"Wonder woman," he murmured. "Wonder woman."
Slipping out from under the sail, not daring to breathe, Lavelle gently drew the canvas back over the sleeper's shoulders and stole toward the Chinaman. A slight giddiness assailed him for a moment and with it there came a reminder of the old pain which he had felt upon awakening first in the boat.
"Master, master," called the giant worshipfully, springing toward him.
Chang's first glance was directed at Lavelle's forehead and what he saw there pleased him.
"Him all lite, master; all lite," he said. "Him stop bleed."
But it was of the night that Lavelle would hear, and the Chinaman rapidly unfolded the wondrous tale of how their lives had been saved by Emily. The wrecked boat was gone. Emily, Lavelle, Rowgowskii, and Chang alone remained of those who had escaped in their party from the Cambodia. The two coolie sailors had been gathering wood at the foot of the hill when the upheaval came. They were gone. At the end he whispered: "You lose him plistol out you plocket. Nobody know—only Chang, master."
The ocean bore no trace of the half of the island which had been torn away. In the heavy wind and sea which Chang reported of the first part of the night it was Lavelle's opinion that the derelict mass, bound together only by a mattress of interlaced roots and vegetation, must have resolved its parts with the waters.
Owing to Chang's having placed the water, provisions, and the boat's equipment high on the hill when the craft had been emptied in the evening, the sea had been able to steal but little. The treacherous bit of earth which remained offered, too, an important contribution to the food supply in a wealth of taro plants, the tuberous substitute of the potato in the islands of the Pacific. It is of this that the Hawaiians make their poi.
By the bearing of the rising sun Lavelle noted that the island had swung round completely during the night. The side of the camel's back-like hill, which had been toward the south the preceding evening, was turned to the northward. The crest of this hill was at least two hundred feet above sea level. As the island lay now its northern side sloped easily for perhaps fifty yards and then broke off abruptly in a sharp cleavage fifty feet sheer to the sea.
The hill's base was slightly less than the island's half-mile width. A gentle slope marked what had become the eastern shore; a straight palisade rise of two hundred feet, the western side. A gradual slope on the hill's southern side blended at the foot with an undulating meadow, green with grass and taro, and about three-quarters of a mile in length. A lone palm tree rose in the center of this patch.