“I don’t know,” replied Davis. “Mind your steering, it’s land, that’s all I want.”
“Oh, I ain’t grumblin’,” said Harman. He got her a point closer to the wind and steered, keeping the far-off speck on the port bow. The breeze freshened and the stays of the mast, fastened to the outrigger grating, twanged while the spray came inboard now and then in dashes from the humps of the swell, yet not a white cap was to be seen in all the vast expanse of water, the great sea running with a heave in the line of Humboldt’s current from south to north, but without a foam gout to break the ruffled blue.
At noon Motul had lost its turban of cloud, but now it stood, a great lumping island moulded out of mountains, scarred with gulleys down which burst forests and rainbow falls, for Motul was green with the recent rains and its perfume met them ten miles across the sea.
There seemed no encircling reef, just a line of reef here and there, beyond which lay topaz and aquamarine sheets of water bathing the feet of the great black cliffs of Motul.
“Ain’t a place I’d choose for a lee shore,” said Billy, “but this canoe don’t draw more than a piedish, and I reckon we can get her in most anywhere across the reefs. Question is where do them cliffs break?”
They kept a bit more to the south, and there sure enough was the big break where the cliffs seem smashed with an axe and where the deep water comes in, piercing the land so that you might anchor a battleship so close that the wild cliff-hanging convolvulus could brush its truck and fighting tops.
“We can’t make it before dark,” said Billy.
“Don’t matter,” said Davis.
It didn’t; although the moon had not risen, the stars lit Motul and the great dark harbour that pierces the land like a sword.
The breeze had almost fallen dead as they came in, nothing but the sea spoke, breaking on the rocks and lipping up the cliffs, where screw pines clung and the great datura trumpets blew in the silver light.