been adequately described by pen or
brush—never will be. What brush or pen could paint the starlight on the
great lagoons, the sunrises and sunsets, the vastness of the distances
unbroken by any land but just the low ring of reef? Life on an atoll is
like life on a raft: immensity on every side—and the sea.
Here the girl felt herself suddenly shut in, the groves rising to the
hill-top fretted her spirit, the bit of lagoon was nothing, and even the
reef was different from the reef of Karolin. Kearney had raised
something deep down in her mind against him and he seemed somehow now
the centre and core of all her trouble. Dick she scarcely thought of;
he, like other human beings, was of little account to her.
Thoughts came to her of trying to get the canoe out and escaping back to
the freedom which was the only thing she loved, but it was hopeless. She
could never do the business single-handed; she was trapped and she knew
it.
Now, when Le Juan wanted help from Nanawa, the shark-toothed god, she
had several methods of invoking the deity. One of the simplest was by
fire. She would go off, build a little fire and, as she fed it, repeat
over it a formula, always the same string of words representing the wish
of her heart, which was never spoken.
Something generally happened after that. Sometimes the wish would be
granted, long overdue rain would come, or some enemy already dying would
die, or the palu that had forsaken for a while the palu bank would come
back.
But the shark-toothed one was a tricky deity and had a habit of sending
other gifts along by way of Laggniappe.
For instance, in that great drought long years ago, Le Juan had
sacrificed stacks of fuel to the god, and weeks after he had sent the
rain, but he also sent the Spanish ship with Katafa on board of it, and
Katafa had given Le Juan a lot of trouble and heart-searching.
Again, two years ago, he had sent the palu back to the bank but at the
same time he had extended the season in the lagoon when the fish were
poisonous by a fortnight.
Sometimes he was quite amiable and would cure an indigestion without
killing the patient as well—but it was all a toss-up. He was a dark
force, and even Le Juan recognised in a dim way that she was playing
with evil, and was never easy till the effects of her invocations were
over and done with.
Katafa had often helped to stoke the little fires and she knew the
ritual in all its simplicity. The thing had never interested her much
till now.
Maybe Nanawa could help her, take the island away or knock it to pieces
without hurting her, or lift it like a dish cover to the sky as she had
seen it lifted by mirage, or free her in some way—any way.
She brooded for an hour or more over this business. Then, having made up
her mind, she rose, skipped lightly on to the bank and, moving silently
as a shadow, approached the house. She could tell by their breathing
that the occupants were asleep, and she could see the box of matches on
the little shelf in the moonlight.
She took it and, as she held the strange fire box in her hand, the
sudden impulse came to her, maybe from the shark-toothed one, to fire
the house. The mysterious antagonism against Kearney urged her to
destroy him; it seemed also a way out of her trouble.
The little ships saved the sleepers.
The remembrance of them suddenly came to the girl, and the thought that
some god of whom they were the insignia might be on the watch. She could
not see them in the darkness of the house, but they were doubtless there
on their shelves, put there to protect the sleepers just as Le Juan hung
over her bed place a shrunken human hand.
Maybe she was right; maybe Kearney, without knowing, had placed them
there under higher direction, but, right or wrong, the things acted as
efficiently as a spell.
She turned away and, taking the paddle from the canoe, unmoored the
dinghy and pushed off for the reef.
She found, as she had expected, plenty of fuel, and the match-box gave
her no trouble. She had watched the process of striking a match
carefully with those eyes from which no detail escaped, and in a minute
the stuff she had collected was alight and burning.
Then, standing in the windless night and piling on dead weed, bits of
wood and dried fish fragments that popped and blazed like gas jets,
Katafa, with hands pressed against her ridi so that the flames might not
catch its dracæna leaves, put up her prayers to the shark-toothed one,
repeating the old formula of Le Juan and backing it with the unspoken
wish that the island might be taken away and freedom restored to her.
An hour later she returned across the lagoon, tied up the dinghy and,
snuggling down in the canoe, went to sleep.