Nevertheless, I shall make a search for Nordhoff--a leisurely search, with some expectation of finding him. Our islands, like those of Mr. Conrad's enchanted Heyst, are bounded by a circle two thousand or more miles across, and it is likely that neither of us will ever succeed in breaking through to the outside world--if, indeed, there is an outside world. I am beginning to doubt this, for the enchantment is at work. As for Nordhoff, his letters, which follow, may speak for themselves.
The sun was low when the _Faaite_ steamed out through the pass and headed for the Cook group, six hundred miles west and south. Dark clouds hung over Raiatea--Rangi Atea of Maori tradition, the Land of the Bright Heavens--but the level sunlight still illuminated the hillsides of Tahaa, the lovely sister island, protected by the same great oval reef. Far off to the north, the peak of Bora Bora towered abruptly from the sea.
It was not yet the season of the Trades, and the northeast breeze which followed us brought a sweltering heat, intolerable anywhere but on deck. Worthington was sitting beside me--a lean man, darkly tanned, with very bright blue eyes. His feet were bare; he wore a singlet, trousers of white drill, and a Manihiki hat--beautifully plaited of bleached pandanus leaf--a hat not to be bought with money. The dinner gong sounded.
"I'm not going down," he remarked; "too hot below. I had something to eat at Uturoa. How about you?"
I shook my head--it needed more than a normal appetite to drive one to the dining saloon. Banks of squall cloud, shading from gray to an unwholesome violet, were gathering along the horizon, and the air was so heavy that one inhaled it with an effort.
"This is the worst month of the hurricane season," Worthington went on; "it was just such an evening as this, last year, that the waterspout nearly got us--the night we sighted Mataora. I was five months up there, you know--marooned when Johnson lost the old _Hatutu_.
"I was pretty well done up last year, and when I heard that the _Hatutu_ was at Avarua I decided to take a vacation and go for a six weeks' cruise with Johnson. Ordinarily he would have been laid up in Papeete until after the equinox, but the company had sent for him to make a special trip to Penrhyn. We had a wretched passage north--a succession of squalls and broiling calms. The schooner was in bad shape, anyway: rotten sails, rigging falling to pieces, and six inches of grass on her bottom. On a hot day she had a bouquet all her own--the sun distilled from her a blend of cockroaches and mildewed copra that didn't smell like a rose garden. On the thirtieth day the skipper told me we were two hundred miles from Penrhyn and so close to Mataora that we might sight the palm tops. I'd heard a lot about the place (it has an English name on the chart)--how isolated it was, what a pleasant crowd the natives were, and how it was the best place in the Pacific to see old-fashioned island life.