A faint flush brightened the east—daybreak was coming. The stars took hasty flight down the encircling sky-lines as Waylao awoke.
Dawn, like a mighty river’s multitudinous flood of infinite colour, swept into that vast, hollow vault as the first pang of the new day’s birth commenced. Crimson, splashed with lines of saffron and green, climbed, glimmered, flickered and flamed as they touched and fired the lines of mist on the eastern horizon, while far to the south-west the last flock of stars took frightened flight.
The birth of that mighty splendour broadened till the gold-flashing eye of day looked over the blue horizon. Nothing but the vast azure circle of infinite water was in sight, only the frail castaway, a stricken girl adrift, fleeing from wrath, the hatred of outraged virtue.
The very heavens seemed to assume a serious mood. The eye of day stared with magnificent heat from its unlidded socket of all the sky. Old Mrs Matafa’s hands had toiled divinely for the coming events of Time unborn, for out of the measures of her weaving fingers happened that which her soul had no hint of in her wildest dreams, as she knitted and knitted, for lo! the perishing castaway ceased appealing to the dumb sky and drew the laced folds of that old shawl over her sun-scorched head. But for the protection of that old shawl the girl would certainly have perished under the blaze of that brassy sky.
Thirst leapt into her frame with demon craving. The sun dropped like a ball of blood into the ocean and glimmered fiercely in its fading light. Like a goblet of boiling blood lifted on the sky-line, it appeared, then suddenly disappeared.
Notwithstanding her sufferings, the girl still felt the cherished desire of humanity to cling to life—though suffering the pangs of death. In that tiny drifting craft on a world of torpid water, afloat beneath illimitable space, she knelt in prayer to the great dumb sky. The crowded stars at first seemed to mock her. Then, like far-off bright thoughts of longing, they came to her, like flocks of her own unattainable desires, and peeped up at her imaged in the vast, silent waters.
A puff of wind ruffled that mirror and swept the deep waters into reefs of illusive radiance. Then came a wind like an infinite breath of pity, and the dying, parched relic of humanity sucked in that cold sigh of night—as one would drink water. Still she floated on. Slowly a silver glimmer of ineffable wildness flushed the south-west horizon; its broadening tide of radiance outrivalled the earnest splendour of the stars. Higher and higher it climbed, till the full, haggard moon peered like sorrow on that lost child, and stared, with sad surprise, on the edge of the ocean. It lit that hollow vault of night with a ghostly gleam, a gleam that revealed no movement but the tossing arms of the delirious castaway.