“Sure,” said the mate.
“Then you’re better at the navigating job than you pretended to be,” said Carlin. “What I like about you is the way you keep things hid.”
“I’ve kept nothing hid,” replied the other. “I’m crazy bad on the navigation, but I’ve got a navigator on board that’ll take us there same as a bullet to a target.”
“Sru?”
“Sru nothing—the kanaka girl, she’s a Marayara. Ever heard of them? You get them among the kanakas; every kanaka has a pretty good sense of direction, but a Marayara, take him away from his island and he’ll home back like a pigeon if he has a canoe and can paddle long enough. That island we took the girl from is the pearl island. Born and bred there she was, and it’s her centre of everything. Sru got it all out of her and about the pearls and fixed up with her to take us back. Don’t know what he’s promised her, I reckon a few beads is all she wants and all she’ll get, but that’s how it lies: we’ve only got to push along due south by the compass and she’ll correct us, leeway or set of current or any tomfool tricks of the needle don’t matter to her. She never bothers about the compass, she sees where she wants to go straight before her nose, same’s when land’s in sight you see it and steer for it.”
“Can she steer?” asked Carlin, who had not been on deck the day Sru set her at the wheel.
Rantan turned to where the girl was standing in the bow, called her aft and gave the wheel over to her. When she had felt the ship, standing with her head slightly uptilted, she altered the course a few points; the Kermadec had been off her path by that amount owing to leeway or set of current.
From that moment the ship was in the hands of Le Moan, tireless as only a being can be who exists always in the open air. She lived at the wheel with intervals for sleep and rest, always finding on her return the ship off her course, still heading south, but no longer on that exact and miraculous line drawn by instinct between herself and Karolin.
Error in the form of leeway or the influence of swell or the set of current could never push the vessel to east or west of that line, for the line moved with the ship, and as the journey shortened, like a steadily shortening string tied to a ball in centrifugal motion, it would bring the Kermadec at last to Karolin, no matter how far she was swung out of her course—blown fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles to east or west it would not matter, her head would turn to Karolin. The only flaw in that curious navigational instrument, the mind of Le Moan, was its blindness to distance from Karolin, the pull being the same for any distance, and had the island risen suddenly before them on some dark night, she would have piled the craft upon it unless warned by the sound of the reef.
Rantan kept the log going, he had a rough idea of the distance between Karolin and Levua, but he did not try to explain the log to Le Moan. If he had done so, his labour would have been wasted. Le Moan had no idea of time as we conceive it, cut up into hours, minutes and seconds. Time for her was a thing, not an abstract idea; a thing ever present yet shifting in appearance—energy.