Before this miracle Harman stood unimpressed.
“We’d have been right into that darned thing in another hour if the sun hadn’t lifted,” said he, “unless maybe the noise of the reef would have fended us off—hark to it!”
They could hear it coming up against the wind, a long, low rumble like the sound of a far-off train, and now, as the Douro drew in, they could see the foam spouting as the flood tide raced through the passage broad before them, and showing the vast harbour of the lagoon.
“The opening seems all right,” said Davis.
“Deep enough to float a battleship,” replied the other, “and no sign of rocks in it. Shove her in.”
The Douro did not require any shoving. Driven by the wind and tide she came through the break like a gull, and as the great lagoon spread before them they could see the whole vast inner beach with one sweep of the eye.
It was an oval-shaped atoll, a pond, maybe, four miles from rim to rim at its broadest part, heavy here and there with groves of palm and jack-fruit trees, and showing a village of grass-roofed houses by the trees on the northern beach, where, on the blinding white sands, canoes were lying, and from which a boat was just putting off.
“They’ve sighted us,” said Davis.
“Seems so,” replied Harman, running forward to superintend the fellows who were getting the anchor ready, while the Douro, shaking the wind out of her sails, lost way, and the hook fell in ten-fathom water, the rumble of the chain coming back in faintest echoes from the painted shore.
The boat drew on. It was manned by Kanakas naked as Noah, and steered by a white man. A huge man with a broad and red and bulbous face, who came on board leg over rail without a word of greeting, gazed around him with a pair of protruding light-blue eyes, and, then, finding his voice, addressed Harman: