Day was breaking as Lavelle awoke to a realization that he still lived.
He found himself in a silence so awful in its intensity and mystery that
it made him catch his breath sharply like one does at a sudden immersion
in cold water. The peace of eternity seemed to have breathed a spell
upon the pitiless deep. It slept.
His long sleep had refreshed him and his mind instantly leaped back to
the events of the night before. A glance round him discovered Chang, a
hundred feet away, searching the horizon. Rowgowskii lay stretched on
the opposite side of the fire.
Just as Emily had imagined him lost so Lavelle for a moment believed her
gone. His senses went crashing, but they reordered themselves instantly
at the touch of a warm body at his side.
Putting his left hand out to raise himself it fell on Emily not half an
arm's length away. There exhausted nature had bent her head in slumber
at midnight when the wind hushed. There Chang had covered her again with
the boat sail. She lay with her right arm under her vivid head and her
face toward the new day. One long golden braid curled across the
hilltop's wet grass where it had been flung unconsciously in her sleep.
The other hung across her exquisite bosom, rising and falling gently
with her breathing, and its end trailing the ground. Such an expression
as Lavelle had so often seen in the faces of play-weary children was in
hers.
"Wonder woman," he murmured. "Wonder woman."
Slipping out from under the sail, not daring to breathe, Lavelle gently
drew the canvas back over the sleeper's shoulders and stole toward the
Chinaman. A slight giddiness assailed him for a moment and with it there
came a reminder of the old pain which he had felt upon awakening first
in the boat.
"Master, master," called the giant worshipfully, springing toward him.
Chang's first glance was directed at Lavelle's forehead and what he saw
there pleased him.
"Him all lite, master; all lite," he said. "Him stop bleed."
But it was of the night that Lavelle would hear, and the Chinaman
rapidly unfolded the wondrous tale of how their lives had been saved by
Emily. The wrecked boat was gone. Emily, Lavelle, Rowgowskii, and Chang
alone remained of those who had escaped in their party from the
_Cambodia_. The two coolie sailors had been gathering wood at the foot
of the hill when the upheaval came. They were gone. At the end he
whispered: "You lose him plistol out you plocket. Nobody know--only
Chang, master."
The ocean bore no trace of the half of the island which had been torn
away. In the heavy wind and sea which Chang reported of the first part
of the night it was Lavelle's opinion that the derelict mass, bound
together only by a mattress of interlaced roots and vegetation, must
have resolved its parts with the waters.
Owing to Chang's having placed the water, provisions, and the boat's
equipment high on the hill when the craft had been emptied in the
evening, the sea had been able to steal but little. The treacherous bit
of earth which remained offered, too, an important contribution to the
food supply in a wealth of taro plants, the tuberous substitute of the
potato in the islands of the Pacific. It is of this that the Hawaiians
make their poi.
By the bearing of the rising sun Lavelle noted that the island had swung
round completely during the night. The side of the camel's back-like
hill, which had been toward the south the preceding evening, was turned
to the northward. The crest of this hill was at least two hundred feet
above sea level. As the island lay now its northern side sloped easily
for perhaps fifty yards and then broke off abruptly in a sharp cleavage
fifty feet sheer to the sea.
The hill's base was slightly less than the island's half-mile width. A
gentle slope marked what had become the eastern shore; a straight
palisade rise of two hundred feet, the western side. A gradual slope on
the hill's southern side blended at the foot with an undulating meadow,
green with grass and taro, and about three-quarters of a mile in length.
A lone palm tree rose in the center of this patch.
The top of the hill presented a flat surface of a city half-block
square. At no distant time a thatched hut had stood there. It was of the
remains of this that Chang and Rowgowskii had built the fire.
While he sipped a cup of water which Chang brought to him, Lavelle took
stock of all these things. Not one thought of solace could he draw from
the bitter, hopeless scheme which unfolded itself to his gaze. By the
time the non-arrival of the _Cambodia_ was read into disaster and a
searching ship sent into these seas the end would have long since come
to this island. Well he realized the emptiness of this stretch of ocean
and the one chance in ten thousand which might bring a stray merchantman
or trader stumbling upon them. Well he realized the slight tenure of the
crust of earth which held him. Judging from its assumed position it had
drifted a phenomenal distance for that latitude. He believed it must
have been ripped away from one of the islands of the Hawaiian group.
That it had survived so long seemed to him miraculous and but emphasized
the imminence of its early dissolution. What had already happened since
the landing confirmed in his mind that the next storm would be the
mother of the island's oblivion and all it held.
Floating islands are uncommon in any but the most placid waters. Yet in
the phenomena of the sea's scheme of things they are common occurrences.
The charts of all big waters are dotted with their records. Shipmasters
come to port reporting an island where one was never before and where it
would seem against all reason that one should be. Still man imbued with
the unconquerable mystery of the sea writes this report on his charts
for all times. First he writes it as a fact, justifying its assumption
as such. According to its reported size, ships go searching for
it--men-o'-war, leisurely merchantmen, vagrant traders. No island is
found. Only sea is there. But man does not trust the deep; he never
will. He does not erase his record. He marks it "P.D."--position
doubtful. Years pass without further report of an island in this
locality. Then he goes as far as he dares. He writes on his charts
"E.D."--meaning "Existence doubtful."
How many a well-found ship, sailing in a sea charted clear and deep, has
blundered into islands like the one which held the _Cambodia_ castaways
and suddenly come unto her last port? No man may tell. Seldom, however,
do ocean traffickers meet with these waif lands north or south of the
twentieth parallels.
With never a dream that this could be one--here in the thirties--though
the absence of reefs and the raw and broken aspect of the island shore
had given him pause, Lavelle had trapped himself. He had captained her,
for whose salvation he would gladly lay down his life, into a prison to
which death held the key.
It was with this bitter, self-blaming thought, and tortured by it, that
he turned away from the sea to behold the gold woman coming toward him
with a wistful smile. He ran to meet her and his soul cried out at the
denial of its impulse to fold her to his heart and soothe her hurts.