Aioma, like Sru, had a sense of humour, and a joke, if it were really a good joke, took him like the effect of a dose of strychnine. Sure now that Marua had been swallowed by the sea, the catastrophe, having made itself certain and obtained firm footing in his mind, suddenly presented its humorous side. He had remembered the “bad men.” They were swallowed with Marua, he could see them in his imagination swimming like rats, screaming, bubbling—drowning—and the humour of the thing skewered him like a spear in the stomach.
BOOK IV
CHAPTER I—E HAYA
The sun touched the sea line, the blazing water leaping to meet him, and then in a west golden and desolate, in a sea whose water had turned to living light, he began to drown.
Dick watched as the golden brow, almost submerged, showed a lingering crescent of fire and then sank, carrying the day with it as Marua had sunk carrying with it his youth and the last visible threads connecting him with civilization.
He turned. Le Moan had taken the wheel.
The sails that had been golden were now ghost white and a topaz star had already pierced the pansy blue where in the west the new moon hung like a little tilted boat.
“To the south,” cried Aioma. “E Haya—to the south, Le Moan, to Karolin now that we have seen there is nothing to be seen, to the south; to the south, for I am weary of these waters.”
Le Moan, dumb and dim in the starlight now flooding the world, spun the wheel; on the rattle of the rudder chain came the thrashing of canvas and the schooner bowing to the swell lay over on the port tack—due east.
Aioma glanced towards the moon but Le Moan reassured him.