A wave took the canoe and smashed it on the coral, destroying the outrigger, and a great king wave festooned with foam took the remains and hove it onto the reef high and dry, stern stuck in a cleft and bow in air, a last touch of the fantasy of the sea, that sister of Fate.
So, at a stroke, went the navy of Karolin and all her fighting men, destroyed by their own imaginations and the child of the woman they had slain long years ago.
CHAPTER XXXII
AFTER THE BATTLE
The gulls were crying above the reef, and away in the east, below the sea-line, a rose-red fire was burning, paling gradually, passing into the starless, infinite distance of the true dawn.
Then, as the ripple of light on the horizon waters turned to a ripple of fire and the birds in the groves chattered out in answer to the gulls, Dick, flinging sleep off suddenly as one flings a blanket, sat up, striking out at the vision of Laminai—Laminai, spear in hand and ready to lunge. For a moment the dead chief stood before him, hard in the imagination as a real figure; then it vanished and his eyes fell on Katafa.
She was lying on her side fast asleep, her face buried in her arms. He watched her, his eyes consuming her in the strengthening light.
He knew nothing of love; he only knew that the something that had revealed itself to him and evaded him was his—his—and the whole unearthly world that surrounded it.
The voices of the gulls and the sound of the reef were part of her, and the strengthening light part of her; the rising sun, his own very life, were part of her—and she was his.
Had she suddenly been snatched from him, the voices of the gulls and the sound of the reef, the rising sun—every bit of the old world she had made new would have fallen in on him and crushed him with despair; and yet only yesterday he had run past her bent on the business of making a sail for the dinghy, run past her heedless as though she had been a tree stump, and, had she been taken from him then, would he have cared?