For a day and a night and a day and a night the voyage continued, the
swell falling to a gentle heave, and then in the dawn came a sail, the
mat sail of a canoe like a brown wing cut against the haliotis-shell
coloured sky.
In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle in hand and half
crouching, she drove the canoe towards him, the sail loose and flapping
in the wind. Then he was on board the canoe, but how he got there he
scarcely knew, the whole thing was like a dream within a dream.
[Illustration: In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle
in hand and half crouching, she drove the canoe towards him, the sail
loose and flapping in the wind.]
In the canoe there was nothing, neither food nor water, only some
fishing lines and as he lay exhausted, consumed with thirst, and faint
with hunger, he saw the girl resetting the sail. She had been fishing
last evening from an island up north and blown out to sea by a squall,
had failed to make the land again, but she had sighted an island in the
sou’west and was making for it when she saw the hatch cover and the
brown, clinging form of Maru.
As he lay half dead in the bottom of the canoe he watched her as she
crouched with eyes fixed on the island and the steering paddle in hand;
but before they could reach it a squall took them, half filling the
canoe with rain water, and Maru drank and drank till his ribs stood
out, and then, renewed, half rose as the canoe steered by the girl
rushed past tumbling green seas and a broken reef to a beach white as
salt, towards which the great trees came down with the bread fruits
dripping with the new-fallen rain and the palms bending like whips in
the wind.