The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of air stirred, the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered water, usually so calm, was agitated by a heavy swell. Then the rain came—drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin roof—and after the rain the wind. At dawn, though a seventy-mile gale was blowing out of the northeast, it was obvious that ali danger of a hurricane was past. At midday the glass began to rise and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly.
More than once during the night I had thought of Hall out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the east. The Potii Ravarava was reputed an able little boat—with proper offing she would probably come through worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in the Paumotu—the Dangerous Archipelago, where unknown currents and a maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather—there was cause for anxiety.
The storm blew itself out in two days' time, and on the evening of the third day I was standing on the water front with a group of traders and schooner captains. They were speaking of the Potii Ravarava, by this time the object of mild misgivings, when one of the skippers gave a sudden shout.
"There she is now!" he announced and, looking up, I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched grayish sails, rounding the point of Fareute. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat ashore—a few moments later I was welcoming Hall—very thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Paumotuan. His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look unmistakable when once seen—the expression of a hunger greater than most of us have known.
"Hello!" he said. "Come along to the hotel—it must be dinner time. By Jove! I feel as though I could eat a raw shark!"
When he had eaten two dinners complete—from soup to black coffee, and beginning with soup again—he lit a cigarette and told me the story of his return from the Low Islands.
"It was all right," he began, "until we left Hao. The palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in a broiling, glassy calm. It was a curious experience, but one I would not care to repeat.
"You've seen the schooner—she's not much bigger than a sea-going canoe. There were four of us aboard—Miti the skipper, a Paumotuan and a seaman by instinct, though he knows nothing of latitude of longitude; two sailors, one of whom has a horrible case of elephantiasis; and myself. We had a tremendous load of copra for so small a boat; the hold was crammed with it and the cabin stuffed to the ceiling. Opposite the companionway they had left out a few bags at the top, giving a space two feet high and just wide enough for two men to sleep side by side in case of rain or bad weather. Our stove was merely a box of sand in which a fire could be lighted, set in a little box of a galley tacked to the forward deck. If we had had anything to cook, the galley might have been useful; but Miti had given away nearly all of the ship's provisions to his relatives on Hao. They gave him a feast while some copra was being loaded, and when the job was finished he gave a feast in return. The two sailors looked sour while they watched the people opening their biscuit and salmon and bully-beef, but, after all, the prevailing winds are fair, and normally the passage to Tahiti wouldn't take more than ten days. Miti overdid the giving-away business, however. When we took stock of our kaikai on the first day of the calm I found he had saved only half a tin of biscuit and a few cans of salmon. In addition to this, we had a parting gift of a sack of drinking nuts and a couple of dozen ripe nuts some one was sending to Tahiti for seed. I had grown fed up on the sort of water these schooners carry—stale, and full of wriggling young mosquitoes—and by great good fortune I had a three-gallon demi-john, sent by Tino, of the Winship, which I filled with fresh rain water at Hao.
"My demijohn lasted precisely a day and a half. All hands drank out of it, but I did not complain of their lavishness—there was supposed to be a barrel of water somewhere below. Those were thirsty days. We rigged up an awning with part of an old mainsail; I spent most of my time lying in the hot shade, reading the one book I had with me—Froissart's Chronicles of England, France, and Spain. The days seemed interminable.... The starlight paled; the sun rose to glare down hour after hour on the face of a motionless and empty sea, and set at last on a horizon void of clouds. Sometimes I dozed; sometimes I watched the reflections of the bowsprit. It was painted gray, with a bright-red tip—and, seen in the faintly heaving water, it looked like a long, gray snake spitting fire as it writhed in graceful undulations. The sufferer from elephantiasis turned out to be an extraordinary man; it was not worth while to keep watches during the calm, and, as there was no work of any importance, he retired to the stifling cubby-hole among the copra sacks and slept—slept from dawn to darkness and from dark to dawn again. Now and then, at long intervals, he appeared on deck; once I went aft for a look at him, lying naked except for a pareu—mouth open and swollen limbs sprawled on the uneven surface of the copra. Miti and Teriaa showed a different side of native character. The schooner belonged to the captain, and keeping her trim gave him the same delight a man feels in buying pretty clothes for his mistress. The young sailor was Miti's nephew, and the pair of them worked tirelessly in the sun, scraping her rail and topsides in preparation for a fresh coat of paint. It was strange, when I was deep in Froissart's sieges and battles and stories of court life, to glance up from my book and see the vacant rim of the horizon, the silhouette of the foremast against a hot blue sky, and the two Kanakas endlessly at work—scrape, scrape, scrape; an exchange of low-toned remarks; a chuckle as they heard the gentle snores of the sleeping man below.
"Nearly every day our hopes were raised by deceitful cat's-paws, heralded by far-off streaks of blue. Some died before they reached us; others, after a preliminary rustle and flutter, filled our sails and set the schooner to moving gently on her course ... only to die away and leave the sea glassy as before.