Dick with the sun on his face and on his red-gold hair, Dick naked and honey-coloured, lithe as a panther and straight as a stabbing spear. Dick with his eyes fixed on the three old men of Karolin who had turned their heads to gaze on Dick.
Le Moan drew in her breath, then she seemed to cease breathing as the vision approached, passed her without a word and stood facing Aioma, the eldest and the greatest of the canoe-builders.
Le Moan was only fourteen, yet she was tall almost as Katafa, she was not a true Polynesian; though her mother had been a native of Karolin, her father, a sailor from a Spanish ship destroyed years ago by Uta Matu, had given the girl European characteristics so strong that she stood apart from the other islanders as a pine might stand amongst palm trees.
She was beautiful, with a dark beauty just beginning to unfold from the bud and she was strange as the sea depths themselves. Sometimes seated alone beneath the towering Jack-fruits her head would poise as though she were listening, as though some voice were calling through the sound of the surf on the reef, some voice whose words she could not quite catch; and sometimes she would sit above the reef pools gazing deep down into the water, the crystal water where coralline growths bloomed and fish swam, but where she seemed to see more things than fish.
The sharp mixture of two utterly alien races sometimes produces strange results—it was almost at times as if Le Moan were confused by voices or visions from lands of ancestry worlds apart.
She would go with Aioma fishing, and with her on board, Aioma never dreaded losing sight of land, for Le Moan was a pathfinder.
Blindfold her on the coral and she would yet find her way on foot, take her beyond the sea-line and she would return like a homing pigeon. Like the pigeon she had the compass in her brain.
This was the only gift she had received from her mother, La Jennabon, who had received it from seafaring ancestors of the remote past.
Crouching by the well she saw now Dick standing before Aioma and she heard his voice.
“You are Aioma?” said Dick, who had singled the chief of the three out by instinct.