II
Nichols leaned toward me, his eyes kindling. "Let me take you back to the morning after the squall that separated the boats" said he "The sun rose in a clear sky; the quick tropical storm had entirely disappeared. Devereux looked about him, and saw no sign of the others. One hardly realizes, until one has experienced the fact, how easy it is for boats to become separated in the night, especially under severe conditions of weather, or how rapidly a dozen miles may spring up between them. And a dozen might as well be as many hundreds, for all chances of their coming together again. The wind had died to a baffling breeze that seemed to be trying to blow from all directions at once. Devereux had no chronometer—nothing but a pocket watch, a sextant, a compass, and an old general chart of the Pacific. After an hour's study of his situation, he came to a quick decision. The chart and the pocket watch couldn't be trusted to get him to the Sandwich Islands; like the second mate, somewhere within a radius of twenty-five miles from him at that moment, he changed the boat's course and steered due east in search of a continent.
"While they were getting up the sail to catch a wandering air that seemed to have settled in the west, a man forward shouted in tones of horror that the water cask was empty. A frantic investigation verified the fact. An oar carelessly thrown down had loosened the plug in the head of the cask, and their precious supply of water was washing around in the bottom of the boat. They tasted it, but found it too salt to drink; the boat, fresh from the top of the forward house, was leaking quite a little.
"Then began the nightmare of heat and thirst. The sun that day was pitiless. They had no luck with the wind, which soon fell flat calm; the exertion of rowing added to the misery. Not a drop of rain fell. By noon, the horror of the first day's thirst had begun to grip them; by nightfall it had them cowed and broken, whining for water. It's that first day which is always the worst, you know—until the end. Devereux still hoped that he might pick up one of the other boats, and all hands kept a sharp lookout; but the hope died as the hours wore on. The sheer loneliness of the vast Pacific under a brilliant sun oppressed them like a foretaste of death, like a vista of eternity. They made little progress that day.
"A night passed, between sleeping and waking; dawn once more showed them a deserted sea. After a couple of hours' rowing, they threw down the oars in despair. What was the use of making little dabs with a wooden blade at an ocean beyond span or circumference? Devereux says that he, too, was completely disheartened. They rested all that forenoon, waiting for a breeze. By this time the thirst had eaten into their vitals. Spots were dancing before their eyes, and frequently one of the men would insist that he saw a boat on the horizon; but after a while they learned to accept the cruelty of this delusion.
"Some time a little after noon, Devereux was in the stern sheets steering; he had persuaded the men to take up the oars again. He was gazing off on the port quarter, in an aimless state of misery, when all at once he thought his mind must be breaking with the thirst. A vision swam before him—a vision of a peaceful island, fringed with palm trees, crowned by a low green hill, all shimmering with heat and inverted in the sky. He says he gazed at it a long time without daring to speak; he was afraid the others wouldn't be able to see it, afraid it wasn't real. Finally he could stand the suspense no longer.
"'Look!' he cried, pointing 'Is anything there?'
"And they saw it, too. For it was nothing but the mirage of an actual island, an indeterminate distance away. It hung in the sky like a mysterious apparition. They regarded it fixedly, with glances almost hostile, as if questioning its integrity; but the vision persisted. Then they turned the boat, and rowed like madmen throughout the afternoon. The mirage had faded in the course of an hour; but Devereux urged them on by arguments and promises, explaining the nature of the phenomenon and enlarging on their chances of deliverance. Hadn't they all seen it? It couldn't be far off; it must lie somewhere along the line of the compass bearing that he had taken.
"That night they rowed by watches, Devereux himself taking stroke oar with either crew. And when morning dawned, the real island lay right side up a couple of miles ahead, fair and alluring on the steel-blue rim of the sea. You can imagine the hoarse shout that went up from parched throats! Weak and wild, they struggled painfully at the oars; and shortly after sunrise the boat entered a little cove that split the front of the island, where the ground swell at once dropped off under the shelter of a curving point of land. A few strokes more, and the surf caught them. A long roller flung them high up the beach—a lucky thing, for God knows they wouldn't have had the strength to save themselves. The roller went out, leaving them planted upright on a white coral strand; in the silence before the coming of another wave, they heard the drip of a little stream running down the hillside at the head of the cove. Water! They left the boat as she was, the oars cock-billed in the rowlocks, the sail, which they'd hoisted just before dawn and had been too weak or excited to take in, flapping loose across the gunwale, and ran with the last strength in their bodies toward the sound. The rivulet had cut a shallow channel in the coral, from the jungle to the water's edge; they threw themselves face downward, buried their mouths in the stream, and drank like animals.
"For some time afterwards they lay as they had fallen, saturated like so many sponges, feeling the water sink into their blood. Then Devereux, who had exercised his will power and drunk as sparingly as possible, got to his feet and turned toward the jungle. A second time he thought his eyes were deceiving him. A woman stood there in the half-shadow, still grasping the branches she had parted as she stepped out on the beach. She didn't appear frightened, but gazed at him frankly in wonder and admiration. He thought she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. His heart went out to her in that astonishing moment of their meeting, went out freely, without restraint or volition ... and she's held it ever since, and always will. One can hardly imagine, to see him sitting over there so dejectedly, that off on the floor of the Pacific, years ago, and utterly unseen of the world of men, he lived such a transcendent moment, that such a romance came to him under the sun that we all know. It takes one back to the days of Sinbad and Urashima and Oisin.