She heard with miraculous clearness the thousand little noises of the night, the moving of leaves, the faint creak of branches, the rustle of a lizard. She heard the surf on the outer beach and the far-off splash of a fish from the lagoon water. Then, as the wind from the sea died to the faintest stirring of air, the moon rising across the eastern trees struck the house, and the air, as though some crystal door had been closed, grew still. Not a leaf moved. Katafa, crouched amidst the leaves, seemed part of the silence that had taken the world, a silence reaching from the furthest sea stars to the trees, a silence suddenly broken by a sound more terrible than the voice of any beast. Suddenly through the utter silence of the night it came, howling, bubbling, bellowing, echoing through the trees from the distant eastern beach, raising the birds in screaming flocks, waking roosting gulls on the reef.
She knew that sound. It was the blowing of a lambai shell, the great conch shell of Karolin, blown only for war.
“We have come!” cried the shell. “The long canoes have come from the south, from the south, from the south! Kara! Kara! Kara! War! War! War!”
CHAPTER XXV
SOUTH
When the squall took Katafa’s canoe that night, sweeping Taiofa overboard, he was not drowned, but the sea killed him all the same.
The canoe, driving north free of its anchor rope and towed by the fish, left him far behind, and without a moment’s hesitation he struck due west, swimming for his life.
He was making for the water to leeward of the atoll, where the current would be broken in its force, and the waves. Here he landed after hours of swimming and with his left leg gone below the knee. The sea is full of hungry mouths and to leeward of Karolin that night there were many sharks. He had just time to reach his people and tell his story before he died.
A great wind had struck the canoe and capsised it. He and Katafa had been thrown into the water. A shark had taken her. He had struck out for the reef. That was the story he told and he had told it in all good faith. He had seen Katafa pulled to pieces by sharks, though how he had seen it Heaven and the Kanaka imagination alone could tell.
When Dick struck Sru dead on the beach, Talia, Manua and Leopa, paddling off across the lagoon, had with equal imagination seen the island alive with Dicks, potential Dicks, stirring amidst the trees. The canoe men had yelled their war cry and, once clear of the lagoon, the potential Dicks became real figures thronging the beaches of their imaginations.