For a moment we are poised on the watery apex in mid air. At that instant I suffered a syncope of all my faculties. I did not lose consciousness, but was spell-bound with the fascination of the rabbit under the gaze of the rattlesnake. I even noticed without shuddering in that terrible sixtieth part of a minute, during which our vessel trembled at this dizzy height, that the sides of the column of malachite-green had a ghastly radiance caught from the sickly sun, that the interior rolled with the gleam of a sapphire, and that there were faint rainbow tints on the outermost edge of spray, while below the sea was churned into a thundering abyss in which it was impossible to distinguish the coral bank from deep water.
I involuntarily shut my eyes. I gasp for breath as the closing waters ring in my ears, crashing, and roaring, and booming with the voice of a thousand cannon. Now we are falling with incredible velocity. Falling! Falling! Oh God! Will the end never come?
My next recollection was that of being awakened by a hot sun playing on my face. To my amazement I found that I was lying with my head on a crown of cocoanut leaves, and that the deck of the schooner, which was quite uninjured, was half-buried in the thick green foliage of a tropical island. During the prolonged horror of the descent from the starry-pointing sea I had swooned. It was not all descent, for the vessel had been carried right through the avalanche of falling waters before she reached the natural level of the sea, and she had been driven on a tidal wave clear over the reef, high and dry on shore, and into a grove of bread-fruits and cocoanuts.[[1]] All hands—with the exception of the master, the mate, and myself—had been swept away in the tumult of waters, and we never saw a trace of them again. Turner had been lashed to the rigging, and Cobb having got jammed between the rudder and the displaced binnacle, they outlived the adventure, though all but drowned in the hail of salt sea which had fallen on them.
[1]. In the year 1871 this also happened to an iron ship, the Ellesmere, on the island of Kandávu. She was purchased by a Levuka storekeeper for a small sum and successfully launched.
CHAPTER III.
AN INHOSPITABLE RECEPTION.
We were cast ashore on the coast of Viti Levu. It was not a desert island, but a land of tropical luxuriance, which supported 80,000 natives with very little labour; and these natives, as far as the coast tribes (the only part of the population the white man had any knowledge of) were concerned, were known to be the most bloodthirsty and treacherous savages in the world, who carried on heathen abominations to an extent unknown in any other part of the globe, while they were privileged to live on a portion of the earth’s surface which was marked by singular beauty.
The master and mate, who survived the wreck with me, had made a former visit to the sandalwood coast, and knew something of the language and ways of the natives, whose acquaintance with the white man was of comparatively recent date. The captain expressed the opinion that our prospects of escape from a cruel death were very small.
“The customs of this country,” said he, “oblige the natives to kill castaways. They look upon all such people—whom they describe as persons with ‘salt-water in their eyes’—as being delivered to them by the gods to be eaten, and if they neglected the practice they would be fearful of some terrible calamity befalling them.”
“To be killed and eaten,” added the mate, “is not the worst there is to fear, either. These wretches sometimes torture their helpless victims in a fiendish way. Only a year ago an English sailor, who had been hospitably received on one island, got wrecked on another in a canoe while endeavouring to reach a ship in the offing, and he had not the good fortune to be clubbed outright. His eyelids were cut away by the sharpened shell of the pearl-oyster, and he was then bound to a tree with his exposed orbs turned to the full glare of the sun. When the poor fellow was perfectly blind they skinned the soles of his feet, and then tormented him with firebrands to make him jump about in that wretched condition.”