III
For a day and a night and a day and a night the voyage continued, the swell falling to a gentle heave, and then in the dawn came a sail, the mat sail of a canoe like a brown wing cut against the haliotis-shell coloured sky.
In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle in hand and half crouching, she drove the canoe towards him, the sail loose and flapping in the wind. Then he was on board the canoe, but how he got there he scarcely knew, the whole thing was like a dream within a dream.
In the canoe was a girl, naked as the new moon. Paddle in hand and half crouching, she drove the canoe towards him, the sail loose and flapping in the wind.
In the canoe there was nothing, neither food nor water, only some fishing lines and as he lay exhausted, consumed with thirst, and faint with hunger, he saw the girl resetting the sail. She had been fishing last evening from an island up north and blown out to sea by a squall, had failed to make the land again, but she had sighted an island in the sou’west and was making for it when she saw the hatch cover and the brown, clinging form of Maru.
As he lay half dead in the bottom of the canoe he watched her as she crouched with eyes fixed on the island and the steering paddle in hand; but before they could reach it a squall took them, half filling the canoe with rain water, and Maru drank and drank till his ribs stood out, and then, renewed, half rose as the canoe steered by the girl rushed past tumbling green seas and a broken reef to a beach white as salt, towards which the great trees came down with the bread fruits dripping with the new-fallen rain and the palms bending like whips in the wind.