It was Karolin—Karolin invisible but singing, calling the gulls home across the evening sea.
Far away they could be seen flying from east and west towards the invisible land, and now as the sun went down like a ship on fire and a single great star broke out above the purple west, the whisper of the great forty-mile reef loudened and changed to a definite murmur like the voice of a far-off multitude.
Katafa, standing up for a moment and steadying herself with her hand on the mast, seemed to have forgotten Dick. Karolin was still a great way off, but its voice was enough to dispel all doubt and fear. She knew these waters, and all the old sea instincts that had given her distance and direction when out in the fishing canoes returned, led by memory and the voice of the reef.
The fishing bank where the squall had struck her canoe, blowing Taiofa overboard, lay straight before them. They could anchor there for the night; it was safer to make the lagoon entrance in the morning.
She told him this, and then, resting in the bottom of the boat with her elbow on a thwart, she watched and listened whilst the moon and the stars took the sky, and the voice of the distant reef came louder against the wind.
The tide was beginning to flood on Karolin, and the air was filled with the rumour of it; it seemed the wind and tide were building the sea on the coral, to come from everywhere around, from the very stars that lit the night.
Then the running swell, looming up and passing in the gloom, altered in character, and away to starboard something showed white—something that came and went like the flicker of a handkerchief, a natural sea beacon, the foam on the Kanaka rock.
Katafa knew. They were on the fishing bank.
The Kanaka rises sharp, like the spire of a cathedral, from the great mountain range that forms the palu bank. At full flood it is submerged entirely, but even then it will break if there is a heavy swell on. It is the only sign of the bank and the only danger to ships, but to Katafa it was a friend.
Crawling forward, whilst Dick let go the sheet, she dropped the anchor they had so often used when fishing off Palm Tree; it fell in twelve-fathom water and held.