Once or twice more the shark struck at Willie, and once or twice more the boy evaded the stroke, but made no attack himself. Then all saw for what he waited. Another black fin, with a curling feather rising before it, came sliding up to take part in the sport. Madame, frightened, was now on her feet. Had time permitted, she would, I think, have disobeyed Willatopy's instructions, and urged the boat forward to his assistance. But there was no time. The first shark was attacking again, and the second was rapidly approaching. Willatopy no longer delayed action. He evaded as before the upward stroke of shark number one, and then, before the beast could turn, twisted about under water and rose beneath the belly of shark number two. Right, left, both daggers went home under the fin. Turning without coming to the surface for breath—he could stay nearly two minutes under water—Willatopy swooped back at his first opponent, slipped under it as he had done with the other, and again shot out both fists—so and so. He came up between the two big fish in water reddened by their blood, and watched warily for further signs of activity. But both sharks were dead; he had struck very swiftly, but he had struck home truly.
Willatopy swam easily towards the boat. Shark hunting, especially with the very efficient trench daggers, was a sport which rapidly palled, and he had done with it. But it had not quite done with him. When he was some twenty yards from the motionless boat, a third shark, more cunning than his two fellows, rose at Willie from the depths without giving him warning on the surface. But Willatopy was not caught yet. One swims with very clearly skinned eyes in shark-infested waters, and the boy saw the shark's shadow before its body was near enough to be dangerous. The shark rising belly upwards could not see the boy drop downwards like a stone, and when it did sight him, the stroke had failed, and Willatopy had dived under the boat. Madame leaning out over the side glared down into the clear, almost still, water. She saw what is rarely seen, an under-water fight between a man and a shark, and she saw, moreover, how fully Willatopy was justified in his self-confidence. The white body of the great fish shot by the dark form of the lithe, quickly manœuvring boy, who, as it went past, flashed out two blows, right and left, as if he were a boxer side-stepping and countering an opponent's rush. Madame could not see the daggers rip home, but she saw the blood spurt from the side of the shark and its huge body writhe and shudder. Then up came Willatopy's head not six feet from the boat, and he swung himself in over the stern. The dead shark, still quivering, rolled slowly up to the surface, and floated there beside its slayer. The body after allowing for the immersed portions, was a good deal longer than the sixteen foot dinghy.
"They are good knives," said Willatopy, pulling the trench knives off his fists, and unfastening the retaining cords. "They are good knives, just the things for sharks. But sharks are silly sheep, Madame, hardly worth the trouble of killing." He pointed to the three big bodies, each floating in its own red pool, and laughed. "Two at once and then the third. One kills them just like the sheep that they are. There is no danger at all, not one little bit."
* * * * * * *
But though Joy and Cry would not trouble to come out of their hut to see Willatopy kill sharks in the bay, they skipped like schoolgirls at the promise of a dance, when offered a fishing trip to the Great Barrier. They were Hulas of New Guinea, whose savage ancestors had for countless ages fished the waters to leeward of the Barrier. It was the great kindly sea farm of the Hulas, it had grown with them through more thousands of years than mankind can count, and it will stand there, grand, massive and mysterious, long after the last Hula has vanished from the earth. The abrupt north end of the Barrier was some ten miles distant—Madame could hear in her tent the everlasting thunder of the surf against its outer wall—and thence it wound southwards, skirting the North Queensland coast though never touching it, for twelve hundred wave-swept miles. Inshore, from Brisbane to Cape York, there interpose deep navigable channels, starred with islands, and through the Barrier itself are cut gaps here and there by which the hardy navigator may pass in safety from the outside Pacific Ocean to the inner channels. By such a passage, Willatopy, the boy of twelve, had steered his father's yawl with his father's corpse lashed to its deck.
The Barrier is a long, narrow, tortuous wall of which the outer face—where the coral polyps love to cling in the foaming surf of the Pacific—drops down almost sheer for hundreds of feet. On the inner side the water is more shallow and broken up by reefs. This wall, twelve hundred miles long, is not more than a quarter of a mile wide on its coping, and in some stretches is no more than a hundred feet. For hundreds of thousands of years the madrepores have been working upon it, each one living out his tiny life in the whirl of the surf, and then dying, to leave his skeleton of lime as one more brick in the gigantic masonry.
The coral polyp, species madrepore, of the Barrier is a patient, courageous little seaman. He is born and bred in the wide ocean. He cannot endure the boredom of life in the still, tame, waters below the hundred-foot level; he cannot exist above the low tidal mark, and his salt soul withers in the muddy freshness of river mouths. I love Darwin's romantic theory of the Barrier, though later authorities have cast doubts upon its sufficiency. Project your mind back, says Darwin, some few hundreds of thousands of years to the time when the Queensland coast was much higher out of the water than it is now in these degenerate days. Imagine the land slowly sinking, a few inches maybe in a century, and there you are! The Great Barrier, skirting the coast yet never touching it, is explained. The coral polyps, which cannot support life except between low water mark and twenty fathoms, can only build fringing reefs along the shore. Wherever a river or stream comes down there is a gap, for the coral polyps cannot live away from their native salt. We have then a fringing reef, cut transversely with gaps, and this reef continually rises in height from the sea bottom as the land slowly sinks. Each foot of subsidence gives to the polyps an added foot of water in which to live and multiply. The æons pass, the land subsides, and presently a water-filled channel opens out between the original fringing reef and the shore. As the land sinks still further, the channel widens, and is ever widening. The fringing reef has become a barrier of which the base on the sea floor is always sinking, and the coping of the roof always rising, built up by madrepore skeletons. Against the edge of the new shore a new fringing reef is built up. And so on through the long centuries. That is Darwin's theory. There are others, less imaginative and more mechanical, but my instinct rejects them. I feel that Charles Darwin, though himself a very bad sailor, has alone done full and sympathetic justice to the splendid sea instincts of the bold madrepores. They scorn the ease of shelter and shallows. Theirs is the open coast on which the wild waves break; they make the long fringe of it one vast coral tomb, and when the land sinks they turn that ancient fringing tomb into a vast outer Barrier. The madrepore is a true sea architect, and no peddling theory of under-water detritus, slowly accumulating as a foundation for his masonry, would deceive him into building on the rubbish.
Willatopy took charge of the expedition to the Great Barrier. He was well equipped with gear, for being very rich and not consenting to do any work, he bought his nets in Thursday Island. The one which he dragged out of store looked as if it would hold enough fish to feed the Island for twelve months. It was sixty feet long and about ten feet wide. One edge was weighted and the other buoyed, and draw ropes were arranged so that the whole net could be pulled into one long narrow bag. For the service of the fishing party he commandeered the motor launch and two whaleboats.
"We will go out with the ebb and come back on the flood," said he, "and the jolly little motor boat shall tow the whalers. When we arrive, the motor boat shall be anchored in safety while we fish from the whaleboats. We shall want"—he spoke as confidently as if the resources of the Humming Top were as unreservedly at his call as were those of Tops Island—"we shall want six strong sailors for each boat, and an engineer to look after the motor. I don't understand motors."
"May we have the boats and men?" asked Madame sweetly of Ching, who had come ashore to pay his regular morning visit. He was responsible for Madame's safety on the Island, and nothing would persuade him that her pretty head was not in grievous peril. The Skipper belonged to the dark adventurous past.