Thirst leapt into her frame with demon craving. The sun dropped like a ball of blood into the ocean and glimmered fiercely in its fading light. Like a goblet of boiling blood lifted on the sky-line, it appeared, then suddenly disappeared.
Notwithstanding her sufferings, the girl still felt the cherished desire of humanity to cling to life—though suffering the pangs of death. In that tiny drifting craft on a world of torpid water, afloat beneath illimitable space, she knelt in prayer to the great dumb sky. The crowded stars at first seemed to mock her. Then, like far-off bright thoughts of longing, they came to her, like flocks of her own unattainable desires, and peeped up at her imaged in the vast, silent waters.
A puff of wind ruffled that mirror and swept the deep waters into reefs of illusive radiance. Then came a wind like an infinite breath of pity, and the dying, parched relic of humanity sucked in that cold sigh of night—as one would drink water. Still she floated on. Slowly a silver glimmer of ineffable wildness flushed the south-west horizon; its broadening tide of radiance outrivalled the earnest splendour of the stars. Higher and higher it climbed, till the full, haggard moon peered like sorrow on that lost child, and stared, with sad surprise, on the edge of the ocean. It lit that hollow vault of night with a ghostly gleam, a gleam that revealed no movement but the tossing arms of the delirious castaway.
Who can paint that scene? Who can describe one iota of the indescribable misery and anguish ere the senses were numbed and the head drooped, faint from its prayer to a heaven that listened not, in all the vastness of that terrible silence?
Another day swept in like a mighty silence of breathing fire. It came almost without warning across those silent, tropic seas. It was as though from the tomb-like vault some mighty starry slab of night had been suddenly uplifted, revealing a vast sepulchre and deep, deep below one little corpse huddled in its shroud, a corpse that still drifted across the silent, blazing seas—as Death, the grey-nosed shark, followed silently.
But Waylao was not dead. It was not the hot furnace winds of heaven that fluttered old Mrs Matafa’s shawl—(I have that shawl)—it was the convulsed movement of death’s despair in one who still lived.
In the delirium of that unquenchable blaze of sunlight Benbow’s misguided daughter lifted her head. It was an eternity of seconds ere she could muster strength enough to hang her face over the rim of her drifting world, then she drank, drank, drank!
Only the infinite powers know why she did not die as that liquid brine stiffened her parched frame with frantic fits of madness.
On, on she drifted. Yet another day swept the skies, yet again Time lifted that tremendous lid from the vault of reality. Just as Fate loves to shatter the dreams, the aspirations, the hopes of men, it seemed to delay the everlasting touch of sleep, the sleep that hovers like an angel with beating wings, waiting to close all eyes.
For lo! that same night the heavens poured down their sparkling drops. The showers of cool liquid drenched her face as she screamed in the ecstasy of its cruel blessing.