The island grew.
 
Poni at the wheel, his eyes wrinkled against the sun, steered¹; Aioma beside him, Le Moan near Aioma and Dick forward near the galley². Dick had taken his seat on the deck in a patch of shadow and now he was leaning on his side supporting himself with his elbow. The sight of this island that was not Karolin had completed the business for Dick.
 
For four days he had scarcely touched food and for four days Le Moan had watched him falling away from himself. It was like watching a tree wither³.
 
There was a vine on Karolin that would sometimes take a tree in its embrace just as ivy⁴ does, grow up it and round it and cling without doing the tree any injury; but if the vine were cut away from the tree, the tree would die.
 
It seemed to Le Moan that Taori was like the tree and Katafa the vine.
 
She was right.
 
Seldom enough, yet every now and then you find in this wilderness⁵ of a world, amidst the thorns of hate and the poison berries of passion and the dung of beasts and the toadstools of conjugal⁶ love, a passion pure and unselfish like the love of Katafa and Taori. Who moreover, above most other mortals, stood apart in a world there was no room for little things—where the sky was their roof and the ocean their floor and storm and war and cataclysm⁷, halcyon⁸ weather, and the blaze of a tropic sun their environment, where the love that bound them together had, woven into it—after the fashion of the rope of Rantan—their past.
 
The thousand little and great and beautiful and terrific things that made up their past, all these were woven into the passion that bound them together.
 
To cut this bond, to separate them forcibly one from the other, was death.
 
In hot climates, in the tropics where the convolvulus grows so rapidly that the eye can all but see it grow, people can die quickly of love. Death grows when released with the fountain speed of the rocketing datura and the disruptive fury of corruption⁹.
 
Dick cut away from Katafa was going to die. It was not only the cutting away, but the manner of it, that made his case hopeless.
 
Not only was he cut away from Katafa, but he was also divorced from his environment. His universe had consisted of Palm Tree and Karolin, the sea that held them, the sky above them: Katafa—nothing more.
 
Then Palm Tree had vanished and Karolin had been taken from him and nothing was left but the great vacant world of the sea, that and the grief for the loss of Katafa.
 
He was going to die. He was dying. His very strength was killing¹⁰ him.
 
You sometimes find that—find that the power of a powerful man can be turned in against itself by grief or by disaster or disease.
 
He was going to die, as Aioma said, and Le Moan knew it.
 
He was dying because Katafa had been cut away from him.
 
The sound of the bow-wash and the sound of the sea as it washed past the counter, and the creak of rope and spar, kept saying all this.
 
“Taori is dying because Katafa is no more with him—no more with him....”
 
Meanwhile the island grew.
 
And now Aioma, cheered by the sight of this bit of land, began talking to Poni in a high-pitched voice. But Le Moan did not hear or heed¹¹ what he said.
 
So, Taori was going to die. And it was for this that she had taken him away from Katafa. She had taken him away to have him to herself and he was turning into a dead man. To save him from death she had given herself up to Peterson, to save him from death she had kille............