The great fight had brought matters to a head with her, coupling itself in some extraordinary way, by antithesis, with the warm tenderness revealed by the birds and with Dick, who had just vanished heedless of her.
What the bluebirds had whispered, the battle had suddenly shouted: “You stand alone. A world lies around you of which you know nothing. It belongs to Taori; never shall you enter it.”
She looked up at the birds, happy and building, heedless of the terror that had just passed and vanished. She looked at the pool, still murky, its surface spangled with prismatic colours where streaks of oil had spread. She looked at the far-off reef and the sea beyond, and she saw nothing but Taori, that beautiful lithe form, that face, fearless and ever seeming to look upwards, those eyes full of sight for all things but her. Until now she had never really seen him. She heard again his voice calling on her for help.
Like a person wandering in sleep, she passed along the lagoon bank towards the eastern trees, seeing nothing, moving by instinct, scarcely alive, terribly, suddenly and mortally stricken. Sounds filled her ears like the chiming of the reef coral when the breakers of the high tide were coming in, sounds now broken and diffuse, now calling his name, gull-clear: “Taori! Taori! Taori!”
Then, breaking away from the dream state and turning to a great tree, she cast her arms about it, embracing it like a living thing and resting her cheek against its smooth, sun-warmed bark, clinging to it and the great momentary peace that had come to her tormented heart.
Dick, who had heard the first thunder of the battle in the woods, running from the trees had seen Katafa standing watching the cachalot come into the pool, but he had no eyes for her. The excitement of the fight and the fear of injury to the dinghy moored by the bank held him from thought of anything else.
Then, when the cachalot broke away, he followed, running through the trees, hallooing, mad with excitement and the desire to be in at the death.
He could see, through the branches overhanging the water, the foam in the wake of the fight and a long line of following gulls.
The gulls were coming down already. The high cloud of them had broken, and, as if on a moving stairway, they were coming down in a great curve that broke and flittered about the nearly dead leviathan, surging now slowly, tongueless, torn, half eviscerated, towards the break of the reef.