With the refreshing fluid on her parched lips, and the cool breezes of heaven, her senses awakened; but only dimly was her mental vision restored. Phantoms danced across that world of water. Shadows of the wrack of clouds, racing beneath the moon, fled away into the darkness of the far-off, silent horizons, and it may have been those shadowy contortions of the sky that peopled the ocean solitude with visions for the girl whose eyes were glazed with insanity. The face of her Islamic betrayer hung enframed beneath the stars. She lifted her hands and beat the air, and cursed that visionary face of evil.
Then her mother came to her, and who knows what visions of those whom she had loved, those who had watched over the innocence of her childhood? Once more her senses were numbed and she fell huddled to the bottom of the canoe.
On the third or fourth day Waylao lifted her death-stricken face and wondered if she still lived. She stared around. Had she died, and was she still travelling onward across some purgatorial ocean of death? As she stared, she saw a tiny blot; it glimmered on the western horizon. At first she thought it was a ship; then in her delirium she thought it was the shores of Nuka Hiva in sight.
At such a possibility the love of life that is so strong in youth awoke again, and her being thrilled with tremendous hope. She might yet live to gaze into the eyes of those she loved.
As the setting sun broadened in the west, the dark spot glittered and took definite shape. One by one tiny hills arose, then plumed palms stuck out in bright relief, distinctly visible against the background of the yet more distant sunset.
The strong, hot north wind still blew and laughed along the rippling sea, yes, as though it knew that its unseen hands were fast drifting the poor derelict to deliverance from the homeless ocean.
At the sight of the little isle with its palms and all the materialised beauty of Nature’s handiwork blossoming forth flowers and ferns, the stricken girl fell on her knees and thanked God, God who in His own inscrutable way had answered her prayers.
Ere sunset faded down into ocean depth behind the solitude of that small, uninhabited isle, Waylao could hear the murmuring of the deep waters on the reefs, and saw the singing waves running up the shore, tossing their hands with delight.
In the reaction from deepest despair to the renewed hope she struggled to a sitting posture and laughed in the madness of delirium. Then she slept.
The stars were crowding the heavens when the canoe suddenly beached itself. The impact of the frail craft on the coral reefs tore the bottom, and so the cooling waters crept in and swathed the fevered limbs of the unconscious girl.