With his head on the pasht, unconscious as the dead, he slept whilst the sea wind blew and the great reef sang, mourned, murmured and spoke.
Broad as the reef break was at Karolin, no ship under sail could enter at the full ebb. Sweeping with an eight-knot clip and boiling round the coral piers, the waters of the great lagoon met the northward-running current in a leaping cross-sea of aquamarine and emerald whipped to snow when the wind was in the east. At slack all this died away; a child might have swum the passage and a leaf would have drifted with scarce a change of place. This was the sea gate of Karolin, and the keepers of the gate were the sun and the moon.
The sun and the moon and the wind and the sea—these four held the great atoll between them and had here a significance unguessed by dwellers on the continents and lands of the world; for here the new and the full moons were manifestly the letters-in of the great spring tides, and the first- and third-quarter moons the admitters of the neaps. Here the sun was seen from his rising to his setting, from his leap to his plunge, and storm and halcyon cast their spells on life, unbroken and uninterfered with by hills or walls or mountains or forests.
Here for undated ages man had lived alone with the sea and the gulls and the fish, and had remained man, learning little, forgetting nothing, with a memory and tradition kept alive by the necessities of the moment that urged him to build canoes as his forefathers had built them, and houses to shelter the canoes, and houses to protect him from the rains and winds.
Here there was nothing that did not date from the remote past, nothing that was not of use in the immediate present.
So is it with the beavers and the ants and the bees, whose work ever advances from the time of Nineveh and beyond, yet never advances to the future, who build as they built, who live as they lived, who die as they died, and as first they built and lived and died in the garden of God, which is Nature.
Only man can change, only man can live for ages without change, yet remain capable of change, only man can be sealed away in the land of instinct, yet remain capable of entering the land of reason.
So was it with the people of Karolin gathered together this morning on the beach by the gridiron of coral where for ages past victims had been sacrificed to Nanawa, the shark-toothed one, by his priests and through the agency of his servants, the sharks.