At that moment the captain himself came on deck and began to look at the sun, holding to his face a thing so strangely formed that Uliami would have laughed, only that laughter and all gay thoughts were now as far from him as Tilafeaa.
The captain was a big man with a red face, and when he had done looking at the sun, and when he heard what Uliami had to say, he swore a great oath, and, calling to the mate, he ordered the tarpaulins to be taken off the hatch and the locking bars undone, and then the hatch was opened, but there was no man there.
Then the captain kicked Uliami, and the mate kicked him, and at that very time, or near it, they were kicking Tauti on board the schooner for also giving them word that a man was hidden in the cargo.
Of a truth these two, who had set out so gayly to kill one another, were receiving payment through the hands of Sikra; each of these men had seized the devil by the tail and they could not let go, and here he was galloping over the world with them, from wave to wave, like a horse over hurdles, for the brig and the schooner, though separated by many leagues, were going in the same direction.
VI.
They passed islands, and there was not an island they passed that did not make Uliami feel as though he had swallowed Paulii and it had risen in his throat.
As first, and for many days, he noticed in his ears a sound which was yet not a sound. Then he knew it was the sound of the reef that had been in his ears since childhood, but had now drawn away and gone from him, leaving only its memory. The food displeased him, and the work and the faces of his companions, and he would have given his pay and all he possessed for a sniff of the winds blowing from the high woods, or a sight of the surf on the shores of Tilafeaa.
He had only one companion—his anger against Tauti. He saw now that he had been served a trick, and put the whole matter down to the wiles of the other, little thinking that it was Sikra who had played this game against them both.
VII.
One day the brig, always butting like a ram against the blue sky and empty sea, gave them view of a mountain and land, stretching in the distance from north to south as though all the islands of the ocean had been drawn and joined together making one solid piece.