Waylao’s life was not yet closed, though Providence would have been more merciful to have taken her soul away beyond the deepest sleep.
As the cool waters swished about her body, her eyelids quivered; she moved, then sat up and looked around.
Who knows what terrible thoughts haunted her delirious brain as she tried to fathom the loneliness, the deep silence of the small world whereon she had drifted? The pangs of thirst stupefied her faculties. The moaning of the winds in the belt of palms just up the shore inspired her heart with terror, and seemed to mock her misery.
Too weak to stand, she crawled up the little patch of soft sand to the lagoon that glimmered in the hollows by the shore. She almost screamed with delight as the life-giving crystal fluid crept between her cracked lips, moistening her parched throat. It was fresh water. Dimly realising that she was safe from the desolation of the trackless ocean, she crept into the shadow of the bamboo thickets and, quite exhausted, fell asleep.
There she lay, alone beneath the infinite skies. The great world, with its cities and histories, did not exist so far as she was concerned.
Awakening with the gilding of the eastern horizon, she gazed around and at once realised her awful position. Terror seized her. She lifted her face and screamed, then listened. No answer came; only the weird screech of the frightened parrots that had rested, on their migrating flight, in the trees over her head. They rose in glittering flocks and hovered a long time just over the isle ere they once more settled down.
With the rising of the kind sun her terror decreased. But the horror of the loneliness on that silent world still remained. All that she had suffered (only a part of which my pen can attempt to tell) had destroyed her natural pluck. She was as weak as a child.
So great was her grief, and so vividly was the scene burnt in her brain as she stared about her, that she told us how the tiny waves came up the shore to her feet singing a song of tender fellowship.
Then how she ran about the isle calling aloud, in the hope that some human being might exist in that loneliest spot in creation.
But when only the echoes of her own voice answered her despairing cries, the awful desolation overwhelmed her, and she rushed back with terrified eyes to the singing shore waves, and huddled near their presence, just as a child might run from danger back to the security of its little comrades.