My thoughts will haunt the banks—drink deep the dream!
Come when my night full of deep loneliness
Sighs all its stars across the dreaming skies,
Till memory’s ocean mirrors happiness—
My heaven with all its half-forgotten eyes.
NEXT morning Hawahee and Sestrina went, as usual, and prayed before the gods of the shell-temple. No sadder sight could be imagined than the sight of the two lonely castaways kneeling there, in the faith born of superstitious fear and misery, before those solemn-faced figures which were sombre manifestations of Hawahee’s pagan creed.
Sestrina’s small delicate form, her hair rippling down her back, and Hawahee, tall and broad-shouldered, kneeling by her side, like some Phidias before Olympian Zeus and his colossal vassals, made a symbolical picture which might well have appealed to a beneficent Omnipotence. Their statues were dwarfed to pigmy-like proportions as they knelt in humbleness before those herculean, solemn high-domed-headed gods that stood on either side of the divinely majestic solemn-voiced goddess Pelé. How mellow was her voice, for the wind, drifting from the south-west, came sweeping down the leafy valley and entered the convolutions of her pearly lips with æolian cunning and murmuring sweetness.
As soon as they had left the temple Hawahee proposed that they should take a trip together and search for seagulls’ eggs on the other side of the isle. It was only about half an hour’s walk across the island. Sestrina, who was never so happy as when roaming about the tropical loveliness of that solitary world, clapped her hands with delight. When they arrived on the cooler elevation of the palm-clad hills in the centre of the isle, the sun was high in the sky.
“How sweet is the smell of the scented wind,” said Sestrina, as she stood on the height and felt the cool scent-laden breeze as it stirred the leafy boughs of the mango and breadfruit trees. Standing up there they could see the far-off curling waves running up the shores around their solitary isle. To the eastward they could see the two huge rocks that looked like two vast monoliths standing by the sea. Again to the south-west stood the lightning-blasted giant breadfruit trunk; its one shrivelled blackened branch resembled a mighty human arm that ever pointed to the western skyline, like some weird sign-post pointing the way towards the eternity of the blue days and the sad, hesitating sunsets.
While standing there, on the hills, the wind gently touched Sestrina’s tresses, blowing them softly out till they floated against Hawahee’s cheek.