Southeast to find some more likely home, to die in the waves, to split up into companies seeking shelter in the Paumotuan atolls—no man could say, or whether the birds of Karolin were the victors or the strangers from the north. Wanderers lost for ever to sight as their home sunk beneath the waves.
CHAPTER IV—WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE REEF?
Three weeks’ work had recreated the houses broken by the great waves, and put a top knob to the work of the builders. Nan had been recovered. A boy found him cast up in the sand near the break. A new post for him was cut, and Karolin, no longer godless, was itself again. But Aioma was not happy.
The sea when it had swept the reef had not disturbed the tree trunks felled and partly shaped, or had only altered their position slightly as they lay waiting for the canoe-builders to resume work; but Aioma had lost heart in the business. He had come to the conclusion that the schooner was better than any fleet of canoes, and all his desires were fixed on her.
Yet still something called him to the shaping of the logs, the voice of the Unfinished Job perhaps calling to the true workman, or maybe just the voice of habit—all the same he did not turn to it. He was under the spell of the schooner. Pulled this way and that he was unhappy. It is hard to give up a life’s vocation even at the call of something better, and he would sit sometimes squatting on the sands, his face turned now to the object of his passion, and now towards the trees that talked to him of the half-born canoes.
Meanwhile in his mind there lay side by side and growing daily, a great curiosity and a great ambition.
The curiosity had been born of the battle of the gulls.
“What,” asked he of himself, “has happened to the reef of Marua (Palm Tree)?” He knew Marua, he had been one of the fighters in the great battle of long years ago when the men of the north of Karolin had pursued the men of the south and slain them on Palm Tree beach. He had seen the reef and instinct told him that the invading gulls of three weeks ago had come from there.
They were seeking a new home. Why? What had happened to the reef, or what had driven them from the reef?
Had the great waves of the same day, those three great waves that he still beheld scintillating in his mind, had they destroyed the reef? But how could that be, since they had not destroyed Karolin reef? The whole thing was a mystery and beside the curiosity that it excited, there lay in his mind the great Ambition, to take the schooner into the open sea and sail her there.