BOOK III
ON THE ISLAND OF MYSTERY
The Treasure is Found and Fought For
CHAPTER X
IN WHICH WE CROSS THE BARRIER
WHEN day broke I hauled aft the sheet and headed the boat to the southward, for I had now crossed what I took to be the head of the island and could run down the other side. By the time it was fairly dawn I had made enough southing to place the north end of the island between ourselves and the ship. My calculations had been remarkably accurate again. I had weathered the islands fairly in good time, and now as the sun rose I steered the boat directly toward the land, the changed direction of the morning breeze permitting me to lay the desired course.
My hopes were high and I felt a kind of exhilaration at our escape, although I was by no means inclined to minimize the possibilities of grave peril we might soon be compelled to meet. The island was our destination, however, and for it therefore I determinedly headed my small craft with its precious and still peacefully sleeping cargo. Poor girl, if ever a woman needed sleep and rest it was she. And her easy slumber pleased me the more for it bespoke not only weariness amounting to exhaustion but confidence and trust—and in me, and I was stirred to even greater devotion.
I had sailed in nearly all the waters of the globe, frequented and unfrequented, and I fancied I had chanced upon most of the odd things to be seen therein, but I am free to admit that the island was unlike any I had ever looked upon. The chart should have prepared me for it, but it had not. In the first place, like most Pacific islands, this was enclosed by a barrier reef over which the waves broke in white caps as far as I could see. I supposed that somewhere there would be an opening in the reef through which we could sail, although the chart, rather roughly drawn, had showed none. That an opening should exist was so invariably the case with all such islands as I had ever known or read about that I counted upon finding one here. But I could not see any opening from the boat as yet. The lagoon enclosed by the barrier reef seemed to be from a half to three-quarters of a mile wide.
The strangest part of the whole game was that the island itself looked like a whitish-gray wall rising straight up from the lagoon for, I suppose, from one hundred and fifty feet in the lowest parts to three hundred feet or more in the highest. And the wall appeared to be without a break. It stood up like a solid rampart of stone, its top covered with greenery.
From where we were situated at just that moment I couldn’t see on to the end of the island, although from my inspection of it the day before, I judged it might be six or eight miles long, and as I had sailed past it I estimated it was about the same breadth and nearly circular in shape.
A long distance away on the other side and hard to be seen at all from the level of the sea in the small boat in which we were, lay other islands, faintly outlined on the far horizon. I doubt if I could have seen them at all had not the rising sun smote full upon them. They were too far away for my purpose, which was to make a landing as soon as possible and find some concealment or, at worst, some practical place of defense. I therefore paid no attention to them, not realizing what a part they were to play in the adventure following.
I suppose I must have threshed about somewhat when I brought the dinghy to the wind and changed her course, for presently my little mistress awoke. She sat up instantly and after the briefest acknowledgment of my good morning and the briefest reply to my inquiry as to how she did, she stared at the land toward which we were heading in so far as the wind would allow. It was a bleak, inhospitable looking place, that gray rough wall, in spite of its infrequent cresting of verdure, I will admit, and she too found it so. After she had stared hard at the land, she cast an anxious glance to leeward, but of course could make nothing definite of the distant islands there.
“We have made good our escape from the ship, since she is not to be seen,� she began.