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 344 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 345 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."
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 all 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 346 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 or 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 347 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 demijohn, 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. 348 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 349 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.
"On the second day the sharks began to gather in their uncanny fashion, as they always do about a vessel becalmed or in distress. I spent hours watching them—ugly blots in the clear blue water, waiting with a grim and hopeful patience for some happening which would provide them with a meal. They cir............