So, at a stroke, went the navy of Karolin and all her fighting men, destroyed by their own imaginations and the child of the woman they had slain long years ago.
The gulls were crying above the reef, and away in the east, below the sea-line, a rose-red fire was burning, paling gradually, passing into the starless, infinite distance of the true dawn.
Then, as the ripple of light on the horizon waters turned to a ripple of fire and the birds in the groves chattered out in answer to the gulls, Dick, flinging sleep off suddenly as one flings a blanket, sat up, striking out at the vision of Laminai—Laminai, spear in hand and ready to lunge. For a moment the dead chief stood before him, hard in the imagination as a real figure; then it vanished and his eyes fell on Katafa.
She was lying on her side fast asleep, her face buried in her arms. He watched her, his eyes consuming her in the strengthening light.
He knew nothing of love; he only knew that the something that had revealed itself to him and evaded him was his—his—and the whole unearthly world that surrounded it.
The voices of the gulls and the sound of the reef were part of her, and the strengthening light part of her; the rising sun, his own very life, were part of her—and she was his.
Had she suddenly been snatched from him, the voices of the gulls and the sound of the reef, the rising sun—every bit of the old world she had made new would have fallen in on him and crushed him with despair; and yet only yesterday he had run past her bent on the business of making a sail for the dinghy, run past her heedless as though she had been a tree stump, and, had she been taken from him then, would he have cared?
As the sun struck Katafa full, from her night-black hair to her little feet, she moved. Then, suddenly casting sleep away, she sat up.
Just as Dick’s waking vision had been the man he had fought with, hers was Dick.
She saw him, with wide-pupilled eyes that saw nothing of this world, and, holding out her arms to the vision, cried: “Taori!”
It faded as her arms clasped themselves round the reality.
The vast columnar swell was marching across the Pacific, smooth as though the Naya e Matadi had never blown, and nothing to tell of the great wind remained but a few broken trees in the groves and the up-ended canoe on the reef. Dick could see it as they sat, the sun now high above the horizon, and the land breeze fanning out across the sea in spaces of violet shadow.