The trees like the pillars of a cathedral, the twilight and the incense-like odours of tropical flowers gave to this place a solemnity and character all its own. Lestrange, in his wood wanderings, had found it out and had often come here to meditate and dream and sometimes forget, for here the great trees cast their presence as well as their shadow on a man’s soul. Half-way down this alley Kearney halted.
A breath of wind came stealing towards him, stirring the tendrils of the liantasse and bearing with it suddenly an odour of corruption from the flower-decked gloom ahead.
He stood just as though a bar had been placed across his path. Then, taking the child by the hand, he turned and retraced his path to the house.
CHAPTER VI
KATAFA
Standing on the summit of Palm Tree Island and gazing sou’west, one saw above the horizon line something that was not land; the sky just then altered in colour, as though dimmed by a fingerprint, and sometimes, just before sunset, this mysterious spot in the sky took on a vague glow.
Any old South Sea man would have known at once that this spot was the mirror blaze from a great lagoon reflected in the sky. Kearney recognised the fact at once when he saw it. “There’s a big low island somewheres down there,” had been his verdict, and he was right.
Karolin was the name of this atoll island; even the whalemen called it by its native name instead of dubbing it with some outlandish term of their own after their custom with islands not on the chart. But they never entered the lagoon. The place had a bad name, wood and water being scarce and the natives untrustable.
But the birds of Palm Tree cared nothing for the scarcity of wood or water or the trustability of the natives, and the great gulls, when fancy took them, would spread their wings for the south, thinking little of the journey of fifty miles. League after league they would lay behind them with nothing in view but the blaze of the sea till, like a trace of pale smoke, the birds of Karolin showed circling in the sky. Then the line of the reef sent its murmur to meet them, but, unheeding reef or surf, they would pass over to poise above the lagoon before slanting down to rest and fish.
The lagoon was forty miles in circumference and the containing reef nowhere higher than six feet; standing on the reef, you could not see the opposite shore, except when mirage lifted it, showing across the great pond brimming with light a line dotted with palm clumps. There was no water source on Karolin, only ponds cut in the coral and filled by the rains; no taro, only puraka; no bread-fruit; cocoanuts, puraka, pandanus-fruit and fish were the main support of the inhabitants, and though Palm Tree, with all its vegetation lay within reach, they never went there for food.