Had they been attacking a known tribe they would have beached the canoes, shouting defiance. As it was, they anchored, feeling their courage and their shark-tooth spears, listening, looking, whilst the moon rose higher, lighting more fully the fairyland they were about to attack, whose only defenders were a youth fast asleep, and a girl the prisoner of illusion, and the trees.
Then, of a sudden, the lagoon became dotted with heads. The whole army of Karolin had disembarked. Swimming like otters, they made for the shore and, leaving the canoes with a man apiece for anchor watch, formed on the beach.
Nothing but their long shadows, drawn on the salt-white beach by the moon, opposed them, shadows that swung clubs and brandished spears, threatening who knows what in shadow-land.
The silent woods stood firm; the reef beyond the lagoon sent the selfsame whisper; the wind lifting the foliage failed and died. Nature, before the terrific threat of Karolin, seemed to have fallen asleep till Ma, like the knight before the enchanted castle, seizing the great conch, blew the signal for war, blew with one mighty and prolonged breath till the whorls of the conch nearly split asunder, till the howling, bubbling echoes came back from strand and hill-top and wind and sea.
Like the response of the shadows came the response of the echoes—nothing more.
CHAPTER XXVIII
IN THE NIGHT
Dick, when sleep took him that night, passed straight into dreamland. He rarely dreamed. When he did, his dreams had always one origin, some vexation or irritation experienced during the day. He would be trying to light a fire that would not light, or the dinghy would be sinking under him, or, going to cut bananas, the banana trees would be gone; those were the sort of dreams that came to Dick. Katafa had never entered them till to-night, when suddenly he found himself chasing her over the sands of sleep, chasing her, spear in hand, till she dashed into the lagoon and became a fish, the most beautiful fish in the world, glimpsed for a moment like a flash of silver.
He had hunted for her till dusk through the trees, beside the lagoon, right to the eastern beach, and now in dreamland he was hunting her again. Ye gods and writers of the old romance, creators of the lovesick swain! Hunting her like an animal, possessed with one overmastering desire, the desire to seize her.
Suddenly the dream was shattered. Sitting up, he saw the world outside the house clearly in the moonlight as though seen by day. A sound filled his ears. It was the sound of the conch.