A week later Mauriri and a Raiatea man swam back with empty calabashes.
The tiger sharks had arrived in the harbour. The next day they thirsted
on the Big Rock.
“We must take our chance,” said Grief. “Tonight I shall go after water
with Mautau. Tomorrow night, Brother, you will go with Tehaa.”
Three quarts only did Grief get, when the tiger sharks appeared and
drove them in. There were six of them on the Rock, and a pint a day, in
the sweltering heat of the mid-tropics, is not sufficient moisture for a
man's body. The next night Mauriri and Tehaa returned with no water. And
the day following Brown learned the full connotation of thirst, when the
lips crack to bleeding, the mouth is coated with granular slime, and the
swollen tongue finds the mouth too small for residence.
Grief swam out in the darkness with Mautau. Turn by turn, they went down
through the salt, to the cool sweet stream, drinking their fill while
the calabashes were filling. It was Mau-tau's turn to descend with the
last calabash, and Grief, peering down from the surface, saw the glimmer
of sea-ghosts and all the phosphorescent display of the struggle. He
swam back alone, but without relinquishing the precious burden of full
calabashes.
Of food they had little. Nothing grew on the Rock, and its sides,
covered with shellfish at sea level where the surf thundered in, were
too precipitous for access. Here and there, where crevices permitted, a
few rank shellfish and sea urchins were gleaned. Sometimes frigate birds
and other sea birds were snared. Once, with a piece of frigate bird,
they succeeded in hooking a shark. After that, with jealously guarded
shark-meat for bait, they managed on occasion to catch more sharks.
But water remained their direst need. Mauriri prayed to the Goat
God for rain. Taute prayed to the Missionary God, and his two fellow
islanders, backsliding, invoked the deities of their old heathen days.
Grief grinned and considered. But Brown, wild-eyed, with protruding
blackened tongue, cursed. Especially he cursed the phonograph that
in the cool twilights ground out gospel hymns from the deck of the
_Rattler_. One hymn in particular, “Beyond the Smiling and the Weeping,”
drove him to madness. It seemed a favourite on board the schooner, for
it was played most of all. Brown, hungry and thirsty, half out of
his head from weakness and suffering, could lie among the rocks with
equanimity and listen to the tinkling of ukuleles and guitars, and
the hulas and himines of the Huahine women. But when the voices of the
Trinity Choir floated over the water he was beside himself. One evening
the cracked tenor took up the song with the machine:
“Beyond the smiling and the weeping,
I shall be soon.
Beyond the waking and the sleeping,
Beyond the sowing and the reaping,
I shall be soon,
I shall be soon.”
Then it was that Brown rose up. Again and again, blindly, he emptied his
rifle at the schooner. Laughter floated up from the men and women, and
from the peninsula came a splattering of return bullets; but the cracked
tenor sang on, and Brown continued to fire, until the hymn was played
out.
It was that night that Grief and Mauriri came back with but one calabash
of water. A patch of skin six inches long was missing from Grief's
shoulder in token of the scrape of the sandpaper hide of a shark whose
dash he had eluded.