A great sea current is a world of its own and, like the _Kuro Shiwo_, this northern drift carried with it its own peculiar people. Jellyfish from the far south, albacores from the Gambier grounds, turtle drowsing or asleep on its surface, sometimes a shoal of flying fish, like shaftless arrow-heads of silver shot by invisible marksmen, would pass, flittering into the water ahead; once, uprunning a steeper wall of the swell, she glimpsed a shark cradled in the glossy green like a fish in ice or a faun in amber. At noon a reef showed away to starboard, razor-backed and spouting like a whale, and then, just before sunset, gulls began to pass her, flying north; away across the water she could see more gulls in full flight, all making north.
Standing up in the last blaze of the sunset, she strained her eyes—nothing. Once she thought that she could see a point breaking the far horizon, land or gull’s wing she could not be sure. Then, with the dark, the wind sank to a dead calm and the swell to a gentle heave of the sea, and, crouching in the bottom of the canoe, Katafa, her head resting against the outrigger pole, closed her eyes.
She awoke at dawn with the whole eastern sky flushed like the petal of a vast rose on which the day-star glittered like a point of dew. A faint breathing of wind from the north brought a whisper with it, the whisper of the reef, and for a second, just as she opened her eyes, the picture of Karolin came before her. Had she drifted back? Rising and grasping the mast, she turned her face to the wind, and there, far away still but breathing at her with the perfumed breath of the land wind, lay the form she had seen in mirage as a dreamer sees his fate.
Moment by moment, as the light increased, it grew clearer and more definite, till now, struck by the first level beams of the sun, it bloomed to full life across the blue.
That morning, three hours after sun-up and half an hour after breakfast, Fate and Mr. Kearney had a difference of opinion.
The bananas were ripe on the eastern side of the island and he had arranged in his mind to go and fetch a bunch, taking the quickest way—that is to say, right over the hill-top instead of round by the lagoon edge—but he was lazy and disposed to put the business off to a more convenient time. He would have made Dick row him round in the dinghy, only that Dick wanted the boat for purposes of his own beyond on the reef.