the stars faded, the east grew crimson and the sun arose to show levua gone; a sky without cloud, a sea without trace of sail or gull.
le moan, crouching in the bow with the risen sun hot on her left shoulder, saw the long levels of the marching swell as they came and passed, the kermadec bowing to them; saw the distant southern sea line and beyond it the road to karolin.
with her eyes shut and as the needle of the compass finds the north magnetic pole, she could have pointed to where karolin lay; and as she gazed across the fields of the breeze-blown swell no trace of cloud troubled her mind, all was bright ahead. sru had made it clear to her that no hurt would come to taori, and with peterson, had gone any last lingering doubt that may have been in her mind. she trusted sru and she trusted rantan, who had spoken kindly to her, carlin, and the kanaka crew; of peterson, the man who had terrified her first and the only trustable man on that ship, she had always had her doubts, begotten by that first impression, by his beard, his gruff voice and what sru had said about peterson and how he would “swallow all”—that is to say the pearls of karolin; those mysterious pearls that the white men treasured and of which the charm hidden behind her ear had spoken to sru.
she had always worn it as a protection and she had not the least doubt that it had spoken to sru, just as a person might speak, and told him of those other pearls which she had often seen and played with when oysters were cast to rot on the beach for the sake of their shells. she had not the least doubt that to the talisman behind her ear was due this happy return and the elimination of peterson. was she wrong?
as she crouched, the back draught from the head sails fanning her hair, the ship and her crew, the sea and its waves, all vanished, dissolved matter from which grew as by some process of recrystallization the beach of karolin. the long south beach where the sand was whispering in the wind, the hot south beach where the sun-stricken palms lifted their fronds to the brassy sky of noon and the tender skies of dawn and evening, the beach above which the stars stood at night all turning with the turning dome of sky.
she saw a canoe paddling ashore and the canoe man now on the beach, his eyes crinkled against the sun—eyes coloured like the sea when the grey of the squall mixes with its blue. the sun was on his red-gold hair and he trod the sands lightly, not as the kanaka walks and moves; one might have fancied little wings upon his feet.
his naked body against the blazing lagoon showed like a flame of gold against a flame of blue. it was taori. taori as she had seen him first, on that day when he had come to bid aioma to the canoe building.
it was as if fate on that day had suddenly stripped away a veil showing her the one thing to be desired, the only thing that would ever matter to her in this life or the next.
as she leaned, the breeze in her hair and her mind like a bird fleeting far ahead into the distance, flying fish like silver shaftless arrow-heads passed and flittered into the blue water, and now a turtle floating asleep and disturbed by the warble of the bow wash and the creak of the onrushing schooner, sank quietly fathoms deep leaving only a few bubbles on the swell.
carlin had come on deck. rantan had said not a word about the broken open cupboard or the whiskey; the ship was cleared of drink and that was enough for him; when he came on deck a few minutes after the other, he found the beachcomber leaning on the after rail.
a shark was hanging in the wake of the schooner. a deep-sea ship does not sail alone. she gives company and shelter to all sorts of fish from the remora that hangs on for a whole voyage, to the bonito that follows her maybe for a week. in front of the shark, moving and glittering like spoon bait, a pilot fish showed in flashes of blue and gold.
carlin turned from contemplation of these things to find rantan at his side.
on going below for a wash after his night on deck, carlin had found the other at breakfast. neither man had spoken of the events of the night before, nor did they now.
“following us steady, isn’t he?” said carlin, turning again to contemplate the monster in the wake—“don’t seem to be swimming either and he’s going all of eight knots. what’s he after, following us like that?”
“haven’t you ever seen a shark before?” asked rantan.
“yes, and i’ve never seen good of them following a ship,” replied carlin, “and i’m not set on seeing them, ’specially now.”
“why now?” asked the mate.
but carlin shied from the subject that was in both their minds.
“oh, i don’t know,” said he, “i was thinking of the traverse in front of us.... say, now we’re set and sailing for it, are you sure of hitting that island?”
“sure,” said the mate.
“then you’re better at the navigating job than you pretended to be,” said carlin. “what i like about you is the way you keep things hid.”
“i’ve kept nothing hid,” replied the other. “i’m crazy bad on the navigation, but i’ve got a navigator on board that’ll take us there same as a bullet to a target.”
“sru?”
“sru nothing—the kanaka girl, she’s a marayara. ever heard of them? you get them among the kanakas; every kanaka has a pretty good sense of direction, but a marayara, take him away from his island and he’ll home back like a pigeon if he has a canoe and can paddle long enough. that island we took the girl from is the pearl island. born and bred there she was, and it’s her centre of everything. sru got it all out of her and about the pearls and fixed up with her to take us back. don’t know what he’s promised her, i reckon a few beads is all she wants and all she’ll get, but that’s how it lies: we’ve only got to push along due south by the compass and she’ll correct us, leeway or set of current or any tomfool tricks of the needle don’t matter to her. she never bothers about the compass, she sees where she wants to go straight before her nose, same’s when land’s in sight you see it and steer for it.”
