The boat was making about three knots, and he reckoned that the island could not be more than ten miles away. Were bad weather suddenly to spring on him Pacific fashion, he might either be driven out of reach of the shelter before him or sunk. But the wind held fair and steady with no sign of squalls, and now, when he looked again, he could see the palm-tree tops raised high above the water, and—what was that—a ship?
The masts of a ship, all aslant, showed thready near the palms. She was wrecked—of that there could be no manner of doubt.
The shimmer of the sea cut off everything but the palm tops, the palm stems, and the masts; they seemed based on air.
In an hour, standing up again, Floyd made out the whole position distinctly.
The island that lay before him was simply a huge ring of coral clipping a lagoon a mile or more in diameter, as he afterward discovered. It was not an even ring; here and there it swelled out into great spaces covered with palms and artus and hotoo trees. Near the break in the reef for which he was now steering, piled up on the coral literally high and dry, lay the carcass of what had recently been a schooner of some two hundred tons.
She must have been sent right up by some great lift of the sea.
As he drew near he could see that the planking had been literally stripped off her from a huge space reaching from the stern post almost to midship; there was no rudder; the sails, he thought, had either blown away or flogged themselves to pieces, taking with them gaffs and booms. Then he remembered that the masts, still standing by some miracle, would certainly have snapped like carrots had sail enough been on her to carry away the spars like that. He could not tell. The thing hypnotized him as he watched it, his hand on the tiller and the opening of the reef before him.
Though the sea was as calm as the Pacific can ever be, a steady surf was breaking on the reef. The boom of it came to him now against the wind, and the boat heaved to the short sea made by the resistance of the great coral breakwater.
It was like the bourdon note of an organ, and though it swelled and sank it never ceased, for it was the tune that ringed forever the whole four-mile circuit of the atoll.
Then as he passed the coral piers and opened the lagoon, the sound of the surf grew less loud and the boat went on an even keel.