The two men, taking comfortable positions on the reef, had lit their pipes. Hour after hour they sat smoking, interchanging a few words, but always with their eyes alive for changes in the water below. Now forgetting to smoke, they lay on their elbows looking down into the green depth where, stronger through the shallowing water, sharper, clearer, the ship began to shew her form hideous to the sight as the form of a man bloated by disease; grey, enormous, muffled with coral, tufted with what seemed fungous growths.
“Look,” said Yves, pointing down to where the fantastically high poop was humping itself into view, “saw you ever a ship built in that fashion floating on the sea? Why she is from the time of Noah—In the church at Paimpol they have a model ship like that; she was dedicated to the Virgin in the old days—”
“Let us look,” growled the Moco, speaking as if irritated by the voice of his companion; then he hung silent, his eyes fixed on the vision developing below. The tide had sunk now to within a foot of low water mark, and as the veil of water lessened so did the vision strengthen; one could make out the decks clearly, all rough with coral, and the coral banks that were once the bulwarks, a stump of mainmast was left and had become converted into a cone of coral the height of a man; trace of mizzen mast there was none.
CHAPTER III
EVENING
All this time, steadily as the tide, the sun had been sinking; he had dropped through a dazzling azure sky and he was now hanging almost in touch with the western horizon, a ball of fire in a sky of dazzling gold; momently the gold of the sunset took possession of the sky, spreading up, up, till the very zenith was reached, and down, down, till the gilding reached the eastern sky line. The world now seemed clipped in the cup of a great golden flower, and the little ripples that came sighing in round the low tide reefs showed their foam like fleeces of gold. Not a trace of cloud shewed in the golden sky, not a wave on the golden sea; in that wonderful sunset the palm tops burned like fingers of flame, and as music lights the soul of man, so did the golden and glowing atmosphere the heart of the lagoon.
The ship in the water below answered to the magic of the light; the thing that had been grey and dismal as death was in a moment transformed to a dream of colour, the brains of frost-white coral became golden lamps; starfish, sea-flowers, coraline growths, pink, crimson, indigo, pale yellow, colour and form, all lent their adornment.
Shadowless on her bed of dazzling sand she hung for a moment, burning in full sight, clear to the eye as though she were floating in air and exquisite as a jewel, then just as she had bloomed she faded out, her colour and beauty passing with the fading light, and as night swept over the sea like the shadow of a violet-wing, she vanished utterly, whilst the lagoon filled with darkness and the first stars cast their shimmer on its surface.
“Eh bien?” said Yves, as he rose to his feet and stretched himself. The Moco, who had also risen to his feet, looked around him at the world of darkness that had displaced the world of gold; he had seen many things, but nothing that had ever struck his imagination so vividly as the sight now veiled by darkness. His mind could not reason on the question or refute by logic the feeling in his heart that what he had seen was evil.