“can she steer?” asked carlin, who had not been on deck the day sru set her at the wheel.
rantan turned to where the girl was standing in the bow, called her aft and gave the wheel over to her. when she had felt the ship, standing with her head slightly uptilted, she altered the course a few points; the kermadec had been off her path by that amount owing to leeway or set of current.
from that moment the ship was in the hands of le moan, tireless as only a being can be who exists always in the open air. she lived at the wheel with intervals for sleep and rest, always finding on her return the ship off her course, still heading south, but no longer on that exact and miraculous line drawn by instinct between herself and karolin.
error in the form of leeway or the influence of swell or the set of current could never push the vessel to east or west of that line, for the line moved with the ship, and as the journey shortened, like a steadily shortening string tied to a ball in centrifugal motion, it would bring the kermadec at last to karolin, no matter how far she was swung out of her course—blown fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles to east or west it would not matter, her head would turn to karolin. the only flaw in that curious navigational instrument, the mind of le moan, was its blindness to distance from karolin, the pull being the same for any distance, and had the island risen suddenly before them on some dark night, she would have piled the craft upon it unless warned by the sound of the reef.
rantan kept the log going, he had a rough idea of the distance between karolin and levua, but he did not try to explain the log to le moan. if he had done so, his labour would have been wasted. le moan had no idea of time as we conceive it, cut up into hours, minutes and seconds. time for her was a thing, not an abstract idea; a thing ever present yet shifting in appearance—energy.
the recognition of time is simply the recognition of the rhythm of energy by energy itself. le moan recognized the rhythm in the tides, in the sunrises and sunsets, in the going and coming of the fish shoals, in slumber and waking life, but of those figments of man’s intellect, hours, minutes, years, she had no idea. always in touch with reality, she had come in vague touch with the truth that there is no past, no future—nothing ever but rhythmic alternations of the present.
but, though unable to grasp the division of the real day into empirical fractions, the compass, that triumph of man’s intellect, presented no difficulties to her. when rantan explained its pointing to her she understood, the needle pointed away from karolin.
the fleur-de-lys on the card, which seemed to her vaguely like the head of a fish spear, pointed away from karolin, that is away from the south.
the compass card moved, she did not know that the compass card was absolutely steady, that this appearance of movement was a delusion caused by the altered course of the ship, that the ship pivoted on the card not the card on the ship.
if she let the ship off her course to the east, the card moved and her sense of direction told her at once that the fleur-de-lys was still pointing away from karolin. she spoke on this matter to sru. sru, who had made the two voyages on ships and who was yet a capable steersman, had quite taken for granted his first captain’s explanation to him of the compass; there was a god in it that held it just so and if sru let the card wobble from the course set down, the god would most likely come out of the binnacle and kick sru into the middle of next week. he was a yankee skipper and he had made an excellent steersman of sru.
le moan understood; she believed in gods, from naniwa the shark-toothed one to nan the benign: believed in them, just as white men believe in their gods—with reservations; but this was different from anything she had hitherto conceived of a deity. he must be very small to be contained in the binnacle, very small and set of purpose always pointing with the spear head away from karolin. why?
rantan had pointed down to the spear head and away north and told her it always pointed there, always away from the direction of karolin. why?
she had not asked him why the card moved, or seemed to move, sru having already told her.
the feeling came to her that the little imprisoned something was against going to karolin, but no one seemed to mind it, yet they were always consulting it, rantan when he took the wheel and sru and maru, who was also a good steersman.
every day at noon rantan would appear on deck and take an observation of the sun with peterson’s sextant, whilst carlin, if he were on deck, would cuff himself on the thigh and turn and lean over the rail to laugh unobserved.
rantan was only fooling—keeping up appearances, so that the crew might fancy him as good as peterson in finding his way on the sea. sru had never told the others that they depended entirely on le moan, the fact that she was a way-finder was known to them, but it is as well for the after guard to keep up appearances. rantan might as well have been looking at the sun through a beer bottle for all he knew of the matter, but the crew could not tell that. so, as a navigator, he held a place in their minds above the girl.
at night when the binnacle lamp was lit and she happened to be at the wheel, her eyes would wander to the trembling card. she would put the ship a bit off its course just to see it move, noticing that it always moved in the same manner in a reverse direction to the alteration in course. if the head of the schooner turned to starboard, the card would rotate to port and vice versa. she studied its doings as one studies the doings of a strange animal, but she never caught it altering its mind or its action.
at night it always seemed to her that the thing in the binnacle, whether god or devil, was inimical to her, or at all events warning her not to take the ship back to karolin; by day it did not matter.
so under the stars and over the phosphorescent sea the kermadec headed south, ever south, the blazing dawns leaping over the port rail and the gigantic sunsets dying with the blood of titans the skies to starboard, till one morning le moan, handing the wheel to rantan, pointed ahead and then walked forward. her work was done. far ahead, paling the sky, shone the lagoon blaze of karolin.
