Makara and his men, slain long ago on the eastern beach, had taken their revenge in full, and as Dick passed swiftly, glancing to left and right, by the mounds of the dead and glades that told their tale, the knowledge came to him that there was nothing more to fear; all the men in the world seemed lying here stricken to nothingness. Done for.
As he broke onto the eastern beach he saw the three canoes that had been driven upon the sands. Two lay on their sides and one bottom up with out-rigger smashed; away on the reef the fourth stuck up just as he had seen it from the hill-top.
A coral-headed club lay near one of the canoes. He cast away the spear he was holding and seized the club. That was a weapon worth carrying, yet, having handled it and swung it in the face of the quiet lagoon and desolate eastern sea, he lost interest in it and let it drop, and turned to examine the canoes. There was no one here to use a weapon against, no one but the men in the woods, those strange brown men so stiff, yet so seemingly alive, so full of anger, rage and terror, so swiftly running, so furiously hitting, yet so still.
As he overhauled the canoes, pictures from the woods came before him: a man who had been stricken running just as he had dashed into a tangle of vines, still erect, upheld and preserved in position by the vines; a green glade where ferns grew, and out of the ferns a brown leg, stiff as the leg of a table, making as if to kick at the sky through the roof of foliage and merry dancing lights and liquid shadows.
But he did not think of those things long. He was too much interested in the canoes and their make and their huge size.
Nothing born of the sea is more fascinating than a native canoe with its outrigger, outrigger poles and grating, its mast and yard and mat sail, its paddles, the perfume of its wood, the cunning of its cocoanut fibre lashings, the mystery of its whole being.
What an antiquity lies behind it, and what a history! Whilst the galleys and caravels of the eastern world were in evolution, it was as now, a thing never to develop like the boat that carries the seed of the plant on the wind.
Dick saw that the construction was identical with that of the canoe of Katafa. The old smashed canoe had engraved itself upon his memory in every detail; nothing was different but the size and the number of paddles that would be used. He examined the broken mast and the sail of the only one from which the wind had not stripped the sail. It was the same as Katafa’s.
Then, as he turned away, something that had been washed up on the sand caught his eye. He stooped and picked it up. It was Nan.
Nan’s head, which the wind had blown into the lagoon, and the lagoon had faithfully delivered to the sands; Nan looking terribly debauched and battered, but still Nan.