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CHAPTER XVIII
Aboard the Potii Ravarava
I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, traveling in the leisurely manner of these latitudes, transferring from one schooner to the next and stopping over—for weeks at a time, perhaps—in the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or twice—when a dingy Paumotu schooner, deep laden with copra and crowded with pearl divers eager for a whirl of gayety in the island capital, crept into the pass—I had word of him, but there was no hint of return.
It was a month of calms: long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the faintest cat's-paw, shimmered in the blinding sunlight, while the sea outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef. Once, at midday, a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and Diesel engines going, came in to waken the town with the hoarse clamor of her exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street.
"Your friend Hall is homeward bound," he told me. "I spoke the Potii Ravarava, a bit of a thirty-ton native schooner, off Nukatavake, and he was aboard of her—she ought to be in some time this week."
The days passed in the rapid and dreamy fashion peculiar to the South Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting about becalmed among the coral islands, or perhaps only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. The Potii Ravarava was a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end. The heat was intense that afternoon, and toward sunset towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew black; there was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront the people were gathering in anxious groups before their houses; I heard snatches of talk: "Have you noticed the glass? Things have an ugly look.... Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone.... The town will catch it if the sea begins to rise."
I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papeete to the hills. On Motu Uta, an islet in the bay, a white man was living with his Paumotuan wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the islet from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a Low-Islander, and just before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a surf a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found the drowned and battered body of her husband drifting with dead pigs and horses and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town.
Possibly Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my barometer after dinner, it was falling with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In the small hours of the morning a servant came to waken me. There was a new sound in the air—the uproar of surf breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon.
"The sea is rising," said Tara; "the waves are breaking under the purau trees, and if you do not come quickly to help me our canoe will be washed away."