Kearney turned. The fire still gave a good light, and between him and the fire something had heaved itself on to the coral. Attracted by the firelight, it had left the lagoon, soundless as a crawling cat, yet tons in weight. It was only some thirty feet away from him, yet it seemed formless, a long heaped mass covered with shiny tarpaulin. Then suddenly it took form, extending itself like a slug; lamps, like the headlights of a locomotive, blazed out, and around the lamps great serpents curled like the locks of Medusa.
For one fatal moment he stood staring at the thing before him. Then a rope slashed round his waist and tightened.
He was caught.
Katafa had taken refuge in the second great pool, a pool some four feet deep and large enough for a person to swim in. The water was tepid and the floor of soft sand, and as she slipped into it, gracile as a serpent, she did not look to see what fish there might be there.
A small whip-ray, an electric eel or a stinging jellyfish would have made the pool untenable, she knew, but chanced it, and, lying submerged to the chin, waited and listened.
She felt an eel pass like a cold waving ribbon over her thighs; it touched the outer side of her left leg as it made its way along the sand and was gone. Then she felt the tap of small sharp-pointed fingers here and there on her body. Fish were nuzzling her, yet she dared not move for dread of setting the water waving. Instinct told her that Kearney was more to be feared than fish or eels or the great crab of the reef, and even when a sting like a hot needle sticking in her side told her that a banda fish had attacked her flesh, her only movement was the drift of her right hand like floating seaweed towards her side, and the sudden snap of the fingers as the banda fish, caught by the hand, was crushed to death.
She kneaded the fragments viciously between her fingers. Then, as she released them, sudden and sharp came a cry, the piercing cry of a man who has been speared or stabbed with a shark-toothed dagger. Raising her head swift as a lizard, she glanced, shuddered and dived again. She had seen Nanawa.
Katafa knew the seas and its creatures with an intimacy given to few naturalists. She had seen great fleets of giant whip-rays enter Karolin lagoon disporting under the stars and filling the night with a sound like the thunder of big guns at battle practice. She had seen a cachalot driven by destroyers to its death, and an octopus with sixty-foot tentacles floating like a burst balloon near the palu bank, driven up from mile-deep water by some submarine disturbance, the sharks tearing at it and the eyes still living, lugubrious, and staring at the sky as if in astonishment. But she had never seen the most terrible of all sea things, the giant decapod, barrel-shaped, great as an oak-tree, with two beaks, a tongue armed with teeth, eyes a foot broad and ten tentacles, two of thirty or forty feet in length.
Snuggling into the tepid water, she lay listening—nothing. Only the sound of the surf rising and falling to the pulse of the sea whilst the untroubled stars shone down on her and the minutes passed, bringing not another sound to tell of what was happening—of what had happened.
Then, raising herself gently, she looked again. The reef showed nothing but the last embers of the fire. The dinghy was lying still just where she had been moored, but of the man who had brought her across there was no trace.