The yell of the new-risen wind from the south, the dashing about of the trees, and the great alternating splashes of moonlight and shadow raised their rage and terror to dementia, and as they saw Utali and his warriors, and charged them and were charged in turn, imaginary ghosts attacking imaginary ghosts, nothing on earth could be compared to the fight, and nothing in dreamland.
Twenty men alone escaped from that psychological battle, twenty of Laminai’s men, spearless, daggerless, torn by brambles, gasping and running for the canoes, whilst the trees roared above them and tossed them out to the shouting beach where three of the canoes, dragged from their anchorage, lay broken and ruined.
One canoe alone remained straining at its rope, the fellow in her waving his arms and shouting, screaming as he saw the survivors taking the water. “Karaka! Karaka! Karaka!” “Sharks! Sharks! Sharks!”
The lagoon was full of sharks driven in by the storm, but the survivors neither heard the cries of the anchor watch nor would they have heeded. Worse things were behind them than sharks. Makara and his ghostly followers were on their heels. They struck out across the tossing water, the moonlight steady on the bobbing heads that vanished one by one till ten only were left, saved by the number and rapacity of the sharks.
Thick as women at a bargain counter, the brutes foiled themselves by getting in each other’s way, and the ten survivors, scrambling on board, some over the outrigger gratings, some over the side, cut free from the anchor rope, seized the paddles, and headed for the break.
No sooner had they cut the rope and struck the water with the paddles than they saw their blunder.
The tide had caught them. The full ebb tide, rushing from the two arms of the lagoon, had them in its grip, bearing them to the break, beyond which the out-boiling water had set up a terrible cross-sea.
The heavy canoe was undermanned. They could do nothing but steer and shout as they went, swept as a toboggan on the sheeting foam, stern lifting, bow lifting, shooting through the break into the lumping sea that turned them turtle.
A wave took the canoe and smashed it on the coral, destroying the outrigger, and a great king wave festooned with foam took the remains and hove it onto the reef high and dry, stern stuck in a cleft and bow in air, a last touch of the fantasy of the sea, that sister of Fate.