I supposed I invoked God and his Son to save me. Probably in my agony I promised big things to them and humanity if I survived. I kept my eyes open and struck out. After swimming a few yards I felt the coral shelving inwardly. I realized that I had gone farther from my only goal of life. I felt the end was close, but still in desperation moved my limbs vigorously.
Then I felt the water lashing about me. Something seized my arm. Shark stories leaped from my memory’s cold storage to my very soul. My blood was an icy stream from head to toes. Singular to relate, I was aware of a profound regret for my murders of many sharks—who, after all, I reasoned with an atavistic impulse of propitiation, were but working out the wise plan of the Creator. But the animal that grasped my arm did not bite. It held me firmly, and dragged me out from that murky hell, until in a few seconds the light, God’s eldest and loveliest daughter, appeared faintly, and then, bright as lightning, and all of a sudden, I was in the center of the sun, my mouth open at last, my chest heaving, my heart pumping madly, and my head bursting with pain. I was in the arms of Piri a Tuahine, who, as all the other Tahitians, had swum under the reef in search of me.
In the two or three minutes—or that half-hour—during which I had been breathless, the sailors had recaptured the boat and were righting it, the oars still fastened to the gunwales. I was glad to be hauled into the empty boat, along with McHenry, who was sputtering and cursing.
“Gorbli-me!” he said, as he spat out salt water, “you made a bloody fool o’ yerself doin’ that! Why didn’t ye look how I handled meself? But I lost a half-pound of tobacco by that christenin’.”
I was laid down on the cargoless seats, and the men rowed through the moat, smiling at me with a worthy sense of superiority, while McHenry dug the soaked tobacco out of his trousers pocket.
“Ye can always trust the Kanaka to get ye out o’ the water if ye capsize,” said he, artfully. “We’ve taught him to think o’ the white man first. He damn well knows where he’d get off, otherwise.”
A hundred feet farther, we came to a spit of rocks, which stopped progress. A swarm of naked children were playing about it. Assisted by the Tahitians I was lifted to my feet, and, with McHenry, continued to the sand.
There I took stock of my physical self. I was battered and bruised, but no bones were broken. My shins were scraped and my entire body bleeding as if a sharp steel comb had raked me. My head was bloody, but my skull without a hole in it, or even marked depression, except my usual one where phrenologists locate the bump of reverence. I was sick at my stomach, and my legs bent under me. I knew that I would be as well as ever soon, unless poisoned, but would bear the marks of the coral. All these white men who journeyed about the Paumotus bore indelible scars of coral wound.
The road from the beach