Love never alters, and the forms of the lovers were almost the same, and the incidents of their simple and humble lives made beautiful by love and the absolute innocence which is Nature.
The joyous awakenings to mornings of new life, the sudden and passionate embraces, the sudden and seeming forgetfulness of one another, as when the figure of Dick could be seen far away on the reef, heedless of everything but the fish he was hunting for, followed by the figure of Katafa, faithful as his shadow—all was the same and yet, touched by the wizard spell of Karolin beyond the southern sea, all was vaguely different. The spell of Karolin had seized Dick through Katafa; though he had never seen the reef and the gulls and the forty-mile sweep of lagoon, the great atoll island had begun its work upon him even before Kearney had died.
It had made him talk its language; it had made him forget his past; little by little, and strand by strand, it had broken him away from all things connecting him with the world, drifting him farther than his parents had ever drifted from civilisation and its fantastic labours, its hopes, dreams and ambitions.
And this it had done through Katafa.
He was no longer Dick but Taori. The language of his early childhood had gone from him like a bird flown. Kearney was the recollection of something that had once been part of a dream; Nan, on his pole by the house, was far more potent and living.
At night sometimes now Katafa, as they sat under the stars, would talk to him in an extraordinary way. It was as though Karolin were speaking and trying to tell of itself.
Karolin had never released its hold on her, and in some strange manner the coming of love, the breaking of the spell of taminan, the new meaning of life, all revived in his mind the memory of the environment of her childhood. She told him of Le Juan, the priestess of Nanawa, and of Nanawa, and of Uta Matu, the king, so old that his skin was beginning to scale off in white scales like the scales of the alomba. She told him that at Karolin there was nothing but reef—no island—nothing but reef.
Dick laughed at this, a short, hard laugh that struck through the starlight like the cough of a stabbing spear. She took his hand as they lay there side by side, as if to lead his imagination.
At Karolin there was nothing but reef, a reef so great that sight could not follow it; on one side the lagoon—the quiet water—and on the other the sea. Were you to follow it on foot you would walk for days before it led you round back to the break. Two days’ journey it was, and you had to sleep at night without a roof under the stars. The lagoon was so wide that it held all the stars, even the Milky Way—the great smoke—and the moon, travelling all night, could not cross it.
She told of the great fish that came in from the outer sea and made thunder, whip-rays tossing themselves into the air and falling back in fountains of foam, the coral ringing to the echo of the concussions.