The inverted pyramid

BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1924
Copyright, 1924, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Published January, 1924
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
From the duality of man's nature and the competition of individuals the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.
JOSEPH CONRAD.

The Inverted Pyramid
Item: one boy aged eighteen, name Roderick Norquay; one girl aged fifteen, named Mary Thorn; one gaudy cedar dugout canoe got up in the Siwash style of high-curving bow and stern, both ends grotesquely carved and brilliantly colored in flaming red, blinding yellow, piercing blue; one stretch of tiderace running swiftly between an island shore and a forbidding rock-strewn point.
The tides of Fundy and the maelstroms of the Scandinavian coast have been variously hymned since Jules Verne vulgarized holy science and proved himself an unwitting prophet with Captain Nemo's submersible. But there are tides and maelstroms on the Pacific seaboard as worthy as these others, which have as yet no place in literature save through the dull medium of admiralty charts and blue-bound North Pacific pilot books. These sheets and tomes are thumbed and conned by men nowise concerned with that color, form, and substance which imparts magic to the written word. They seek therein only knowledge of reef and shoal, of anchorages, currents, depths, for the safe passage of their sea-borne keels.