"Come," concluded Uncle Harry, who had been talking as I breakfasted, "we must be getting ashore. Fatu can bring the canoes out and stow them away while we have a yarn with the chief. I hope he has found me some divers."
Taura had sent word to the small Paumotan settlements scattered around the island, and for a week past the divers had been drifting in to Faatemu, traveling by cutter or sailing-canoe with their women, their children, and their household goods. My uncle went to their camp to select his men, and soon the bay was a lively place, echoing with laughter and shouts as the laden canoes plied between the schooner and the beach. The Tara, once smart as a yacht, took on the aspect of a floating menagerie: pigs grunted disconsolately on deck; dogs barked; hens clucked; roosters crowed. A swarm of Paumotans lay about, smoking, chattering in high-pitched voices, playing accordions. The decks were littered with their mats and bedding, on which small brown babies lay asleep, unconscious of the uproar of departure.
Late in the afternoon Marama and I made our parting gifts to his family and paddled out to where the Tara lay, her engine going and her anchor up. We clambered over the rail; old Taura stood in the canoe, waving his hat while the schooner got under way and glided out toward the pass. Months were to pass before we saw the gray-haired chief again.
My uncle laid his course due east, to pass between the great atoll of Fakarava and Faaite, the smaller island to the south. The fair weather held while the Tara threaded her way through the strange Sea of Atolls—the dangerous archipelago, dreaded by mariners since the Pacific was first explored. We passed the southern end of Fakarava, a lagoon like an inland sea, surrounded by a narrow ring of palms, passed Katiu and Tuanake, turned south to skirt the treacherous reefs of Makenio, were swept eastward by the current racing between Nihiru and Marutea, and breathed freely once more as we turned north, past Reka Reka, the Island of Good Hope. Sometimes a low smudge of palms lay along the horizon; sometimes, with no land in sight, the Tara battled with the fierce uncharted currents of this maze of reefs; and there were days when a green glimmer in the sky told of the presence of some huge lagoon, hidden from our eyes by the curving slope of the world. In the open sea to the east of Reka Reka, the bad weather began.
The wind veered to the northwest—the storm wind the natives call the toerau. Black clouds closed above the Tara like a canopy; for two days and two nights she made heavy weather through squalls of wind and rain. My uncle spent much of his time at the rail, binoculars raised to scan the empty horizon east of us.
"We must be close to Iriatai," he said to me on the morning of the last day, "but in these shifting currents, and without a chance for a shot at the sun, it's hard to say just where we are! Risky business, this knocking about at night—if we don't raise the land to-day, I'm going to heave to."
I had been gazing idly at the clouds drifting overhead, and had noticed several flocks of sea birds, passing high above us, all heading southward. As my uncle spoke, another flock appeared in the north. He saw them, too, and shouted a command to alter the schooner's course.
"That's the third lot of birds I've seen this morning," he remarked; "there's a chance that they are coming from Iriatai. We'll beat up to the north a bit, and have a look."
An hour later I heard a long-drawn cry from the crosstrees, and soon from the deck I made out the familiar atoll-landfall—a level dark line of palm-tops, low on the northern horizon. It was Iriatai.
The island differs from most of the atolls in that the pass is on the weather side. The lagoon is nearly circular, ten miles long and about eight across, and the surrounding land is composed of three long curving islands, separated by short stretches of reef over which the sea washes no more than knee-deep on a calm day. A dense growth of young palms—planted by my uncle—covered the islands, and just inside the pass, where von Tesmar's settlement had stood before the hurricane, I saw the loftier tops of the trees planted by Turia, the dead Paumotan woman. From a perch high up in the shrouds, gazing with the glasses toward the far end of the lagoon, I could make out the tall old palms of the islet where the woman and her child had fetched up in that long-ago storm. We were at the end of our voyage: somewhere between the islet and the reef lay the patch of gold-lipped shell planted by the strange Austrian wanderer!